WASHINGTON/TEL AVIV/CAIRO: Donald Trump said Wednesday that Iran’s president is seeking a ceasefire in the Middle East war — a claim Iran swiftly rejected as “false and baseless.” He also asserted that the United States would end its war on Iran fairly soon but could still carry out “spot hits” if necessary, while Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi signalled Tehran remains prepared to continue fighting rather than pursue a truce.
Besdies, hours before he was scheduled to make a primetime address to the nation, President Donald Trump told Reuters the United States will end its war on Iran fairly soon and could return for “spot hits” if needed. Asked when the United States would consider the Iran war over, Trump said: “I can’t tell you exactly... we’re going to be out pretty quickly.”
U.S. action had ensured Iran would not have nuclear arms, Trump said: “They won’t have a nuclear weapon because they are incapable of that now, and then I’ll leave, and I’ll take everybody with me, and if we have to we’ll come back to do spot hits.” He was expected to reiterate a two-to-three-week timetable for ending the war in Iran during the address, a White House official later said. Trump also said he would state in the speech that he was considering withdrawing the US from the NATO alliance.
The US president spoke by phone with KSA Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, discussing the war with Iran and briefing him on ongoing talks over a possible ceasefire, according to an Axios report. Earlier, UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Donald Trump discussed regional developments, including their impact on maritime security and the global economy, according to the Emirati state news agency.
Earlier, Trump said Iran’s president had asked for a ceasefire but ruled out any truce until the vital Strait of Hormuz was reopened for crucial energy shipments. “We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free, and clear. Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. His assertion was flatly denied by Iran, with foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei rejecting it as “false and baseless”. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera he still receives messages from US envoy Steve Witkoff, “directly, as before, and this does not mean that we are in negotiations”.
Tehran launched fresh missile attacks on Israel and US-allied Gulf nations on Wednesday, as AFP journalists reported massive explosions in the Iranian capital.
Two security sources from Pakistan, which is mediating in the conflict, earlier told Reuters that Islamabad had proposed a temporary ceasefire to both sides but had not heard back from either. U.S. Vice President JD Vance communicated with intermediaries from Pakistan about the Iran conflict as recently as Tuesday, a source briefed on the matter told Reuters. At Trump’s direction, Vance signalled privately that Trump was open to a ceasefire as long as certain U.S. demands were met, including reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the source said. Vance also delivered what the source described as a “stern message” that Trump was impatient, warning there would be growing pressure on Iranian infrastructure unless Tehran agreed to a deal.
In a letter to the American people, the Iranian president stated that Iran harbours no enmity towards ordinary Americans, emphasised that portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present-day observable facts, and warned that attacking Iran’s vital infrastructure targets the Iranian people and carries consequences that extend far beyond Iran’s borders.
Trump has told The Telegraph he is strongly considering pulling the United States out of Nato after it failed to join his war on Iran. The US president labelled the alliance a “paper tiger” and said removing America from the defence treaty was now “beyond reconsideration”.
Trump added: “Beyond not being there, it was actually hard to believe. And I didn’t do a big sale. I just said, ‘Hey’, you know, I didn’t insist too much. I just think it should be automatic.
“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine. Ukraine wasn’t our problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them. They weren’t there for us.”
Singling out the UK, the US president rebuked Sir Keir Starmer for refusing to get involved in the American-Israeli war against Iran, suggesting that the Royal Navy was not up for the task. “You don’t even have a navy. You’re too old and had aircraft carriers that didn’t work,” he said, referring to the state of Britain’s fleet of warships. Asked whether the prime minister should spend more on defence, Trump added: “I’m not going to tell him what to do. He can do whatever he wants. It doesn’t matter. All Starmer wants is costly windmills that are driving your energy prices through the roof.” The newspaper said he had made comments to Rubio and others in private but had made no final decision on the future of the alliance.
