Donald Trump warned that he is not ready to seek a deal to end the war with Iran, as US ally Israel launched a new wave of strikes Sunday and Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened to hunt down and kill the Israeli leader.
The US president, in an interview with NBC News, said he thought Tehran was keen to come to the table but that Washington would fight on for better terms and might bomb targets on Iran’s oil hub Kharg Island once, again, “just for fun”.
More than two weeks into the US-Israeli war against the Islamic republic, neither side is moderating its rhetoric despite a mounting death toll and economic damage from soaring oil prices caused by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz sea lane.
“Iran wants to make a deal, and I don’t want to make it because the terms aren’t good enough yet,” Trump told NBC News, warning that US forces would step up strikes on the Iranian coast north of the strait to clear a path for oil shipments to resume.
Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has — in a written statement — vowed to keep Hormuz closed. But Trump dismissed this and suggested his foe might not even be in control, saying: “I don’t know if he’s even alive. So far, nobody has been able to show him.”
Iran said on Saturday that “there is no problem with the new supreme leader”, even though he has yet to appear in public.
The Israeli military, meanwhile, announced a wave of strikes against targets in Western Iran, after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards branded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a criminal and vowed that they would pursue and kill him.
Vanguard
