Iran *Israel-Iran conflict at critical juncture as Trump demands Tehran’s ‘unconditional surrender’* https://chat.whatsapp.com/IN2ykxJIr7iJt6mdfkTjti US president triggers speculation about American military involvement after five days of Israeli bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes Israel’s war on Iran appeared to be approaching a pivotal moment on Tuesday night after five days of bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes, as Donald Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and weighed his military options. Trump convened a meeting of his national security team in the White House situation room after a day of febrile rhetoric in which the president gave sharply conflicting signals over whether US forces would participate directly in Israel’s bombing campaign over Iran. He told journalists in the morning that he expected the Iranian nuclear programme to be “wiped out” long before US intervention would be necessary. Later he took to his own social media platform, Truth Social, to suggest that the US had Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in its bomb-sights, and could make an imminent decision to take offensive action. “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump said. “But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.” In a post a few minutes later, Trump bluntly demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”. It was not just Trump’s all-caps threats that triggered speculation that the US might join offensive operations. They were accompanied by the sudden forward deployment of US military aircraft to Europe and the Middle East, amid a general consensus that Iran’s deeply buried uranium enrichment facilities could prove impregnable without huge bunker-busting bombs that only the US air force possesses. “If Iran does not back down, complete destruction of Iranian nuclear programme is on the agenda, which Israel cannot achieve alone,” German chancellor Friedrich Merz told ZDF television a day after meeting Trump at the G7 summit in Canada. But France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, urged restraint, saying: “We recognize Israel’s right to self-defense, but we do not support actions that threaten stability in the region. The biggest mistake that can be made today is to try to change the regime in Iran by military means – because that would lead to chaos.” Despite the US military deployments and Trump’s menacing comments, the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, who was also at the G7 meeting, insisted the US was not about to join the Israeli bombing campaign. “There’s nothing the president said that suggests that he’s about to get involved in this conflict,” Starmer said. “On the contrary, the G7 statement was about de-escalation ... I was sitting right next to President Trump [at the dinner], so I’ve no doubt, in my mind, the level of agreement.” Trump left the Canadian summit a day early and flew back to Washington around midnight on Monday. On the way, he told journalists he was not seeking a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Iran but instead wanted to see a “complete give-up” by Iran, as well as “a real end” to Iran’s nuclear programme, with Tehran abandoning its uranium enrichment “entirely”. The vice president, JD Vance, also took to social media to discuss Trump’s options. “He may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment. That decision ultimately belongs to the president,” Vance wrote, before adding that “people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy”. The US president predicted Israel would not let up in its bombing campaign and suggested a decisive moment in that campaign was imminent, though he made clear he expected Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities without US help. “You’re going to find out over the next two days … Nobody’s slowed up so far,” he told CBS News on the flight back to Washington, saying he was returning to the White House to focus on the conflict. Israel’s justification for its shock attack on Iran was called into question on Tuesday when CNN cited US intelligence assessments as saying that when Iran was attacked, it had been “up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver [a nuclear bomb] to a target of its choosing”. The report echoed a public assessment in March by Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who told Congress “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and the supreme leader “has not authorised the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003”. On Tuesday, Trump shrugged off that assessment, siding instead with Israel’s claims that Tehran was on the brink of making a warhead. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said. “I think they were very close to having it.” In freewheeling remarks to reporters on Air Force One, Trump also stressed that any Iranian attack on Americans or US bases, which Iran has threatened, would be met with overwhelming force, saying: “We’ll come down so hard, it’d be gloves off.