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rescue of another brave Pilot, yesterday, which we did not confirm, because we did not want to jeopardize our second rescue operation.”

The airman, a weapon systems officer, was equipped with a pistol, a beacon and a secure communications device to coordinate with rescuers, the New York Times reported.

Two of the planes meant to transport him and his rescuers to safety were stuck in a remote base in Iran and had to be destroyed to prevent them from falling into Iranian hands, the New York Times and CBS reported.

US forces then used three other transport planes to carry the airman and his rescuers out of Iran, the reports said.

Iran’s military said it had destroyed two C-130 military transport planes and two Black Hawk helicopters involved in the operation, which it said had made use of an abandoned airport in southern Isfahan province.

Iranian media reported five people were killed in strikes during the operation.

Footage released by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was presented as showing charred wreckage of an American aircraft scattered across a desert area, with smoke still rising.

‘CHOOSE PEACE’

Critical infrastructure across the Gulf came under attack from Iran again yesterday, with damage reported at civilian facilities in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait.

Pro-Iran armed groups also carried out two attacks on US diplomatic sites in Iraq overnight, the US embassy in Baghdad said.

On another front, Lebanon has increasingly been drawn into the conflict since the Iran-backed Hezbollah group began targeting Israel.

Israel has struck back and pushed its ground forces into southern Lebanon.

A source from the Lebanese civil defence told AFP that an Israeli strike on southern Lebanon’s Kfar Hatta killed a family of six waiting to evacuate and a relative who had come to pick them up.

Another Israeli strike on south Beirut killed at least four people, the Lebanese health ministry said.

The war has cast a pall over Easter Sunday celebrations for Cristian minorities in Lebanon and across the region.

In the usually lively alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City, silence reigned yesterday.

As a security precaution, Israeli authorities have restricted access to the Holy Sepulchre, where the faithful commemorate Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.

In his Easter blessing at the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV urged “those who have the power to unleash wars” to “choose peace” instead and criticised global indifference to “the deaths of thousands of people”.

‘RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT’

In Iran, a strike near the Bushehr nuclear plant on Saturday killed a guard and led Russia, which partly constructed the facility and helps operate it, to announce it was evacuating 198 workers and to condemn the strike.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that continued attacks on the plant on the southern coast could eventually lead to radioactive fallout that would “end life in GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) capitals, not Tehran”.

Bushehr is considerably closer to Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar than it is to the Iranian capital.