German embassy staff, relatives leaving Iran

Relatives of German embassy staff were leaving Iran on Saturday amid fears of an escalation in the hostilities between Iran and Israel, reported dpa.

Further security precautions have also been taken, a spokesman for the Foreign Office in Berlin told dpa. The Foreign Office is holding a crisis team meeting in the afternoon, he said.

More than 100 German citizens have registered on the ministry's Elefand crisis preparedness list, the spokesman added. The system enables Germans abroad to be quickly informed by German representatives in acute situations and included in possible crisis measures.

The Foreign Office assumes a larger number of German-Iranian dual nationals are living in Iran, though no confirmed figures are available as people are not obliged to register their presence abroad.

On Friday, the Foreign Office called on all German nationals in Iran to leave the country and also issued a warning against travel to Iran, saying the security situation could deteriorate quickly and without warning.

Other embassies have issued similar warnings amid fears of an escalation after two brigadier generals and five other members of Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) were killed in a suspected Israeli airstrike on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus at the start of the month.

The Iranian leadership has since threatened to retaliate several times.

US President Joe Biden said on Friday that he expected an attack to happen "sooner rather than later," though he did not comment on intelligence information.