Tehran3:07 a.m. April 1
Tel Aviv2:37 a.m. April 1
Iran War Live Updates: Days? Weeks? Trump Makes Conflicting Predictions on War’s End
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, the president addressed the war with signature hyperbolic language. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told Al Jazeera that no formal negotiations were taking place.
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Reuters
- David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
- Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
- Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
President Trump gave conflicting statements on Tuesday about how long the war with Iran would last, saying first that it would go on for another two or three more weeks, then asserting that the U.S. assault could continue “a couple days longer” to “knock out every single thing they have.”
“When we feel that they are, for a long period of time, put into the stone ages and will not come up with a nuclear weapon, then we will leave,” the president said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “Whether we have a deal or not, it is irrelevant.”
Mr. Trump continued to assert as he has in recent days that Iran’s military was crippled and could no longer put up a fight. The news media, he said, was painting a false picture of Iran’s capacity to keep retaliating. He also insisted Iran’s leaders were begging for a peace deal.
But Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said earlier on Tuesday his country had neither responded to a 15-point peace proposal from the United States nor made a counteroffer. He denied any formal negotiations were taking place, despite President Trump’s claim talks were going well.
The war kept grinding ahead on Tuesday. A major airstrike on the city of Isfahan in Iran caused a huge explosion, and a Kuwaiti oil tanker erupted in flames earlier in the day at a Dubai port after a drone attack that the Kuwaiti authorities attributed to Iran.
At a briefing in Washington, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States had begun flying B-52 bombers over Iranian territory for the first time since launching the war, a sign that Iran’s air defenses had been significantly damaged.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, giving his first briefing with General Caine in nearly two weeks, conceded that Iran retained some ability to retaliate. “They will shoot some missiles,” he said. “We will shoot them down.”
Mr. Trump has tried in recent days to pressure Iran to end its de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a conduit for one-fifth of the world’s oil supplies, by threatening more destruction and making unverified claims of diplomatic progress.
But Mr. Araghchi denied that there were any substantive talks taking place with the United States. And he said Iran would accept only a permanent cease-fire for the entire region, not just a temporary pause in the fighting.
Also on Tuesday, Mr. Trump again criticized U.S. allies that have not heeded his call for help in securing the Strait of Hormuz, particularly Britain. He said on social media that the United States would not come to their aid in the future.
“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself,” he wrote, adding, “Go get your own oil!”
Here’s what else we’re covering:
American kidnapped: A journalist, Shelly Kittleson, was kidnapped in the Iraqi capital on Tuesday evening, Iraq’s Interior Ministry said. The ministry said that security forces had pursued the kidnappers, arrested one suspect and seized a vehicle used in the abduction. The suspect is a member of the Iranian-allied paramilitary group Kataib Hezbollah, two senior Iraqi security officials said.
Gas prices: Gasoline in the United States crossed an average of $4 a gallon on Tuesday, a threshold it hadn’t reached since August 2022. The S&P 500 surged nearly 3 percent on hopes that the war will come to an end soon. Oil prices also rose. The average cost of gas has jumped 35 percent since the war began on Feb. 28, according to data from the AAA motor club, becoming a political burden for Mr. Trump.
Persian Gulf: Gulf countries reported more missile and drone attacks on Tuesday. The authorities in Dubai and Saudi Arabia reported that debris from interceptions had injured several people. In the United Arab Emirates, remote learning will continue at all schools until mid-April, the education ministry said.
Lebanon: Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, on Tuesday outlined more explicitly plans for the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people and the destruction of Lebanese villages along Israel’s northern border. Israeli forces have taken control of more territory in southern Lebanon as they have battled Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group. He said that the Israeli military would maintain control over all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, which is about 20 miles from the Israeli border at its farthest point.
Casualties: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,574 civilians had been killed, including 236 children, in Iran since the war began. Lebanon’s health ministry said that more than 1,260 Lebanese had been killed as of Tuesday, with more than 3,750 others wounded, since the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah began. In Iran’s attacks across the Middle East, at least 50 people have been killed in Gulf nations. In Israel, at least 17 had been killed as of Friday. The American death toll stands at 13 service members, with hundreds of others wounded.
Regional economy: One month of the war could plunge four million more people across the Arab world into poverty and shave off up to 6 percent of the region’s economic output during that time, according to projections by the United Nations Development Program. Read more ›
After a day of heavy bombardment on Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, on Tuesday, the residential and commercial Jnah area was targeted with three Israeli missiles early on Wednesday morning. They hit an empty building and parked cars, which caught fire. Witnesses described seeing about 20 damaged cars in the bombarded streets. There were no advance warnings from the Israeli military. An airstrike also targeted a car in an area south of Beirut, killing two people and wounding three others, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Narges Mohammadi, Iran’s most prominent human rights activist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, suffered a heart attack in prison last week, but the Iranian authorities have refused her requests to be taken to a hospital for treatment, her husband said on Tuesday.
