The ongoing military conflict between Israel and Iran continued to lead newscasts and headlines across the world on Monday, as Israel came under renewed missile attacks from Tehran and Israeli forces targeted a series of sites in western and central Iran.
The headlines ranged from the apocalyptic: “World Crisis” screamed the 60-point front page of Britain’s Daily Mirror, to the strictly factual of Turkey’s Hürriyet Daily News, which went with “Israel, Iran trade strikes again as conflict rages.”
The mutual strikes pushed the death toll from four days of open conflict close to 250, with Iranian media reporting more than 200 deaths since Israel began its air attacks on Friday, and Israel’s official death toll now topping 20.
The conflict also topped newscasts worldwide, with all-news channels, including BBC Worldwide and Sky News in the U.K., France’s France 24, and Germany’s Deutsche Welle TV, providing rolling coverage and regular updates from correspondents on the ground. But the scale of the coverage is well below the wall-to-wall approach seen following the October 7 attacks on Israel two years ago.
Two major exceptions to this are CNN and Middle East-based news network Al Jazeera, which have been providing blanket coverage of the conflict since Friday. The two channels have extensive networks of correspondents in the region and specialize in this kind of 24/7 crisis coverage. For CNN, whose future remains in the balance following news last week that parent Warner Bros. Discovery is splitting into two separate companies, with CNN and other cable brands hived off into a new Global Networks division, the conflict is also a chance to demonstrate its USP, both to its corporate overlords and to potential future buyers.
Getting into Iran, and reporting freely while there, has proven a challenge for many international news groups, and the bulk of reporting on the conflict from the news networks, is coming out of Israel, with some outlets, such as Germany’s ARD, also reporting out of Turkey, across the border from Iran. Coverage from Iran has been mostly limited to official footage of areas hit by Israeli missiles and reporting from state media and Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency.
Alongside reporting on the latest attacks, International coverage has focused on the rationale for Israel’s sneak attack on Friday. Tel Aviv claims it was a preemptive strike aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities before the country acquired an atomic bomb, which could threaten Israel’s existence. Tehran says the attacks were unprovoked, saying its atomic energy program is solely for peaceful purposes. An Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson on Monday said that while the Iranian parliament is preparing a bill to leave the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Tehran remains opposed to the development of weapons of mass destruction.
International reporting has also highlighted the divisions between Western powers. U.S. President Donald Trump has lauded Israel’s offensive, while denying Iranian allegations that the U.S. had any part in the attacks, and has said Iran could end the war quickly by agreeing to tough restrictions on its nuclear program. In an interview with ABC News on Sunday, Trump said he was open to Russian President Vladimir Putin, an Iranian ally, acting as a broker to negotiate a ceasefire. Reuters, however, quoted French President Emmanuel Macron, who rejected the idea of Putin as a peacemaker.
“I do not believe that Russia, which is now engaged in a high-intensity conflict and has decided not to respect the UN Charter for several years now, can be a mediator,” Macron said.
International news coverage also reflected the shifting view of Israel two years into the war in Gaza. Many outlets that were broadly supportive of Israel’s military action in the immediate wake of the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, in which more than 1,100 people were killed and more than 200 hostages taken captive, have become sharply critical of Israel as it continues to bomb civilian areas in Gaza and restrict access to food and humanitarian aid.
The Palestinian death toll from the 20-month Israel-Hamas war passed 55,000, the Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday, June 11. Last week, 5 nations — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom — formally sanctioned far-right Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, for “incitement of violence” against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Elsewhere on the dial, the Israel-Iran conflict jostled for attention with other news stories. CBC News Network, the all-news channel run by the Canadian public broadcaster, balanced updates from Tel Aviv and Tehran with a look at the G7 summit taking place in the Canadian Rockies on June 16 and 17. Political crisis in Spain — where a corruption scandal threatens to topple the government of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — knocked the Middle East off the top spot.
Many networks also carved out time for recap coverage of the mass “No Kings” protest against U.S. President Donald Trump and Saturday’s military parade in Washington DC, timed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, as well as being Trump’s own birthday.
The Herald Sun, the conservative daily out of Melbourne, Australia, picked a Trump-themed front page: “Steel & Fury,” headlining both the parade and the protests, with news on Israel and Iran relegated to a button on the upper banner. Trump and No Kings pushed Middle East news off the front page of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, the English-language newspaper owned by Alibaba Group, which chose instead to quote Beijing state media, noting that the “Parade, Protests show US in decline.”
