Some Gulf states hosting US forces may be covertly encouraging the slaughter of Iranians, Iran’s foreign ministerclaimed on Monday in a thinly veiled attack on Saudi Arabia.

Abbas Araghchi demanded clarification on reports that Mohammed bin Salman was in regular private conversations with Donald Trump urging the US president “to continue hitting the Iranians hard”.

Araghchi was responding to the second US media report in a week claiming the Saudi crown prince’s public opposition to the US attacks on Iran did not reflect his private position. “Stances should be promptly clarified,” he said in a post on X.

Iran’s foreign minister said hundreds of civilians had been killed in US-Israeli attacks, including more than 200 children.

Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, issued an appeal directed at Muslim populations in the Gulf states urging them to ask themselves which side were they on in the war and why no Islamic country had stood by the Iranian people.

Defending Iran’s attacks on Gulf states, he said: “Are we being asked to stand idly by while US bases in your countries are being used to attack us? The confrontation today is between America and Israel on the one hand, and the Muslim Iran and the forces of resistance on the other.”

The warnings came as Iranian attacks escalated on Monday, with drone strikes in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, in one of its most comprehensive sets of assaults since the war started.

Iran also vowed to keep the strait of Hormuz closed indefinitely to “enemies and those supporting their aggression”, amid signs that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (ICRG) were tightening their grip inside the country after the appointment of an uncompromising hardliner, Mohsen Rezaee, as military adviser to the supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Rezaee, a former commander of the IRGC for 16 years, played a key role during the bloody Iran-Iraq war. He said at the weekend there should be no ceasefire until the US agreed to vacate its military bases in the Middle East. His appointment consolidates the grip that the IRGC achieved with the recent appointment of Khamenei.

The Iranian death toll headed towards 1,500 on Monday after neighbourhoods across Tehran suffered one of the most intense bombardments since the start of the war, with electricity grid infrastructure being hit and power being temporarily lost in easten parts of the capital.

The mayor of Tehran, Alireza Zakani, said the capital had suffered 13,000 separate attacks, more than half of the total attacks on Iran. Parts of the Tehran metro were suspended.

Censorship inside Iran, including the internet blackout, has become more intense over the past 48 hours with newspapers and telegram channels becoming largely inaccessible.

Speaking at his weekly morning press conference, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, said that “vessels belonging to countries not involved in the war have been allowed to transit the strait of Hormuz with coordination and permission from Iran’s military.”

Two Indian flagged gas tankers ships bound for Gujaraet have been allowed to pass through the Strait after direct talks between Iran and India, but no blanket agreement has been reached for future passage for Indian ships.

Araghchi said the deal was a one-off due to his history of engagement with India. There are reports Iran in return is asking for access to medicines and the release of three of its ships captured by India.

Iranian officials were delighted that Trump had received a largely negative response with his call to seven countries, including China, France and the UK to join a US-led coalition in helping to open the strait of Hormuz.

Any fissures in the US-European relations are being seized upon by Iranian officials and media as a sign that Trump’s unilateral war, in which no country but Israel had any prior input, will not be endorsed.

National Car Parks, the UK’s biggest car park operator, has fallen into administration, putting nearly 700 jobs at risk.

NCP’s board of directors called in PwC as administrators after it ran out of cash, leaving it unable to pay its landlords and creditors, with significant rent payments due at the end of March.

PwC said it would take steps “to stabilise the business while assessing options for its future” including a sale, with all car parks staying open “for now”, and staff remaining in post. NCP, which dates back to 1931 and is a familiar sight in town centres with is black and yellow signs, employs 682 people.

The Japanese-owned company, which manages 340 car parks across the UK, including in major towns and city centres, airports, hospitals and transport hubs, has struggled in recent years, with “continued shifts in commuting and customer driving patterns,” according to PwC.

Its Tokyo-listed owner, Park24, said NCP had run up debts of £352.6m. It blamed the collapse in demand during the Covid-19 pandemic and “subdued” subsequent recovery, as well as rising operating costs from higher energy prices and “persistently high inflation in the UK, leading to rising inflation‑linked rent payment obligations”.