Ms. Mohammadi, 53, collapsed on the floor and became unconscious on March 24 in her jail cell in the city of Zanjan, her husband, Taghi Rahmani, said in a phone interview from Paris, where he lives with the couple’s two teenage children. Ms. Mohammadi received basic treatment in the prison clinic, but her health has continued to deteriorate, and her life was in “imminent danger,” Mr. Rahmani said.
“I’m extremely worried about her; she needs to be taken to the hospital immediately,” said Mr. Rahmani. “I want her to be free, but right now I’m worried about her life. The very least the government can do is allow her a proper treatment at a hospital in Tehran.”
Mr. Rahmani said the couple’s twins, Ali and Kianna, had not heard the news about their mother yet, and he worried how they would take it. They have not seen her since they left Iran as small children to live with their father, who is a prominent political activist.
The family learned of Ms. Mohammadi’s heart attack on Tuesday, he said, after her lawyer visited with her in prison two days earlier. The visit followed weeks of a communication breakdown with her because of the war and the denial of requests for an in-person visit. The legal team described her health as “critical” in a statement released by her foundation.
It took more than an hour for Ms. Mohammadi to regain consciousness after she collapsed, and her fellow inmates had wrapped her in a blanket because her body had turned cold, the statement said. In February, she went on a hunger strike to protest her unjust detention.
Mr. Rahmani said that before the heart attack, she had received threats to her life in prison from other inmates who supported the Islamic republic’s system.
Ms. Mohammadi, known for her bold and relentless advocacy for democracy, has spent much of her adult life in and out of prison in Iran’s authoritative theocracy. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of threatening national security for her decades-long work promoting human rights, women’s rights and democracy in Iran. In 2023, while she was imprisoned, the Nobel Committee awarded her the Peace Prize, saying it was in recognition of “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.”
Ms. Mohammadi was furloughed from Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in December 2024 after receiving surgery. But in early December last year, she was arrested in the city of Mashhad while attending the memorial service of a lawyer and rights activist. She delivered a fiery speech at the funeral while standing on the roof of a car before a crowd of hundreds of attendees gathered in the street.
“We swear by the blood of our comrades, we are standing until the end,” she said in her speech. The crowd chanted with her: “Standing until the end.”
There was a lot of uncertainty and contradiction in the comments made by the president on state of the war. Trump said the war could be over in two weeks, or three weeks, or “a couple days longer to do the job.”
He said the U.S. first needs to “knock out every single thing they have,” but then said “it is possible that we will make a deal before that.”
He then added that “it doesn’t matter whether” the Iranians come to the negotiating table or not.
Trump ended an event in the Oval Office by lashing out at news coverage of the war in Iran, included in The New York Times, going as far as to claim that the Iranians “are not even shooting at us.” Several U.S. troops were injured in a combined missile and drone attack last week, one of the most serious breaches of American air defenses in the war thus far.
Trump is contradicting himself, even in this same event, on when and how the war will end. He just said that “when we feel that they are for a long period of time put into the stone ages and will not come up with a nuclear weapon, then we will leave,” he said. “Whether we have a deal or not, it is irrelevant.”
As the world’s largest shipping operators suspend Gulf transit amid the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, many are redirecting vessels around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.
Companies like Maersk, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd have all diverted vessels from the region’s high-risk areas, such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, increasing traffic off the South African coastline.
The Strait of Hormuz has been closed since late February, when Washington and Israel launched their attacks on Tehran, which said it closed the vital waterway in response. The Strait of Hormuz usually transports about 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
The Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia in Yemen, attacked Israel over the weekend, widening the war. They had previously disrupted global shipping in the Red Sea, attacking vessels and crew members.
As global shipping companies seek safer routes, Brian Ingpen, a maritime economist based in Cape Town, estimates that traffic through Southern Africa will almost double.
“It’s really the Houthi rebel situation that has, again, forced a lot of shipowners to redirect to the Cape, and if traffic builds up like it did a year ago, as many as 150 ships a day, including regular traffic, should now be passing around the Cape,” he said, referring to the strain on global shipping caused by Washington’s bombing of Iran last June and the war in Gaza before the cease fire.
In some cases, rerouting vessels around the Cape of Good Hope has already raised shipping costs 30 percent to 70 percent, according to some estimates. Refueling in Algo Bay, off South Africa’s east coast, is ideal for rerouted shipping as it avoids port fees on the extended journey.
But energy is not the sole industry in South Africa benefiting from the increased maritime traffic. Offshore services are the biggest beneficiaries of increased shipping, Mr. Ingpen said.
“They provide critical support, crew changes, urgent spares and supplies delivery, medical evacuation allowing vessels to avoid unnecessary port calls and reducing downtime,” he said.
