U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday threatened widespread destruction of Iran’s energy resources and other vital infrastructure if a deal to finish the war with Tehran is just not reached soon.
In a social media post, Trump said “great progress is being made” in talks with Iran to finish military operations. But he bristled that if a deal is just not reached and and if the strategic Hormuz Strait is just not immediately reopened, the U.S. would broaden its offensive by “completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!).”
On the bottom, the war showed no sign of letting up: Tehran struck a key water and electrical plant in Kuwait, and an oil refinery in Israel got here under attack.
Israel and the U.S. launched a brand new wave of strikes on Iran. It stays unclear where the diplomatic effort facilitated by Pakistan stands.
Iran’s attacks on its Gulf neighbors could add one other element of uncertainty to any talks.
The United Arab Emirates — which has long billed itself as a beacon of safety and stability in a volatile region — has been hard hit within the war, and increasingly is signaling it wants Iran disarmed in any ceasefire. Iran’s theocracy likely won’t accept that.
Within the interview with the Financial Times, Trump said his preference could be to “take the oil in Iran” — a move that might require seizing Kharg Island — the terminal through which nearly all of Iran’s oil exports pass.
“Possibly we take Kharg Island, perhaps we don’t,” he continued. “Now we have a whole lot of options.”
Also within the interview, Trump said that the U.S. had about 3,000 targets that it might still prefer to hit in Iran, but adding: “A deal may very well be made fairly quickly.”
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One late Sunday that the U.S. was negotiating “directly and not directly” with Iran.
“We’re doing extremely well in that negotiation but you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them after which we at all times should blow them up,” Trump said.
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Twice during Trump’s second term, the U.S. has attacked Iran while in the course of negotiations, once with the strikes on Feb. 28 that began the present war and in addition in June.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei on Monday acknowledged Tehran had been given a 15-point proposal from the Trump administration, but said there had been no direct negotiations with Washington thus far.
Earlier, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, dismissed the talks in Pakistan as a canopy to get more U.S. troops into the world. He said Iranian forces were “waiting for the arrival of American troops on the bottom to set them on fire and punish their regional partners perpetually,” in response to state media.
The U.S. already launched airstrikes once that targeted military positions on Kharg. Iran has threatened to launch its own ground invasion of Gulf Arab countries and mine the Persian Gulf if U.S. troops land on its territory.
To get an amphibious invasion force to Kharg would mean transiting the Strait of Hormuz and a lot of the Persian Gulf. Experts say that holding the island would even be a challenge, because along with its missiles and drones, it might be well inside artillery range from the Iranian mainland.
Sirens sounded at dawn near Israel’s foremost nuclear research center, a component of the country that has been targeted repeatedly in recent days. Israel’s military also said it had taken out two drones launched from Yemen, where the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels entered the war on Saturday with their first missile attack.
Later, a fireplace broke out at an oil refinery within the northern city of Haifa, certainly one of only two in Israel, either from a missile strike or from debris falling from an interception. The blaze was quickly extinguished.
Iran kept up the pressure on its Gulf Arab neighbors, as Saudi Arabia intercepted five missiles targeting its oil-rich Eastern province, Bahrain sounded a missile alert, and a fireball erupted over Dubai as an incoming missile was taken out by defences.
In Kuwait, an Iranian attack hit an influence and desalination plant, killing one employee and injuring 10 soldiers, the state-run KUNA news agency reported.
Desalination plants are crucial to water supplies within the Gulf Arab states, and an Iranian attack previously damaged a desalination plant in Bahrain through the war. The facilities are typically paired with power plants, due to the great amount of energy required to remove salt from the water to make it drinkable.
Israel’s military launched a brand new wave of attacks on Iran, saying it was striking “military infrastructure” across Tehran, and explosions were heard within the Iranian capital. Iranian state media reported a petrochemicals plant in Tabriz, within the north, sustained damage after an airstrike and firefighters needed to put out a blaze.
Iran confirmed on Monday that the pinnacle of the Revolutionary Guard’s navy, Rear Adm. Alireza Tangsiri, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, as Israel claimed last week.
In Lebanon, which Israel has invaded by ground, an Indonesian peacekeeper was killed and three others were wounded when a projectile exploded near a village within the south.
Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military will widen its invasion, expanding the “existing security strip” in that country’s south because it targets the Iran-linked Hezbollah militant group.
In Iran, authorities say greater than 1,900 people have been killed, while 19 have been reported dead in Israel.
Two dozen people have been killed In Gulf states and the occupied West Bank. In Lebanon, officials said greater than 1,200 people have been killed, and greater than 1 million have been displaced.
Six Israeli soldiers have died in Lebanon, while 13 U.S. service members have been killed within the war.
Oil prices rise again as concerns of world energy crisis grow
Iran’s attacks on the energy infrastructure of the region and its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped in peacetime, has sent oil prices skyrocketing and given rise to growing concerns about a worldwide energy crisis.
In early trading, the spot price of Brent crude oil, the international standard, was around $115, up nearly 60 per cent from when the U.S. and Israel began the war with attacks on Iran on Feb. 28.
As pressure has grown on Trump to bring an end to the conflict, the U.S. has presented Iran a 15-point plan that features it agreeing to open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping. Iran, meantime, has produced a five-point plan with its own terms, including maintaining its sovereignty over the important thing waterway.