DUBAI — Iran's Foreign Ministry issued a formal war-footing declaration on Saturday, stating publicly that the country's armed forces had been granted "full authority" to retaliate against the United States and Israel following the joint military campaign launched in the predawn hours, marking the first time the ministry had directly signalled that a state-level military response was not only authorised but imminent.

The Foreign Ministry Statement and What It Signals Legally and Militarily

The statement, posted directly to the ministry's official account on X, went beyond standard diplomatic condemnation. The text declared that Iran "will not hesitate" and that "the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran will decisively respond to the aggressors with full authority," language that constitutes an explicit public delegation of military decision-making to the IRGC and regular armed forces. That phrasing carries specific weight: it removes the ambiguity around whether any retaliatory strikes would require further political authorisation, effectively telling both Tehran's military commanders and international audiences that the order has already been given. Governments monitoring the situation in Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and the Gulf capitals would have read that sentence not as rhetoric but as an operational green light.

The ministry also inserted a pointed diplomatic contrast into the statement, noting that Iran had been "prepared for negotiations" but had been "even more prepared for defense at all times." That framing serves a dual audience: it positions Tehran as a party that chose dialogue and was attacked mid-process, while simultaneously justifying military escalation as a defensive rather than aggressive act under international law. The distinction matters because Iran's legal argument for a response under Article 51 of the UN Charter, which covers the right of self-defence, depends on precisely this framing of who struck first and under what circumstances.

IRGC First Wave and the Gulf Strikes Already Under Way

Iran had already begun acting on that authority before the ministry's statement was published. The IRGC announced it had launched a "first wave" of drones and missiles targeting Israeli territory, and explosions were reported in Israel as its military worked to intercept the incoming fire. Bahrain's government confirmed separately that a missile had struck near the US Navy's Fifth Fleet headquarters on the island, making it the first Gulf Arab state to acknowledge a direct hit on American military infrastructure. Witnesses in Kuwait reported sirens and explosions in areas near US military installations, though Kuwaiti authorities had not issued an official statement confirming damage at the time of publication; casualty figures and the full extent of structural damage across all affected sites remained unverified pending official assessments.

The sequencing is strategically significant. The IRGC's "first wave" designation implies further waves are either planned or already in motion, and the Foreign Ministry's invocation of "full authority" removes the institutional friction that might otherwise slow subsequent launches. Iran's retaliation architecture, as assessed by analysts before the conflict began, relies on saturation tactics rather than precision strikes, precisely because overwhelming volume stresses missile defence systems in ways that individually targeted attacks do not. The confirmation of a strike near the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain represents an escalation that few Gulf security scenarios had publicly modelled as an opening-hours development.

What the "Full Authority" Declaration Means for Diplomacy and the Next 48 Hours

The Foreign Ministry's public grant of full military authority functions as a diplomatic door-closing mechanism as much as it does a military one. Any back-channel communication aimed at halting the exchange before it deepens would now need to contend with a publicly stated position that Iran's armed forces are already operating on standing authorisation, meaning that any ceasefire agreement would require Tehran to publicly rescind a statement it issued to its own population under conditions of active bombardment. That is a significantly higher political cost than if the ministry had stayed silent or issued a more ambiguous condemnation.

For the United States and its Gulf partners, the statement also complicates the position of Arab states like Qatar and the UAE, which host American forces and had sought to stay publicly neutral. Tehran has now framed the conflict explicitly as one between Iran and "the aggressors," a category that, from the ministry's stated perspective, arguably includes any country providing logistical or territorial support for the strikes. Saudi Arabia, which has maintained back-channel communications with Tehran since a 2023 normalisation agreement brokered by China, had not issued a public statement by the time of publication. Whether those channels remain viable given the pace of escalation on the morning of 28 February 2026 was, at the time this article was written, one of the most consequential open questions in the region.

Written by Nick Ravenshade for NENC Media Group, original article and analysis.