As Gulf disruptions persist, shipping lines are relying more on the southern passage. But Mr. Ingpen said this is not new, but rather a return to historical patterns.
“The Cape route has always been a critical shipping artery,” he said.
President Trump appears to be declaring “mission accomplished” on the war in the Oval Office after signing an executive order to restrict mail-in voting in federal elections. He asserted that he had stopped Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon and that “we have had regime change.” In Trump’s signature hyperbolic language, the president suggested that he had toppled two of Iran’s governments.
“We knocked out one regime. Then we knocked out a second regime,” Trump said. “Now we have a group of people that is very different and much more reasonable, much less radicalized. We have had regime change.”
Republicans in Congress who have so far refused to call top Trump administration officials to testify about the war in Iran have scheduled a budget hearing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for late April, his first public testimony since the start of the attacks.
The April 29 hearing, which is to include Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, falls exactly 60 days after President Trump began the offensive, the end of the period during which the law allows a president to deploy forces into hostilities without congressional authorization.
The session before the House Armed Services Committee serves as the annual budget hearing for the Pentagon, according to a congressional aide with knowledge of it, a routine affair during which a cabinet secretary lays out his department’s budget needs for the upcoming year. But with Democrats in both chambers demanding public testimony on the war for weeks now and the G.O.P. so far declining to schedule any oversight hearings, lawmakers and aides expect it to center on the combat operations in the Middle East, whose costs are skyrocketing.
Democrats on the Armed Services Committee warned in recent days that failing to call Mr. Hegseth to testify on the war was unacceptable.
“Given the complexity and gravity of this conflict, it is imperative that it receive its own hearing, separate and apart” from the annual budget hearing, 27 Democrats wrote in a letter on Friday to Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the Republican chairman of the committee. They cited the “ever-shifting strategic and operational objectives of the conflict and lack of clarity” on whether the president would deploy ground troops.
Republicans have robustly supported the attacks as necessary and legal, but some have suggested they would expect the administration to seek congressional authorization if the war dragged past the 60-day mark.
For weeks, Republicans have ignored calls from their Democratic counterparts for senior members of the Trump administration to testify under oath on the combat operations. Democrats have accused Mr. Trump and his advisers of haphazard war planning and keeping lawmakers in the dark about the timeline and costs of the campaign, whether ground troops will be needed and what the plan is to draw the conflict to a close.
A handful of Republicans, including Mr. Rogers, signaled last week that they too are growing concerned with Congress being sidelined as the war dragged into its second month.
But Mr. Rogers, who as chairman has the authority to call Mr. Hegseth to testify at any time on the war, has not done so, nor has Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs his chamber’s Armed Services Committee.
Republican leaders have repeatedly said budget hearings would be the venue for Democrats to question members of the cabinet on the war, and shown no willingness to call Mr. Hegseth or Secretary of State Marco Rubio to testify any sooner or in any other format.
Mr. Trump has said he wants to raise the Pentagon’s budget by more than half in 2027, increasing military spending to $1.5 trillion. But members of Congress still have no clear understanding of how the war will impact that spending goal.
Some Republican lawmakers who visited the Pentagon last week to meet with department officials on their budget request and asked for an official accounting of how much money was being spent on the war each day said they could not obtain one.
“I wish I did,” Representative Jodey Arrington of Texas, the chairman of the Budget Committee, said in an interview. “I know it exists.”
Speaking in the Oval Office after signing an executive order intended to restrict voting by mail in federal elections, President Trump said he thinks the United States will be finished with the war in Iran in a matter of weeks. Asked to clarify on his comment, Trump says the United States could leave in two to three weeks. The president has issued a number of conflicting statements about the timeline of the war with Iran, and has previsouly forecasted a near end to the war.
In the Pentagon’s first public briefing on the war since March 11, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the United States was “closer than ever before to winning” and that Iran was still able to retaliate, even after a month of intensive bombing by the United States and Israel.
In an indication that Iran’s air defenses may be significantly degraded, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, said that the U.S. military had begun flying B-52 bombers over Iran for the first time since the start of the war.
Mr. Hegseth and President Trump blasted U.S. allies — whom the Trump administration did not consult before launching the first attacks alongside Israel — for not doing more to help fight the war. As the price of gasoline in the United States crossed an average of $4 a gallon, Mr. Trump told allies to “go get your own oil” and “start learning how to fight for yourself.”
“The U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” he said on social media.
Here’s what else happened on Tuesday:
Iran: At least 1,574 civilians in Iran, including 236 children, have been killed since the war began, the Human Rights Activists News Agency said.
The director general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that attacks on Tehran had struck near the agency’s office there and shattered windows. The locations of offices for the W.H.O. and other U.N. agencies have been “clearly identified,” and strikes damaging them or affecting their operations “cannot be tolerated,” he said.
