The missile incident is the first time Turkey - which borders Iran and has NATO's second-largest military - has been drawn into the conflict, but US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said there was no sense it would trigger the Atlantic alliance's collective-defence clause.
The United States and Israel pressed on with their round-the-clock assaults on Iran, with Hegseth saying the US was winning the conflict.
"This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down," Hegseth, sounding supremely confident, said at a briefing at the Pentagon. "We can sustain this fight easily for as long as we need to."
By contrast, Iran is firing fewer missiles, signalling its military capabilities are greatly diminished, said Dan Caine, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
At an unrelated White House event, President Donald Trump said the US is "doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly", and that on a scale of 10 he thought the US was doing "about a 15".
The Israeli military said it was easing public safety instructions across Israel on Thursday through Saturday, allowing businesses to open as long as they were at a close enough distance to shelters and other protected areas while keeping schools closed.
The Israeli military said its aircraft had struck a compound in eastern Tehran housing all Iran's security bodies, including the Republican Guard, intelligence, cyber warfare and internal police in charge of cracking down on protests.
Israel also told residents to leave a swathe of southern Lebanon on Wednesday as it presses its assault on the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, which has again dragged Lebanon into conflict by firing drones and rockets into Israel on Monday.
As new explosions rang out in Tehran, plans were in doubt for a funeral for the elder Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, killed by Israeli forces on Saturday in the first assassination of a nation's top ruler by an airstrike.
The body had been expected to lie in state in a vast Tehran mosque from Wednesday evening, but Iran announced that three days of farewell ceremonies had been indefinitely postponed and no funeral date has been announced.
Two Iranian sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Iran's slain supreme leader, was not in Tehran when his father was killed.
Iran said the Assembly of Experts that will select the new leader would announce its decision soon, only the second time it will have done so since the Islamic Republic's founding in 1979.
Assembly member Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told state TV the candidates had already been identified but did not name them.
Israel said it would hunt down whoever was chosen.
Other candidates for supreme leader include Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the Islamic Republic's founder and a champion of the reformist faction sidelined in recent decades.
The favourite, however, appears to be Mojtaba Khamenei, who has amassed power as a senior figure in the security forces and the vast business empire they control, the Iranian sources said. Choosing him would signal that hardliners remain in charge.
US Central Command said in a statement it had "struck or sunk to the bottom of the ocean" more than 20 Iranian ships, including the warship sunk off Sri Lanka in the first such action by a US submarine since World War II.
A Sri Lankan official identified the boat as the frigate IRIS Dena, saying it had been heading back to Iran from eastern India.
Local authorities said 32 people had been rescued while 87 bodies had been recovered. About 60 sailors were unaccounted for from the estimated 180-strong crew.
"An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters," said Hegseth, the US defence secretary. "Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death."
With AP
