12 U.S. troops wounded, planes damaged in Iranian strike on Saudi air base

An Iranian missile attack wounded several U.S. service members and damaged several planes at a base in Saudi Arabia on Friday, a U.S. official familiar with the situation said.
 

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The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters, said the attack on Prince Sultan Air Base involved an Iranian missile and unmanned drones. It damaged several U.S. refueling aircraft. It was not clear how many troops were wounded or how severely.
 

The confirmation, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, comes after satellite imagery that appeared to show the damage to the aircraft appeared online.
 

Army Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, 26, died days after being wounded during a March 1 attack on the base.
 

U.S. Central Command said earlier in the day that more than 300 service members have been wounded in the conflict.
 

Also Friday, US President Donald Trump said it will be time for Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize ties after the war in Iran wraps up.

“It’s now time,” Trump said at a Miami event sponsored by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. “We’ve now taken them out, and they are out bigly. We got to get into the Abraham Accords.”

Trump has been pressing Israel and Saudi Arabia, the two biggest powers in the Middle East, for years to normalize ties as part of his Abraham Accords efforts.
 

Significant headwinds remain, including Saudi Arabia’s insistence that there needs to be a credible path to a Palestinian state before it normalizes commercial and diplomatic ties with Israel.
 

Meanwhile the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva said Tehran has agreed to “facilitate and expedite” humanitarian aid through the Strait of Hormuz, even as it endures strikes on its nuclear facilities.
 

Ali Bahreini said Tehran accepted a request from the U.N to let humanitarian aid and agricultural shipments move through the vital waterway, which usually handles a fifth of the world’s oil shipments and nearly a third of the world’s fertilizer trade.
 

The aid plan would be the first breakthrough at the shipping chokepoint after a month of war. While markets and governments have largely focused on blocked supplies of oil and natural gas, the restriction of fertilizer ingredients and trade threatens farming and food security around the world.
 

“This measure reflects Iran’s continued commitment to supporting humanitarian efforts and ensuring that essential aid reaches those in need without delay,” Bahreini said in a post on X. The U.N. earlier announced a task force to address the ripple effects the Iran war has had on aid delivery.