The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, continued to dispute claims that negotiations with the United States to end the war were underway. Iran has not responded to the 15-point plan the United States sent via Pakistan and has not offered a proposal of its own, he told Al Jazeera.
Lebanon: The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said that Israel intended to occupy much of southern Lebanon as it expanded its ground offensive there. As part of the occupation, Mr. Katz said, Israeli forces will demolish Lebanese border towns and hundreds of thousands of displaced people will not be able to return.
After Mr. Katz’s remarks, the foreign ministers of several European countries, along with the European Union’s foreign policy chief, issued a statement urging Israel not to widen the conflict, “including through a ground operation on Lebanese territory.”
As of Tuesday, more than 1,260 people in Lebanon have been killed and more than 3,750 others injured, the country’s Health Ministry said.
Iraq: An American journalist was kidnapped in Baghdad on Tuesday evening and remains missing, Iraq’s Interior Ministry said, adding that Iraqi security forces who pursued the kidnappers had managed to arrest one suspect. Two Iraqi officials identified the journalist as Shelly Kittleson and said that the suspect was a member of the Iranian-allied Kataib Hezbollah.
The group is one of Iraq’s most powerful militias and holds close ties to the Quds force, the overseas arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran. One of Kataib Hezbollah’s compounds in Baghdad was hit by U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Feb. 28, the first day of the war, officials said. Two weeks later, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Persian Gulf: Iranian nationals will no longer be allowed to enter or travel through the United Arab Emirates, according to guidance posted by the government-owned Emirates airline. It was unclear whether exceptions would be made for the country’s many long-term Iranian residents.
Earlier on Tuesday, a Kuwaiti oil tanker burst into flames at a Dubai port after what the tanker’s owner said was an Iranian drone attack. The authorities in the United Arab Emirates said no one was injured and there was no oil leakage. The country also said it had intercepted several missiles and dozens of drones launched from Iran over the past day.
The State Department issued a new warning to American citizens in Saudi Arabia, saying that hotels and other gathering points, including American businesses and educational institutions, might be potential targets for attacks. Separately, the kingdom’s civil defense agency said that falling debris from a drone interception had injured two people southeast of the capital, Riyadh.
The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting on Tuesday, to condemn deadly attacks on U.N. peacekeepers in south Lebanon, with senior U.N. officials and diplomats calling for Israel and Hezbollah to de-escalate.
Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the U.N.’s peacekeeping chief, told the Council that “the situation has dangerously deteriorated with the ongoing escalation between Hezbollah and Israel across the Blue Line and beyond,” referring to the demarcation line dividing Israel and Lebanon and the Golan Heights. He added that peacekeepers had seen a “worrying increase in denials of freedom of movement and aggressive behavior.”
Two Indonesian peacekeepers from the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon were killed on Monday, and two other peacekeepers were injured, one severely, when a roadside explosive struck their convoy, destroying their U.N.-marked vehicle, Mr. Lacroix, said.
It was the second deadly attack in just 24 hours. On Sunday, a projectile landed in a U.N. outpost, killing one Indonesian peacekeeper and critically injuring another. The U.N. said it was investigating the attacks to determine the origin.
Lebanon’s ambassador to the U.N., Ahmad Arafa, called the attacks “barbaric and irresponsible,” and said they must stop regardless of who was responsible. “The attacks on peacekeepers are attacks on this Council itself. They undermine its reputation and credibility before the peoples of the world.”
The deadly incidents come as the Israeli military has intensified airstrikes and its land incursion into southern Lebanon, extending about 11 kilometers into the country, and is in control of areas immediately north of the Blue Line- a U.N. demarcated border that separates Israel from Lebanon and the Golan Heights, according to the U.N. Hezbollah and Israel’s military have been exchanging fire and clashing in the area.
Indonesia’s ambassador to the Council, Umar Hadi, said his nation was feeling grief, anger and frustration about the loss of three of its servicemen and the wounding of five others. He said the fallen peacekeepers were in their 20s. “These peacekeepers fell and wounded while carrying out a mandate entrusted to them by this very Council.”
Mr. Hadi blamed the incidents on Israel, saying that the hostilities in south Lebanon stemmed from “repeated incursions by the Israeli military into the territory of Lebanon."
Israel’s ambassador, Danny Danon, told the Council that Hezbollah was responsible for both incidents, the projectile and the roadside bomb, that killed the peacekeepers.
Secretary General António Guterres condemned the attacks and said in a statement on Sunday that all parties must respect international law protecting peacekeepers and warned that violations could be prosecuted as war crimes. U.N. peacekeepers operate under the Security Council’s mandate.
Pope Leo XIV, addressing reporters as he headed for his papal retreat outside of Rome on Tuesday, said he hoped the war against Iran would end soon, according to The Associated Press. “I’m told that President Trump has recently stated that he would like to end the war,’’ he said. “I hope that he’s looking for an off-ramp.’’
