On February 28, the United States and Israel launched missile strikes on Iran, despite ongoing talks between Washington and Tehran over the Islamic nation’s controversial nuclear programme.

The strikes were a culmination of two overlapping crisis tracks: the 2025 joint US-Israel nuclear‑site raids in Iran and decades-long regional tensions.

Israel and Iranian proxies have been engaged in conflict since 1985, which escalated into a series of direct confrontations in 2024, and a 12-day war in June 2025 that also saw US strikes aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Saturday’s strikes were the most intense escalation of tensions between Iran and the US-Israel tag team yet — which saw the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.

Here is a timeline of events that led to the recent strikes in the Islamic Republic.

JUNE 2025: On June 13, 2025, Israel struck Iran, targeting its nuclear facilities.

The intense 12-day conflict killed top nuclear scientists, military commanders, and over 600 civilians.

Retaliatory Iranian strikes in Israel killed some 28 people and injured thousands.

On June 21, 2025, the US bombed Iran’s key nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and An early intelligence assessment from the Pentagon assessed that the US and Israeli strikes damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities, but “did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months,” Arms Control Association reported, citing officials familiar with the assessment.

But the White House denied the finding, saying Iran’s nuclear programme was completely destroyed.

Iran countered the White House’s After 12 days of daily missile and drone exchanges, a US‑brokered ceasefire is announced.

DECEMBER 2025: Protests erupted on December 28, 2025, in Tehran, sparked by the national currency’s plunge to record lows (around 1.4 million rials per US dollar) and a sudden spike in prices for food and basic The rial had already lost more than 40 percent of its value since Israel’s 12-day conflict with Iran.

Those losses were just the latest in a prolonged collapse that had erased nearly 90 percent of the rial’s value since the US quit the nuclear deal it had with Iran and reimposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic in 2018.

The nuclear deal, known as the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA), was a 2015 agreement between Iran and several world powers to restrict Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for relief of international sanctions on Iran.

Within days the unrest spread to dozens of cities, with citizens chanting anti‑government slogans and calling for the end of the Islamic Republic system.

The protests were met with a violent state clampdown.

In the first few weeks of the demonstrations, over 2,000 people were killed, according to rights groups and security officials.

The death toll in the protests which crept into....