Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized to neighboring countries for Iranian attacks on their territory and said the country’s leadership had instructed its armed forces to show restraint. Yet the message was followed by further reports of missiles and drones moving toward Gulf Arab states, while another senior Iranian official said attacks on sites used by Iran’s enemies would continue.
The sequence presented governments across the Gulf with two sharply different signals from Tehran: a presidential appeal for diplomacy and a continued military campaign against facilities Iran regarded as connected to the United States and Israel. It also raised questions about whether Iran’s political leadership could impose a consistent policy on the forces selecting and striking targets during the widening conflict.
An apology with a condition
According to the Associated Press, Pezeshkian said Iran’s interim leadership council had communicated with the armed forces and ordered that neighboring countries should no longer be attacked unless an attack on Iran came from those countries. He said the dispute should be addressed through diplomacy.
The qualification was important. American forces operate from bases and vessels across the region, but Gulf governments said their territory had not been used to attack Iran. Pezeshkian later wrote that facilities used to launch attacks against Iran could still be treated as legitimate targets, according to TRT World.
His statement therefore offered reassurance to neighboring governments while preserving Iran’s claimed right to strike infrastructure it connected to the US-Israeli campaign. That distinction did little to settle the immediate question facing civilians and governments in the region: whether the attacks would actually stop.
Military activity continues
AP reported that Iranian missiles and drones were still heading toward Gulf Arab states as Pezeshkian apologized. Kuwait said two border guards were killed during attacks involving missiles and drones, though authorities released few details about the circumstances. The same report described Iran as having launched another round of retaliatory strikes against Israel and Gulf countries hosting US forces the previous day.
TRT World reported strikes in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates on March 7. It said Pezeshkian’s pledge of restraint was followed by renewed attacks and by public statements asserting that locations made available to Iran’s enemies remained targets.
Reporting published late on March 7 and updated early on March 8 showed that the danger continued beyond the event date. AFP, through France 24, reported that Qatar said it had been targeted on March 7 by 10 ballistic missiles and two cruise missiles, most of which were intercepted without casualties. Saudi Arabia later said it had intercepted 15 drones, while Kuwait reported a wave of drones and said fuel tanks at its international airport had been targeted. Those March 8 updates are later-known facts, not events that should be presented as having been confirmed at the time of Pezeshkian’s March 7 remarks.
The United Arab Emirates also faced disruption. Dubai temporarily closed its main airport after an object was intercepted nearby, and the government described damage from falling interception debris. AFP reported that a Pakistani national was killed by debris in Dubai and that flight operations later partially resumed.
Competing messages from Tehran
The contrast was not limited to the difference between words and military activity. Senior Iranian officials publicly offered different descriptions of the policy itself.
Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the judiciary chief and another member of the three-person leadership council, said locations in regional countries that were being used in aggression against Iran would continue to face heavy attacks. TRT World similarly quoted him as saying evidence showed that parts of neighboring countries had been placed at the enemy’s disposal.
Top Iranian security official Ali Larijani later insisted that Iran’s leaders were united and had no disagreement over fighting Israel and the United States. Parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said countries in the region would not have peace while American bases remained there. Together, those statements framed the attacks as action against foreign military infrastructure rather than against neighboring states themselves. Gulf governments rejected that rationale and maintained that they had not permitted their territory to be used for attacks on Iran.
AP said Pezeshkian’s message highlighted the limits of civilian political authority over the Revolutionary Guard, the force controlling much of Iran’s ballistic-missile capability. With Iran’s supreme leader killed in the opening airstrikes, the interim council was overseeing the country, but the reports indicated that commands, target selection and public messaging were not moving in a visibly unified direction.
A conflict spreading through the Gulf
The attacks were affecting civilian travel, energy infrastructure and urban areas far from the principal battlefields in Iran, Israel and Lebanon. Kuwait announced a precautionary reduction in oil production, while interception debris damaged civilian facilities. Airports and airlines adjusted operations as governments responded to missile and drone alerts.
The immediate significance of Pezeshkian’s apology was therefore less a clear change in military policy than an attempt to define a boundary: neighboring countries would be spared, he said, unless their territory was used against Iran. Other officials drew that boundary differently, arguing that enemy use of regional sites already justified continued strikes.
By the end of March 7, the gap between those formulations remained unresolved. The apology acknowledged the harm and alarm caused across neighboring states, but continued launches and hard-line statements deprived it of the certainty those governments were seeking. Subsequent reports on March 8 confirmed that regional defenses were still responding to incoming threats, demonstrating that the diplomatic message had not yet produced an observable halt to the campaign.