Since the Covid pandemic, demand for parking has not recovered to historic levels, especially in city centres and commuter towns as more people work from home. Due to a high number of long-term, inflexible leases, the company has been unable to cut costs in line with revenues, or to exit loss-making sites, pushing it into the red, the administrators said.

For now, trading continues as normal and customers will see no immediate changes to the day‑to‑day operations, PwC added.

The administrators are exploring a sale of all or part of the business as one of the options, and will review the viability of each location, which could lead to site closures.

Zelf Hussain, a joint administrator and PwC partner, said: “NCP has faced a challenging trading environment over several years, with changing consumer behaviours impacting volumes, and a high fixed cost-base leading to trading losses.”

He added: “We will be engaging with landlords, employees and other stakeholders as we explore all options, including the potential sale of all or part of the business, to secure the best possible outcome for creditors.”

Park24 said despite efforts to address lower demand, NCP’s “structural losses” had continued. “NCP pursued new car park developments to support revenue growth, while also implementing cost‑reduction measures such as workforce restructuring.”

Founded by Col Frederick Lucas in west London in 1931, NCP expanded significantly from 1959 when it was acquired by Central Car Parks. From 2002, it was subsequently owned by private equity companies Cinven and 3i, which loaded it with debt, and then by an infrastructure fund run by the Australian bank Macquarie. In 2011, under Macquarie’s ownership, NCP had debts of £450m.

In 2017, it was sold by Macquarie to Park24 and the government-owned Development Bank of Japan.

If there was a moment when the absence of a US strategy on Iran was exposed, then this was it. Donald Trump demanded on Saturday that the UK, China, France, Japan and others participate in a naval escort for oil tankers through the strait of Hormuz.

Despite launching the attack on Iran, with Israel, the White House does not seem to have fully anticipated what was likely to follow. Iran had few good military options for fighting back, but attacking US bases, US allies and merchant shipping in the Gulf was the most obvious response – to try to impose costs on the west.

Iran had been gearing up for a long period of resistance, with Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader, pressing subordinates to name four levels of succession in the expectation that he and others might be killed.

So far, in the two-week bombing war, the US has focused on Iran’s navy and missile sites. But this has not managed to eliminate the asymmetric threat posed against undefended merchant ships. Sixteen have been attacked, according to the Lloyd’s List journal, and tankers do not want to risk the journey through the strait.

Ten days ago, Trump urged tanker owners to “show some guts” and make the passage, even though the US navy appeared unwilling to undertake it. “The US has not done it because the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group can sit 200km off Oman and strike Iran with little risk,” said Matthew Savill of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank.

Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, suggested last week that after further airstrikes, the US navy might be in a position to escort tankers “by the end of this month”.

Iran has, in theory, a range of small-scale attack options, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps speedboats, aerial drones and up to 5,000 sea mines (though despite repeated US media speculation, these appear not to have been deployed yet).

But, in a reflection of the lessons from the war in Ukraine, the indications are that Iran is having most success attacking with sea drones (uncrewed surface vessels that resemble speedboats as shown in this video). One may have struck the Mayuree Naree, a vessel from Thailand, last week.

Trump, fixated on military power, had no particular desire to work with any country other than Israel – and none wanted to join in starting a war against Iran. As a result, naval preparation by US allies before the start of the war was nonexistent. None of Britain, France, China and Japan had warships ready to take up convoy duties.

For any escort operation to be viable, it might require eight to 10 destroyers, according to Richard Meade, the editor-in-chief of Lloyd’s List, though that would be enough to protect only “five to 10 vessels, making a transit every day and a half”. That would amount to about 10% of prewar shipping volumes.

At the same time, there has been a muted response to Trump’s appeal for help. Japan, for whom international military deployments are legally complex, said it had yet to receive a formal request from the US. China has not responded to the appeal, making it possible that Trump may respond by delaying a visit to Beijing at the end of the month.