The remarks were made during Holy Week, a sacred period of the year for Christians ahead of Easter Sunday. “It is a time of peace, a time of reflection,” the pope said, adding, “We constantly make the call for peace, but unfortunately, many people want to promote hatred, violence, war.’’
Leo has continually renewed calls for peace in the Middle East. He visited Lebanon last year.
Iranian state media on Tuesday reported a new strike on the Mobarakeh Steel complex in Isfahan, which was previously targeted on March 27. Mobarakeh Steel is part of Iran’s metals sector under sanctions.
Fars, a semiofficial news agency, also said airstrikes had hit Sefid Dasht, a subsidiary of the Mobarakeh Steel Group, along with meteorological facilities in Bushehr Province, damaging a civilian weather radar site and its administrative building, and rendering them inoperable.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the World Health Organization, said on Tuesday that attacks on Tehran in the past two nights have struck near the organization’s office in the Iranian capital and shattered windows. There were no injuries, he noted, but added that damage to the premises of the health agency and other groups “cannot be tolerated and must be avoided at all costs.”
Iranian nationals are no longer allowed to enter or transit through the United Arab Emirates, according to updated guidance posted online by Emirates, the government-owned airline in Dubai, the largest Emirati city. The guidance did not specify whether there would be exemptions in place for Iranian residents, many of whom have made long-term homes there. Dubai has generations-old cultural and trade ties with Iran, but they have shown signs of strain since the war began.
The State Department issued a new warning to American citizens in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. It said: “We are tracking reports of threats against locations where American citizens gather. We advise U.S. citizens that hotels and other gathering points including U.S. businesses and U.S. educational institutions may be potential targets.”
The Israeli military on Tuesday night said it had dismantled launchers in southern Lebanon from which a recent barrage of missiles was launched at Israel. The statement came after several hours of rocket and drone launches from Hezbollah toward northern Israel, with no known casualties. The Israeli military said about 20 projectiles were launched during the evening and into the night.
Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said Tuesday that Iran had not responded to a 15-point proposal sent by the United States to end the war in the Middle East, and had not submitted any proposal of its own.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, he said he had received a direct message from Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, but denied that the countries were negotiating.
He added that Iran would accept only proposals that stipulate an end to hostilities, rather than a temporary pause.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Tuesday said Israel had established a “wide buffer zone” in southern Lebanon. Earlier in the day, Israel’s defense minister indicated that troops would control an area up to 20 miles from the Israeli border.
In a televised address, Netanyahu said the war with Iran would continue, but added that missiles from Iran and Israel’s other enemies “no longer” threaten Israel’s existence.
He did not provide a timeline for the war’s duration or mention any efforts to end it.
News Analysis
Regime change has occurred in Iran. Or it hasn’t. It is a goal of the war. Except it isn’t.
Those are some of the dizzying messages that have come from President Trump and his aides in recent days. The phrase “regime change” has flown from lips this week like fighter jets crisscrossing the Persian Gulf.
But there appears to be disagreement among top administration officials on what the phrase means, or whether the United States and Israel have achieved it in four weeks of war against Iran.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an unequivocal declaration about the Iranian government at a news conference on Tuesday: “This new regime, because regime change has occurred, should be wiser than the last. President Trump will make a deal. He is willing.”
A common definition of regime change is a forced transformation of government or leadership that results in structural alterations in policies, politics and governance. In Iran, a theocratic leadership that is authoritarian and anti-American — and that continues to wage war — remains in place.
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the president’s national security adviser, expressed some doubt in an interview with ABC News about whether anything had really changed in Iran.
“The people who lead them, this clerical regime, that is the problem,” he said. “And if there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future, that would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world. But we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case.”
Later, speaking to Al Jazeera, Mr. Rubio made it clear that destroying Iran’s weapons was important because the current leadership — the new regime, as Mr. Hegseth puts it — is an adversary.
“I think the best way to stability, given the people who are in charge in Iran, is to destroy the ability of Iran in the future to launch these missiles and these drones against their infrastructure and civilian populations,” Mr. Rubio said.
He added that “our objectives here from the very beginning had nothing to do with the leadership.”
Mr. Trump opened the war on Feb. 28 by working with Israel to carry out a strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and other top officials. Hours later, he called for Iranians to overthrow their government sometime after the bombing stopped. The uprising, which was promised to Mr. Trump by Israeli leaders, has not materialized, but the president is saying mission accomplished on regime change.
In fact, he said, the United States has been so successful that it has ended not just one, but two Iranian regimes.
“We’ve had regime change, if you look, already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday aboard Air Force One. “The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change.”
To emphasize the point, he said, “Regime change is an imperative, but I think we have it automatically.”