Following his comments, Sir Keir reaffirmed his support for Nato, describing it as “the single most effective military alliance the world has ever seen”. As a reaction to Trump’s remarks on Nato, the European states took pains to appear unruffled and France’s junior army minister Alice Rufo said operations by Nato in the Strait of Hormuz would be a breach of international law. President Emmanuel Macron repeated Wednesday that France would not take part. Britain said it would host a meeting of about 35 countries this week to discuss how to reopen the strait. Global oil supplies were expected to be hit twice as hard this month as in March, the International Energy Agency said, underlining the urgent need for an end to the conflict. The NYT reported Pentagon is doubling its Middle East fleet of Air Force A-10 attack planes, which can support advancing ground troops, even as President Trump says he wanted to end the Iran war in two to three weeks. The Air Force is dispatching 18 A-10s to join roughly a dozen A-10s already in the region that U.S. commanders have used to attack Iranian boats and Iran-backed militias in Iraq, two Pentagon officials said. The presence of A-10s suggests that Iran’s strategic air defenses have been destroyed or greatly suppressed. The plane is more vulnerable to air defenses than fighters.
The conflict has killed thousands, spread across the region and caused unprecedented energy disruption. An airport in central Iran was damaged in an attack, the deputy provincial governor of Isfahan province, told local news agency of Mehr. An overnight strike hit Shahid Haghani Port, Iran’s largest passenger terminal, deputy regional governor Ahmad Nafisi told state media, calling it a “criminal” attack on civilian infrastructure. Iranian media also said steel complexes in central and southwest Iran were damaged in separate attacks. An AFP journalist reported huge explosions in Tehran on Wednesday afternoon and earlier strikes near the former US embassy.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said that the Hormuz would remain closed to the country’s “enemies”. The Guards also confirmed they hit an oil tanker in the Gulf they said belonged to Israel. A British maritime security agency said the vessel was struck off Qatar, reporting damage but no casualties. In a statement, Iranian military’s central command, Khatam Al-Anbiya, said the targets included Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean coast and Eilat on the Red Sea. The Israeli military confirmed it struck Tehran, while emergency services in Israel said an Iranian missile attack wounded 14 people. Israel also said its air defences had responded to a missile fired from Yemen -- the third attack by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels since they entered the war over the weekend. In Tel Aviv evening air raid sirens and air defence systems were repeatedly triggered as Iran fired a volley of missiles around an hour before the start of Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom.
A Bangladeshi national was killed by falling shrapnel from an intercepted drone in the United Arab Emirates. Strikes in Kuwait caused a large fire in fuel tanks at its international airport, Bahrain’s interior ministry said a fire broke out at a business facility, and Saudi Arabia said several drones were intercepted. Meanwhile, a drone strike caused a massive fire at the storage facilities of an engine oil firm in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan. Qatar said an oil tanker leased to state-owned QatarEnergy was hit by an Iranian cruise missile in Qatari waters.
Shortly after the latest Iranian attack, the Israeli military said in a statement that the Air Force was carrying out strikes on dozens of targets across Tehran.
In Lebanon, seven people were killed in strikes around south Beirut, the health ministry said with the Israeli military saying it had struck a senior Hezbollah commander. A Lebanese security source and a Hezbollah source both told AFP that the strike had killed Hezbollah’s top commander for Iraq military affairs. AFP correspondents at the scene saw a blackened, debris-strewn street. The Lebanese health ministry said that Israeli attacks had killed more than 1,300, among the thousands reported killed across the region since the war began, mostly in Iran.
Optimism sparked by Trump’s comments on the timeline for the end of the war pushed oil prices down Wednesday, and stock markets rallied in Europe and Asia. IEA head Fatih Birol said the main issue so far from Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz was the lack of jet fuel and diesel that was already a problem in Asia and would hit Europe in April or May. The head of European budget airline Ryanair said jet fuel supply to Europe could be disrupted from June if the conflict did not end in the next month, potentially forcing the airline and rivals to consider cancelling summer season flights. Businesses around the world are struggling, with cosmetics and tea among the latest sectors to report difficulties. However, global stocks rallied and oil prices fell almost 3% as hopes of a de-escalation fuelled the biggest rebound in regional equities in more than three years. Higher fuel prices are already weighing on U.S. household finances before the November midterm elections, with two-thirds of Americans believing the U.S. should work to exit the Iran war quickly, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have threatened to hit US companies in the region including Microsoft MSFT.O, Google GOOGL.O, Apple AAPL.O, Intel INTC.O, IBM IBM.N, Tesla TSLA.O and Boeing BA.N, from 8 pm Tehran time (1630 GMT) on Wednesday. Trump has said he was not concerned.
