Kuwaiti state media reported sirens sounding across the country after a missile and drone attack, thrusting the Gulf state into the widening regional conflict even as Donald Trump brushed off criticism and said the situation would work out well. The US president, posting on Truth Social, also urged critics to “sit back and relax,” saying it would all work out in the end.
The timing sharpened attention on the crisis because the alarm in Kuwait came as new Israeli strikes were ordered on Beirut’s Dahiyeh district and Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, described the campaign as “a vicious and reprehensible Israeli aggression.” Aoun said Lebanon would work to end the suffering of the Lebanese people, especially those in the south, as the war continued to spread across fronts that already include Iran, Israel and Lebanon.
Trump’s post did not mention the attack in Kuwait or the US strikes on Iran over the weekend, and it sat uneasily beside the sounds of sirens on the ground. He wrote that “Iran really wants to make a deal” and mocked political critics who, he said, were making it harder to negotiate. The contrast was stark: one public message insisted things would settle, while another part of the region was reporting fresh attack warnings and military escalation.
The conflict in Lebanon has been building since 2 March, when Hezbollah fired rockets toward Israel after the US-Israeli killing of Iran’s supreme leader, and a truce that began on 17 April was never observed. Over the weekend, Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to push deeper into Lebanon and called Sunday’s operation a “dramatic shift” in the campaign against Hezbollah, while Israel also stepped up its offensive with the capture of the medieval Beaufort Castle. France requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council for Monday, with Emmanuel Macron warning that “nothing justifies the major escalation under way in south Lebanon.”
That leaves one central gap: who carried out the missile and drone attack that set off Kuwait’s sirens, and whether the next warning comes in the Gulf, in Beirut or somewhere else in a conflict that is now moving faster than the diplomacy built to contain it.
