India, April 4 -- Iran fired on targets on Friday across the Middle East, damaging a desalination plant and setting a refinery ablaze in Kuwait, while American and Israeli airstrikes hit the Islamic Republic as the war neared the end of its fifth week. Tehran has kept the pressure on Israel and its Gulf Arab neighbours, despite US and Israeli insistence that Iran's military capabilities have been all but destroyed. In a sign that part of Iran's theocracy could be willing to negotiate, the country's former top diplomat published a proposal for ending the conflict in an influential American magazine.

Iran's attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure and its tight grip on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil and natural...