Over the weekend, the US president said in an interview that Nato allies should feel obliged to take part. “Now we’ll see if they help us,” he told the Financial Times, warning of “a very bad future” for the alliance if they did not. The threat came despite Nato covering only Europe and North America and more than a year of heavy US messaging that Europe should focus on the defence of its own continent, not the Middle East, Indo-Pacific or elsewhere.

France has sent eight warships to the eastern Mediterranean but said it was not ready to go to Hormuz until the “most intense” fighting was over. The UK has struggled to prepare a destroyer and had to rush HMS Dragon out of dry dock, destined for Cyprus.

The UK has been criticised for failing to anticipate the need to have a warship in the region when the US was assembling two carrier strike groups. However, the Royal Navy was focused on deploying the Prince of Wales aircraft carrier into the north Atlantic later this year as part of an Arctic protection mission demanded by Trump at the time of his pursuit of Greenland.

Tucker Carlson, the conservative US political commentator, has publicly expressed fear that he may be facing criminal charges for “acting as an agent of a foreign power” by communicating with people in Iran.

The former CNN and Fox News host, who has established an alternative media career as online talking head and interviewer, claimed in a video posted on X that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was preparing “a crime report” for the Trump administration’s justice department.

“The CIA is preparing some kind of criminal referral against me, a crime report to the Department of Justice on the basis of a supposed crime I committed,” Carlson said in the video.

Carlson said the crime was “talking to people in Iran before the war” and claimed – without evidence – that US government agencies have “read my texts”.

He then denied the claims that have not been levelled. “I have only one loyalty and that’s to the United States,” he said.

The Guardian has requested comment from the justice department.

Carlson has questioned US support of Israel, which the US started war with in Iran in late February. That has moved him from the center to the fringe of US conservatism.

Earlier in February, Carlson had entered into a dispute with Donald Trump’s US Israeli ambassador, Mike Huckabee, who appeared to assert that Israel has a biblical right to take over most of the Middle East.

Huckabee said Carlson appeared to be “insinuating that the Jews of today aren’t really same people as the Jews of the Bible”, adding that he didn’t previously know about the theory “because it comes from some of the darkest realms of the internet and social media”.

Carlson’s latest claim points to deepening fissures within Trump’s once united Maga movement as some of its former stars break with the president over the war in Iran as well as other issues.

Beside Carlson, that includes Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, and former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Kelly, for instance, recently rebuked US senator Lindsey Graham – a South Carolina Republican – for his support of the Iran strikes, with the ex-Fox News host calling him “a homicidal maniac with a bloodlust that is insatiable”.

The host of Megyn Kelly Show podcast (which has 4.2 million subscribers) said on a recent episode that “there’s nothing unpatriotic or unsupportive of one’s conservatism or general adherence to Maga-type principles to say: ‘I would like to be better convinced that this is worth the sacrifice of American blood and treasure.’

“That’s where I am. That’s where a lot of people are.”

Greene has said the Trump White House and its Republican allies are “going in the wrong direction on key issues” and being “completely hijacked” by the neoconservative “establishment … we all voted against”.

Carlson’s break with Maga is perhaps the most striking, describing the decision to attack Iran as “absolutely disgusting and evil”.

“This is Israel’s war,” Carlson said on his podcast in early March. “This is not the United States’s war. This war’s not being waged on behalf of American national security objectives – to make the United States safer or richer.

“This war isn’t even about weapons of mass destruction, nukes.”

Carlson’s comments came after Trump and his administration have complained about they deem to be unfair media coverage of the war in Iran.

The president on 5 March also told ABC News: “Tucker has lost his way.”

“He’s not Maga,” Trump said. “Maga is saving our country. Maga is making our country great again.

“Maga is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”

Greene reacted to Trump’s remarks by responding on X: “I SUPPORT TUCKER. Trump doesn’t even know what Maga is any more and turned it into Miga,” alluding to the phrase “Make Iran great again”.

Greene continued: “Trump is not America First – he’s donor first. Tucker would beat Trump if he ran for president and Trump tried to violate the constitution and tried to run again for a third [presidential] term.”