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Asked if US will strike Iran, Trump says: ‘I may do it, I may not do it’
The US president has been speaking to reporters on the lawns of the White House. Asked if the US was moving closer to striking Iranian nuclear facilities, Trump replied: “I can’t say that … You don’t seriously think I’m going to answer that question.”
“You don’t know that I’m going to even do it. You don’t know. I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do,” he said.
“I can tell you this – Iran’s got a lot of trouble, and they want to negotiate. And I said, ‘Why didn’t you negotiate with me before – all this death and destruction?’ Why didn’t you negotiate? I said to the people, ‘Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine. You would have had a country.'”
Trump claims Iran has ‘no air defence whatsoever’
We have more from Trump at the White House:
- He says Iranian officials reached out to him and suggested visiting the White House.
- Without offering any evidence, Trump says Iran is “totally defenceless, they have no air defence whatsoever”.
- Calling the conflict “so stupid”, Trump reiterates that his threat for Iran to agree to an “unconditional surrender” means giving up and “then we go blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there”.
- “For 40 years, they’ve been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn’t like. They were bullies, they were schoolyard bullies. And now they’re not bullies any more, but we’ll see what happens.”
- “I wouldn’t say that we won anything yet, I would say that we sure as hell made a lot of progress. We’ll see. The next week is going to be very big, maybe less than a week.”
Trump’s ‘unconditional surrender’ threat reveals misconceptions about Iran
Hamid Reza Gholamzadeh, director of Diplo House, says the US and Israel seem to believe that assassinating Iranian military commanders will make the country collapse. “Their understanding was totally far from the reality, and because of that misunderstanding, they are still suffering from miscalculations,” Gholamzadeh told Al Jazeera.
He said Iran’s missile attacks on Israel have been more accurate than in previous rounds of hostilities between the two countries, reaching Israeli territory. At the same time, he noted that there have been reports that Israel’s missile defence system is running short on supplies.
“That’s why Iran says that it’s not going to surrender and that if the Americans get involved … they are going to suffer much more than Iran would suffer,” Gholamzadeh said.
US defence secretary says ‘ready to execute’ potential war orders from Trump
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has been asked about potential conflict with Iran during a Senate hearing. He said he would not say in a public forum whether he had provided Trump with options on a strike against Iran.
“If and when those decisions are made [on matters of war and peace], the Department [of Defense] is prepared to execute them,” Hegseth said.
Iran denies Trump’s claim of officials seeking White House meeting
Iran has denied Donald Trump’s claim that Iranian officials asked for a meeting at the White House. “No Iranian official has ever asked to grovel at the gates of the White House. The only thing more despicable than his lies is his cowardly threat to ‘take out’ Iran’s Supreme Leader,” said the Iran mission to the UN on X.
The comment comes soon after Trump said Iranian officials had reached out to him for negotiations.
“Iran does NOT negotiate under duress, shall NOT accept peace under duress, and certainly NOT with a has-been warmonger clinging to relevance,” it said, echoing previous remarks from Ali Khamenei who said Iranians “do not answer well to the language of threat”.
