An AFP journalist reported on Wednesday afternoon from massive explosions in Tehran and earlier attacks near the former US embassy, now a symbol of decades of US-Iranian tensions.
Iranian media also said that steel complexes in central and southwest Iran were attacked, causing “significant damage and destruction”.
The Israeli military confirmed it struck Tehran, while emergency services in Israel said an Iranian missile attack injured 14 people, including an 11-year-old girl.
Israel also said its air defenses had responded to a missile fired from Yemen – the third attack by Iran-backed Houthi rebels since entering the war over the weekend.
In Lebanon, seven people were killed in attacks around south Beirut, the health ministry said on Wednesday, after the Israeli military said it had attacked a senior Hezbollah commander.
A Lebanese security source and a Hezbollah source both told AFP that the strike killed Hezbollah’s top commander for Iraq military affairs.
AFP correspondents at the scene saw a blackened, debris-strewn road.
“Nobody knows what’s happening,” resident Hassan Jalwan told AFP. He said “displaced people are sleeping in the open” in the area.
Israel launched widespread airstrikes and ground attacks against Lebanon on 2 March following attacks by the Tehran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.
The Lebanese Health Ministry said on Wednesday that more than 1,300 people had been killed in Israeli attacks, most of them in Iran, among the thousands killed across the region since the war began.
Iran has also retaliated against Gulf countries that it says were launchpads for the attacks.
A Bangladeshi national was killed by shrapnel from a captured drone in the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday.
The attacks in Kuwait caused a major fire in fuel tanks at its international airport, Bahrain’s interior ministry said a commercial facility caught fire, and Saudi Arabia said several drones were intercepted.
Meanwhile, a drone strike in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan caused a massive fire at the storage facilities of an engine oil company.
“Every day, we hear the sound of drones,” truck driver Wad Abdulrazak, 31, told AFP near Iraq’s Erbil International Airport.
“We hear them in the morning, and we hear them at night. We can neither sleep nor live in peace anymore.”