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran was open to resuming talks with the US. “If President Trump is genuine about diplomacy and interested in stopping this war, next steps are consequential,” he said. Benjamin Netanyahu was also dismissive of the idea of diplomacy. “Of course they want to stop. They want to stop, and to keep producing the tools of death. We gave that a chance,” the Israeli prime minister said, laying out a new, expanded set of war aims. “We want three central results: eliminating the nuclear programme, eliminating the ability to produce ballistic missiles and eliminating the axis of terror.” He left vague what the third war aim would entail. Later on Tuesday, his foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, described it differently as a mission to “severely damage [the Iranians’] plan to eliminate the state of Israel”. Asked how that would be achieved, Sa’ar told the Guardian: “We are doing that gradually. First we cut the [tentacles] of the octopus, when we dealt with Hamas and Hezbollah. Now we are dealing with the head of the octopus.” “Regime change is not an objective of this war,” the minister insisted however, during a visit to a missile strike site in Rishon LeZion, east of Tel Aviv. He added that regime change “may be a result, but its not an objective” of the war. Israel’s choice of targets has broadened over the course of the campaign, in line with its rhetoric. In recent days it has bombed the Iranian capital, ordering the residents of a part of northern Tehran, a third of a million people, to leave their homes. The Israeli evacuation order was modelled on those routinely issued to Palestinians in Gaza, where bombing by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has flattened entire residential neighbourhoods over the course of a 20-month conflict. Explosion could be heard in Tehran early on Wednesday after Israel announced a wave of fresh attacks. The IDF warned residents to evacuate from a neighbourhood south of Mehrabad International Airport, which includes residential areas, military installations, pharmaceutical companies and industrial firms. The Israeli ultimatum on Monday said the bombing of Tehran would be aimed at “military infrastructure”, but one of the targets hit was a state television station, killing three staff and ending live broadcasts. Israel has also been bombing Iran’s oil and gas installations, and Iran has retaliated with strikes on Haifa, damaging a power station and a refinery in the Mediterranean port. Israeli airstrikes killed at least 24 Iranians across the country on Tuesday morning, bringing the toll since Friday’s surprise attack to at least 224 people dead and more than 1,400 injured, Iran’s health ministry said. The scale of destruction and the threats from the IDF and Trump triggered an exodus of Tehranis, jamming the roads out of the capital overnight. In Israel, the death toll after four days was 24, with about 600 injured. Iran fired a total of 20 to 30 missiles on Tuesday morning, according to the IDF, lightly wounding five people, marking a significant drop in the tempo of its attack compared with the previous few days. ‘ The IDF said Iran had used 370 missiles in eight salvoes out of a US-estimated arsenal of 3,000 ballistic missiles. The IDF further claims to have destroyed 200 of Iran’s missile launchers, half the total. Israel has also struck a severe blow to Iran’s chain of command, killing at least 11 top generals and, in some cases, their replacements. On Tuesday the IDF said it had killed the acting armed forces commander, Maj Gen Ali Shadmani, who had been in the post for only four days, after his predecessor was targeted in the first wave of strikes on Friday morning. “Iran is completely naked and we have full freedom of action. This is an unprecedented achievement,” an IDF general staff officer told the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Iran continued to threaten Israeli cities however, with its senior army commander echoing Israeli methods by calling for the residents of Haifa and Tel Aviv to evacuate immediately. If those threats prove empty and IDF claims of its dominance are borne out, it will leave Iran with few cards to play. The Iranian parliament has prepared a bill that would withdraw Iran from the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty, so that it would no longer be legally bound to forgo nuclear weapons, but the government insists it remains opposed to all weapons of mass destruction. State TV has also aired calls from hardline politicians suggesting that Iran block the strategically important strait of Hormuz, potentially stopping the passage of more than 17m barrels of oil a day and producing a dramatic spike in world oil prices and global inflation. On Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Israeli bombing sorties on the enrichment plant in Natanz had penetrated to its underground levels. But, as the war enters its sixth day, the focus of key decisions in Israel and the US is likely to be the underground facility at Fordow, near the religious centre of Qom, which houses Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium as well as an enrichment plant. However, Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said its presence was not likely to be relevant to military calculations “Blowing up the stockpiles at Fordow would release a limited amount of radiation and chemical toxicity from the UF6, but it would be confined to the site,” Davenport said. “There may be a very slight risk that if Iran has enough 60 percent enriched uranium stored at the site, an explosion could trigger a chain reaction. But I would be very surprised if that is the reason Fordow is not being bombed. Israel knows it cannot destroy the site.”