Mr. Trump’s talk of the destruction of two regimes appeared to refer to the initial attacks that killed Mr. Khamenei and other senior officials and also injured his son Mojtaba Khamenei, who was later appointed by a group of clerics to be Iran’s new supreme leader. Iranian and Israeli officials say the son suffered leg injuries, and he has not appeared in public during the war.
The younger Mr. Khamenei is considered a hard-line ally of a powerful arm of the Iranian military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The government in Tehran vows resistance and continues to fight the United States, Israel and Arab partners, and to block energy shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting the global economy.
“There has been personnel change in Iran, not regime change,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a scholar of Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Different men with the same ideology.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks about regime change have muddied the waters. But his military actions and coercive economic warfare against a handful of nations — Iran, Venezuela and Cuba — are aimed so far at decapitating leadership to put in power someone who will accede to U.S. demands, rather than effecting a wholesale transformation of the political system.
The president’s aim is to create client states by coercing regime compliance, part of a greater project of resurrecting empire. And he constantly talks about a template: the U.S. military’s violent incursion into Venezuela in January to seize Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president, and Mr. Trump’s subsequent negotiations over oil and other matters with the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, who like Mr. Maduro is a hard-line leftist.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a news conference on Monday that the United States and Israel had to kill the older Mr. Khamenei and some of his aides after it proved too difficult to do diplomacy with them. Those previous leaders “are now no longer on planet Earth,” she said, “because they lied to the United States and they strung us along in negotiations, and that was unacceptable to the president, which is why many of the previous leaders were killed.”
Mr. Trump’s braggadocio over accomplishing what he calls regime change is fairly new. In 2016, when he was running for president, he criticized the wasteful U.S. “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that “we must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change.” In May, he gave a speech in Saudi Arabia in which he said that “in the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”
Despite his embrace of war and military violence, Mr. Trump’s instinct to refrain from committing the United States to completely transforming hostile nations appears to persist for now.
The president’s remarks this week asserting that leadership decapitation is regime change can be interpreted as an attempt to redefine the phrase so that he can say his original war goal has been met.
“The administration as a whole seems to be moving away from deep regime change as a goal of the war,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities in Washington. “A real regime change war in Iran would require boots on the ground — and a lot of them — and Trump wisely doesn’t want to commit that level of effort when the costs and risks far outweigh the benefits.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday that U.S. bombers had carried out a strike in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, after President Trump shared a video showing huge explosions lighting up the night sky after the attack.
The video, which Mr. Trump shared on Truth Social late Monday and whose authenticity was verified by The New York Times, shows the aftermath of an airstrike south of Isfahan. Mr. Hegseth said at a news briefing that the video Mr. Trump had shared was from the strike and that it had targeted an Iranian ammunition depot.
It was unclear from the videos alone what the target of the attack was or what kind of damage had been done. Iran’s government and state media did not immediately comment on the strike.
The footage shows large, fiery explosions and clouds of smoke rising south of Isfahan. An enormous cloud of smoke rises between mountains on the outskirts of the city. The footage also shows what appears to be multiple smaller explosions.
The video shared by Mr. Trump, and others showing the strike in Isfahan, was posted earlier by Vahid Online, an aggregator that frequently shares footage from Iran. It has become one of the few sources of video from the country as Iran’s government has severely restricted internet service since the U.S.-Israeli attacks began Feb. 28.
At least one of the explosions appears to have been in the area of an Iranian air base, also in the south of Isfahan. The footage shows several large clouds and multiple secondary explosions rising in the night sky.
The Times verified the footage posted by Mr. Trump by matching visible geographical and physical features to satellite imagery of the surroundings of Isfahan and to other authenticated videos posted early on Tuesday that depicted the same explosions from different angles.
Isfahan, a historic city and tourist center with about two million residents, is also a center for weapons production and housing for small nuclear facilities. A more important nuclear site outside the city, believed to house enriched uranium, was struck by the U.S. military in June 2025.
The U.S. military said on Saturday that it had struck more than 11,000 targets in Iran since the American-Israeli assault began. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that U.S. forces were now focusing on “interdicting and destroying the logistical and supply chains” that formed Iran’s military-industrial base.
Jon Hazell contributed reporting.
The foreign ministers of 10 European countries and the European Union’s foreign policy chief on Tuesday urged Israel to avoid widening the conflict in Lebanon, “including through a ground operation on Lebanese territory.” The statement — signed by the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, among others — came after Israel’s defense minister said earlier in the day that Israel intends to control a large part of southern Lebanon, demolish towns there, and refuse to allow displaced residents to return.
The European diplomats blamed Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia, for the resumption of hostilities and called on Israel and Lebanon to hold direct negotiations to end the conflict.
An American journalist was kidnapped in Baghdad by “unknown individuals” on Tuesday evening, and government security forces have begun operations to find her and track down the abductors, according to Iraq’s Interior Ministry.
