US President says ‘very close’ to signing a deal with Iran, US troops to remain in ME until ‘completion’ US and Iran are not in ‘endless war’ US will destroy Iran’s highly enriched uranium.
BEIRUT/DUBAI/NEW BRUNSWICK - US President Donald Trump said in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that he would not unfreeze Iranian assets or lift any sanctions before a peace deal is reached.
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Trump said he would consider those steps after an agreement is done. “Comes after,” he said. “Yeah. If they behave, if they do a good job, we start talking. Yeah.” Trump also said that he was not demanding that Lebanon be a part of a short-term deal with Tehran.
“I think they’d like to see it, but I’m not demanding,” Trump said in the interview recorded on Friday. US and Israeli forces began strikes on Iran on February 28. The Trump administration has been trying to negotiate a potential peace deal for weeks. “We’re very close to a deal, or I’m going to blow the hell out of them,” Trump told NBC News. “We have a couple of points. They don’t even seem like big points.”
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The president also said he would be willing to speak with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since being wounded in US strikes at the beginning of the conflict.
“I don’t want to say whether or not I know where he is, but there’s a good probability that I do,” Trump said. Top Trump administration officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio insist a temporary ceasefire agreement has been holding up despite recent US strikes on Iran, telling lawmakers last week those are defensive actions.
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Trump said the US will seize and destroy Iran’s highly enriched uranium, either with or without Tehran, Al Jazeera reported. “We’ll take it out and destroy it, whether it’s on-site or whether we take it off-site,” he said in interview. He added that he wanted to keep US troops in the Middle East until “completion”, further stating he didn’t “consider them in danger”.
US President Donald Trump called for more “surgical” strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the interview.
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“I’d like to see Lebanon have a better life. I’d like to see a more surgical attack on Hezbollah. I think it should be more surgical,” Trump said, according to a transcript of the interview,” recorded on Friday.
Separately, Trump in a message on social media website X said, “I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months; much of it has been under a pretty good form of ceasefire.”
Meanwhile, Israel struck the outskirts of Beirut on Sunday for the first time since the US announced a truce plan for Lebanon last week, and an Iranian lawmaker threatened to retaliate, putting talks to end the wider war into new jeopardy.
An Israeli raid on Beirut’s southern suburbs has killed two people and wounded 11 others, Al Jazeera reported, citing Lebanon’s National News Agency.
The agency said the strike hit two apartments in the Mreijeh-Tahwita al-Ghadir area, in another Israeli attack on a densely populated civilian neighbourhood.
Iran has long said any peace deal with the United States would depend on a ceasefire also holding in Lebanon, which Israel invaded in March in pursuit of Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters who fired across the border in solidarity with Tehran.
There was no immediate formal response from Tehran to Sunday’s Israeli strikes on the southern outskirts of Beirut, but influential hardline Iranian lawmaker Ebrahim Rezaei posted on X that Iran would deliver a “decisive and painful response”.
“Look at the sky of the occupied territories tonight,” wrote Rezaei, who serves as the spokesperson for parliament’s national security committee.
The US-Israel war on Iran entered its 100th day, as Washington said it had shot down two Iranian drones that posed a threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
The US Central Command (Centcom) said it destroyed two Iranian drones “that threatened international maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz”, hours after announcing it struck four other drones and coastal surveillance radar sites.
Washington and Tehran have shown little progress in reaching a deal to end the war that President Donald Trump launched in February with a campaign of air strikes alongside Israel against Iran. Trump has repeatedly threatened to restart the strikes unless there is an agreement soon.
Trump has leaned on Israel to scale back its campaign in Lebanon to allow room for a peace deal with Iran, including rebuking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with obscenities in a phone call last week. After the call, Netanyahu called off air strikes on Beirut and agreed the latest truce plan with the Lebanese government.
But Israel has never fully halted its campaign in Lebanon, which has killed thousands of people and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes. Hezbollah, which was not party to the truce and would be dismantled under its terms, has also continued attacks and says it will not give up its weapons unless Israel halts fighting and withdraws.
Netanyahu said Sunday’s strike on Beirut’s southern outskirts, a district known as Dahiyeh that has long been a Hezbollah stronghold, was ordered in response to Hezbollah firing toward Israel.
The Israeli military had earlier said it had intercepted two projectiles fired over the border. It issued an evacuation order for the southern Lebanese city of Tyre and surrounding areas ahead of possible strikes there.
Elsewere in Beirut on Sunday, mourners held a military funeral for Brigadier General Wissam Sabra, a senior military officer killed in a strike on his vehicle in the south the previous day.
The wider war has been stalemated since the United States and Israel paused their attacks on Iran in early April, with Tehran blocking most shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the main transit route for Middle East oil. Washington has imposed its own blockade of Iranian ports.
Though the sides have both said they are close to a preliminary agreement that would reopen the strait, they have repeatedly traded strikes, with escalations in recent days that have included attacks on nearby Arab states hosting U.S. bases.
U.S. forces struck Iranian coastal radar sites in Goruk and Qeshm Island, both in the Strait of Hormuz, early on Saturday after shooting down drones launched by Iran that U.S. Central Command said posed a threat to maritime traffic. Two more Iranian attack drones that were threatening shipping in the strait were shot down, the U.S. military said late on Saturday.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they retaliated against U.S. bases in Kuwait and Bahrain. Kuwait’s army said it engaged seven ballistic missiles that passed over residential areas, resulting in material damage but no casualties.