Tel Aviv, Israel — Iran fired another wave of missiles at Israel early Monday, triggering air raid sirens across the country and killing at least eight civilians as a few of the weapons evaded Israeli air defenses, according to the Israeli military. The deaths came on the fourth day of open warfare between the regional foes, which has shown no signs of slowing down.
One missile fell near the American consulate in Tel Aviv, causing minor damage, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee said in a post on social media. He said no American personnel were injured.
Iran announced it had launched some 100 missiles and vowed further retaliation for Israel’s sweeping attacks on its military and nuclear infrastructure, which Tehran said have killed at least 224 people in the country since last Friday.
Ronen Zvulun / REUTERS
Israel said Iranian missiles had killed a total of 24 people and wounded some 500 others by Monday morning, and the Israel Defense Forces accused Tehran of deliberately targeting civilians with its strikes.
“We are hitting military targets and capabilities designed to destroy the State of Israel, and they are firing at population centers with the aim of hitting civilians,” an IDF spokesperson said Monday morning.
In response, “50 fighter jets and aircraft carried out strikes and destroyed over 120 surface-to-surface missile launchers” in Iran, IDF spokesman Brigadier General Effie Defrin said in a televised statement on Monday. He said Iran’s Quds Force, an elite arm of its Revolutionary Guard that conducts military and intelligence operations outside Iran, was the primary target, and that the strikes had destroyed “one-third of the surface-to-surface missile launchers possessed by the Iranian regime.”
Defrin also said Israel’s Air Force had established “full aerial superiority” over the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned Monday that Tehran’s residents would “pay the price” for Iranian strikes on Israeli civilians, according to the French news agency AFP.
The fighting led to the cancellation of talks on Iran’s nuclear program slated for Sunday between the U.S. and Iran.
Separately, three U.S. officials told CBS News Sunday that President Trump opposed a recent Israeli plan to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
The Israelis had the opportunity to assassinate Khamenei and Mr. Trump conveyed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it wasn’t a good idea, one U.S. official told CBS News. They said the conversation between Netanyahu and Mr. Trump came since Israel launched a massive attack on Iran last week.
And a source familiar with its contents told CBS News the U.S. State Department has issued a directive to all its embassies and consular posts to, “at their discretion,” relay or reiterate to their host governments that the United States “is not involved in Israel’s unilateral action against targets in Iran and did not provide tanker support.”
Powerful explosions, likely from Israel’s defense systems intercepting Iranian missiles, rocked Tel Aviv shortly before dawn on Monday, sending plumes of black smoke into the sky over the coastal city.
Authorities in the central Israeli city of Petah Tikva said Iranian missiles had hit a residential building there, charring concrete walls, shattering windows and ripping the walls off multiple apartments.
Mostafaf Alkharouf / Anadolu via Getty Images 
The Israeli Magen David Adom emergency service reported that two women and two men – all in their 70s – and one other person were killed in the wave of missile attacks that struck four sites in central Israel.
“We clearly see that our civilians are being targeted,” said Israeli police spokesman Dean Elsdunne outside the bombed-out building in Petah Tikva. “And this is just one scene. We have other sites like this near the coast, in the south.”
Petah Tikva resident Yoram Suki rushed with his family to a shelter after hearing an air raid alert and emerged after it was over to find his apartment destroyed.
“Thank God we were OK,” the 60-year-old said.
Despite losing his home, he urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to keep up the attacks on Iran.
“It’s totally worth it,” he said. “This is for the sake of our children and grandchildren.”
In addition to those killed, the MDA said paramedics had evacuated another 92 wounded people to hospitals, including a 30-year-old woman in serious condition, while rescuers were still searching for residents trapped beneath the rubble of their homes.
“When we arrived at the scene of the rocket strike, we saw massive destruction,” said Dr. Gal Rosen, a paramedic with MDA who said he had rescued a 4-day-old baby as fires blazed from the building.
During an earlier barrage of Iranian missiles on central Israel on Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran will stop its strikes if Israel does the same.
But after a day of intensive Israeli aerial attacks that extended targets beyond military installations to hit oil refineries and government buildings, the Revolutionary Guard struck a hard line on Monday, vowing that further rounds of strikes would be “more forceful, severe, precise and destructive than previous ones.”
Health authorities also reported that 1,277 were wounded in Iran, without distinguishing between military officials and civilians.
Rights groups, like the Washington-based Iranian advocacy group called Human Rights Activists, have suggested that the Iranian government’s death toll is a significant undercount. Human Rights Activists says it has documented more than 400 people killed, among them 197 civilians.
Israel argues that its assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists was necessary to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Iran has always insisted its nuclear program is peaceful, and the U.S. and others have assessed that Tehran has not pursued a nuclear weapon since 2003.
But Iran has enriched ever-larger stockpiles of uranium to near weapons-grade levels in recent years and was believed to have the capacity to develop multiple weapons within months if it chose to do so.