The freelance journalist was identified as Shelly Kittleson by two Iraqi security officials. She has worked for various news organizations, and one of them, Al-Monitor news outlet, for which Ms. Kittleson is a contributor, called for her safe and immediate release.
A senior official at the U.S. State Department, Dylan Johnson, said in a social media post that the department was aware of the “reported kidnapping of an American journalist in Baghdad,” though he did not identify Ms. Kittleson by name. He said the department had warned the individual of “threats against them” and was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to secure the person’s release.
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad referred questions to the State Department.
The Iraqi ministry said that security forces had pursued the kidnappers as they fled, managing to arrest one suspect and seizing a vehicle that had been used in the abduction. The suspect is a member of the Iran-allied Kataib Hezbollah, the two senior Iraqi security officials said.
Ms. Kittleson was warned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that her name appeared on Kataib Hezbollah plans to “kidnap or kill” her, according to Alex Plitsas, who is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research organization, and described himself as a friend. Mr. Plitsas said in an interview with The New York Times that, after that warning, she had designated him as her point of contact with U.S. officials in the case of an emergency, but wanted to continue reporting and remained in Baghdad.
Barbara Kittleson, who identified herself as Ms. Kittleson’s mother when reached by phone by The Times on Tuesday, gave the journalist’s age as 49 and said she had last heard from her daughter the previous week.
Kataib Hezbollah is one of Iraq’s most powerful militant groups and the same militia that held Elizabeth Tsurkov, an Israeli Russian doctoral student at Princeton University, hostage for more than two years, torturing her while in captivity. The Iraqi authorities were now working under the assumption that the same group was behind the abduction on Tuesday, one of the security officials said.
Ms. Kittleson was abducted on a busy street in central Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, and her kidnappers sped off with her in a convoy of two cars, according to the two senior security officials. The authorities, who were informed of her kidnapping by witnesses, were able to track the cars to a highway outside the city and tried to chase them down, the officials said.
The car holding Ms. Kittleson overturned during the chase, the security officials said, but the kidnappers quickly removed her from the wrecked vehicle and put her in the second car. They then escaped the security forces pursuing them.
For years, Ms. Kittleson has covered the Middle East, according to her LinkedIn page, focusing on conflict across the region. She is known for “her courageous reporting from war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria,” according to Al-Monitor.
There has been growing American anxiety about Iran-aligned armed groups in Iraq. In March, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad told all American citizens they should leave Iraq immediately, citing attacks on civilian facilities and government buildings owned by the United States and its regional allies.
Kataib Hezbollah has also become embroiled in the war in Iran. A compound in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, belonging to the group was hit with U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Feb. 28, killing three people, officials said. About two weeks later, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Since its inception, Kataib Hezbollah has been closely tied to Iran’s Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Repeated attacks on U.S. Army posts in Iraq and Syria over the years contributed to Washington’s decision in 2009 to designate the militia as a foreign terrorist organization.
Ephrat Livni, Edward Wong and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
The Free Narges Coalition, an Iranian advocacy group, said on Tuesday the life of the jailed human rights leader Narges Mohammadi was in “imminent danger” after she experienced a heart attack and was denied hospital treatment.
According to a report published by the organization, Mohammadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023, “appeared pale and weak with significant weight loss” during a March 29 visit. Known for her advocacy of women’s rights in Iran and her opposition to the death penalty, Mohammadi was imprisoned by the government on national security charges.
Israel’s defense minister outlined plans on Tuesday to occupy much of southern Lebanon, offering his clearest indication yet that Israel intends to control the region even after its ground invasion ends.
As Israel expands that ground offensive, the minister, Israel Katz, spoke in more explicit terms than ever before about plans for an occupation. He said Israeli forces would maintain control over “the entire area” from the border to the Litani River — a stretch of territory that is 20 miles from Israel at its deepest point — after the offensive had concluded.
Mr. Katz reiterated that this would include the demolition of entire Lebanese border towns and that hundreds of thousands of residents would not be allowed back to their homes.
“The return of more than 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who fled north will be completely prohibited south of the Litani until safety and security of northern Israeli residents is ensured,” he said.
For decades, southern Lebanon has been dominated by Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group that has fought a long-running conflict with Israel. The Iran-backed group was formed in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Shortly after Israel and the United States attacked Iran in late February, Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel in solidarity with Tehran. That triggered a renewed Israeli offensive against the group that has brought sweeping evacuation orders for much of southern Lebanon along with widespread bombardment.
Israeli officials have said the objective of the ground invasion is to set up a “security zone” to prevent territory in southern Lebanon from being used to attack Israel. But Mr. Katz’s latest comments have deepened concerns about a renewed Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon — more than a quarter of a century after the last 18-year occupation of the same area ended in 2000.
Lebanon’s government has condemned Israel’s military campaign and appealed to the international community to intervene. Last week, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam warned the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, about the risk of Israel annexing the area south of the Litani River.
During an address to the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday from Beirut, Tom Fletcher, the U.N. under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, repeated those warnings, asking council members to consider how the international community should prepare “for a new addition to the list of occupied territories.”
Hezbollah’s decision to fire rockets into Israel in early March came little more than a year after the last full-scale war with Israel ended, at least formally, with a cease-fire. On the ground, the truce was almost nonexistent given near daily Israeli strikes on Lebanon.
More than 1,200 people have been killed in Lebanon since the war resumed, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. More than a million Lebanese — most of them Shiite Muslims who form the core of Hezbollah’s support base — have also been displaced.
The United Nations has warned of a mounting humanitarian crisis inside the small Mediterranean nation.
Across the border in Israel, at least 29 people have been killed amid the wider war with Iran and Hezbollah, including 10 Israeli soldiers killed during the ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
Mr. Katz said the destruction of Lebanese border towns would follow the Israeli “model” employed in parts of Gaza, where large areas were flattened and depopulated during the country’s two-year war with Hamas, another Iran-backed group. The war followed the Hamas-led attack on Israeli on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Israeli military issued fresh evacuation orders on Tuesday for the southern outskirts of the capital, Beirut. They were soon followed by airstrikes in the once densely populated area where Hezbollah holds sway.
The cluster of neighborhoods has largely emptied in recent weeks amid sustained Israeli bombardment and evacuation orders, though some residents have periodically returned to check on their homes or retrieve belongings.
After days of bad weather, Israeli drones again whirred over Beirut on Tuesday as the skies cleared, unnerving a city already on edge.
Farther south along the border, Hezbollah militants engaged in fierce ground fighting with Israeli forces as they made a creeping advance toward the Litani River. So far, the invasion has extended a few miles into Lebanese territory, but Israeli forces have been rapidly advancing in recent days.
The 90-mile Litani River has long divided the rest of the country from Lebanon’s southern borderlands with Israel, one of Hezbollah’s strongest bases of operations and an area where the group retains deep support among the largely Shiite Muslim population.
Gabby Sobelman and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
Stocks rose and oil prices fell as investors’ hoped for an end to the fighting with Iran. The S&P 500 was more than 2 percent higher in early afternoon trading, while Brent crude, the international oil benchmark fell. The moves are a further sign of the market’s sensitivity to the continuing war in Iran.
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European Union energy ministers met today to discuss the fallout from the war in the Middle East, and Dan Jorgensen, the E.U. energy commissioner, just wrapped up a news conference. He said that cutting demand was one tool for dealing with this moment. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but it is clear that the more you can do to save oil, especially diesel, especially jet fuel, the better we are off,” Jorgensen said. He added that “even if there was a peace tomorrow, there will still be consequences, because energy infrastructure in the region has been ruined by the war.”
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps issued a threat on Tuesday against top American corporations, accusing them of helping the United States and Israel carry out strikes against Iranians.
“From now on the main institutions involved in such operations will be considered legitimate targets,” the Guards said in a statement that named 18 companies, including Apple, Google and Meta. The statement, carried by Iranian state media, called for employees of these companies “in all countries of the region” to evacuate their workplaces and stay a kilometer away from their officers.
It was not the first time Iran has threatened American tech companies. Earlier this month, Iran threatened wider attacks against “enemy technology infrastructure” belonging to seven U.S. tech firms.
During an address to the U.N. Security Council from Beirut, Tom Fletcher, the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, warned that Israel could soon occupy a large section of southern Lebanon, and he drew attention to the country’s deepening humanitarian crisis as the war between Israel and Hezbollah escalates.
Addressing three questions directly to Council members, Fletcher asked how they would protect civilians, how the international community should prepare “for a new addition to the list of occupied territories” and how should it also brace for the “potential terror of a fresh round of internal targeting and political strife,” evoking Lebanon’s history of civil instability.
“We have often said that we cannot let Lebanon fail, but now is a real test of that promise,” Fletcher said, adding that the country was “once again at breaking point.”
Iran’s men’s national soccer team will play at the World Cup in the United States as scheduled, the president of the sports governing body said after meeting with the team before a tune-up game held in Turkey.
“The matches will be played where they are supposed to be, according to the draw,” FIFA’s chief, Gianni Infantino, said as he attended a game between Iran and Costa Rica on Tuesday.
Confusion has surrounded the fate of the team ahead of the World Cup, where it is slated to play all three of its group stage games on the U.S. West Coast. President Trump said the team should not play in the tournament, citing safety concerns, and Iranian officials have said they intend to play but raised the possibility that the team’s games could be moved to Mexico, which is co-hosting the event along with Canada.