ISTANBUL/WASHINGTON/JERUSALEM. — Iran said on Monday that the US attack on its nuclear sites expanded the range of legitimate targets for its armed forces, and called US President Donald Trump a “gambler” for joining Israel’s military campaign against the Islamic Republic.
Since Trump joined Israel’s campaign by dropping massive bunker-buster bombs on Iranian nuclear sites on Sunday morning, Iran has repeatedly threatened to retaliate.
But while it has continued to fire missiles at Israel, it has yet to take action against the United States itself, either by firing at US bases or by targeting the 20 percent of global oil shipments that pass near its coast at the mouth of the Gulf.
“Mr. Trump, the gambler, you may start this war, but we will be the ones to end it,” Ebrahim Zolfaqari, spokesperson for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya central military headquarters, said on Monday in English at the end of a recorded video statement.
Zolfaqari said the US should expect heavy consequences for its actions.
Iran and Israel traded another wave of air and missile strikes on Monday as the world braced for Tehran’s response.
An Israeli military spokesperson said Israeli fighter jets had struck military targets in western Iran. Earlier, Iran fired missiles that wounded scores of people and flattened buildings in Tel Aviv.
With the damage visible from space after 30,000-pound US bunker-buster bombs crashed into the mountain above Iran’s Fordow nuclear site, experts and officials are closely watching how far the strikes might have set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, said initial battle damage assessments indicated all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction, but he declined to speculate whether any Iranian nuclear capabilities might still be intact.
Experts surveying commercial satellite imagery said it appeared that the US attack had severely damaged the Fordow nuclear plant site, built inside a mountain, and possibly destroyed it and the uranium-enriching centrifuges it housed, although there was no independent confirmation.
Trump called the strike a “Bullseye!!!”
“Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran,” he wrote. “The biggest damage took place far below ground level.”
In total, the US launched 75 precision-guided munitions, including more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles, and more than 125 military aircraft in the operation against three nuclear sites, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, told reporters.
The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said no increases in off-site radiation levels had been reported after the US strikes.
Rafael Grossi, the agency’s director general, told CNN that it was not yet possible to assess the damage done underground.
A senior Iranian source told Reuters that most of the highly enriched uranium at Fordow had been moved elsewhere before the attack. Reuters could not immediately corroborate the claim.
Tehran, which denies its nuclear program is for anything other than peaceful purposes, sent a volley of missiles at Israel in the aftermath of the US attack, wounding scores of people and destroying buildings in Tel Aviv.
Trump earlier called on Iran to forgo any retaliation and said the government “must now make peace” or “future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.”
Trump’s administration has repeatedly said that its aim is solely to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, not to open a wider war.
But in a social media post on Sunday, Trump openly spoke of toppling the hardline clerical rulers who have been Washington’s principal foes in the Middle East since Iran’s 1979 revolution.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” he wrote.
Trump’s post came after officials in his administration, including US Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, stressed they were not working to overthrow Iran’s government.
“This mission was not and has not been about regime change,” Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon, calling the mission “a precision operation” targeting Iran’s nuclear program.
Vance, in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” said “our view has been very clear that we don’t want a regime change.”
“We do not want to protract this or build this out any more than it’s already been built out. We want to end their nuclear program, and then we want to talk to the Iranians about a long-term settlement here,” Vance said, adding the US “had no interest in boots on the ground.”
“Operation Midnight Hammer” was known only to a small number of people in Washington and at the US military’s headquarters for Middle East operations in Tampa, Florida.
Complete with deception, seven B-2 bombers flew for 18 hours from the United States into Iran to drop 14 bunker-buster bombs, Caine told reporters.
The Israeli military said on Monday that about 20 jets had conducted a wave of strikes against military targets in western Iran and Tehran overnight. In Kermanshah, in western Iran, missile and radar infrastructure was targeted, and in Tehran, a surface-to-air missile launcher was struck, it said.
A missile launched from Iran in the early hours of Monday was intercepted by Israeli defenses, it said.
Air raid sirens blared overnight in Tel Aviv and other parts of central Israel.
Iranian news agencies reported air defenses were activated in central Tehran districts to counter “enemy targets,” and that Israeli air strikes hit Parchin, the location of a military complex southeast of the capital.
Israel’s state broadcaster reported that an Israeli Hermes drone was shot down in Iranian territory, the fourth to be shot down in the area since the start of the campaign.
Iran says more than 400 people have been killed in the Israeli attacks, mostly civilians, but has released few images of the damage since the initial days of the bombing. Tehran, a city of 10 million people, has largely emptied, with residents fleeing to the countryside to escape attacks.
Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes on Israel have killed 24 people, all civilians, and injured hundreds, the first time a significant number of Iranian missiles have ever penetrated Israeli defenses.
Beyond those missiles, Iran’s ability to retaliate is far more limited than a few months ago, since Israel inflicted defeat on Iran’s most feared regional proxy force, Hezbollah in Lebanon, whose downfall was swiftly followed by that of Iran’s most powerful client ruler, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
Iran’s most effective threat to hurt the West would probably be to restrict global oil flows from the Gulf.
Oil prices spiked on Monday at their highest since January. But they have not yet shot up to crisis levels, indicating that traders see a path out of the conflict that avoids serious disruption.
Brent crude futures were down 0.5% to $76.64 a barrel as of 0830 GMT, after briefly jumping above $80 at the opening.
Iran’s parliament has approved a move to close the Strait of Hormuz that leads into the Gulf, which would require approval from the Supreme National Security Council, a body led by an appointee of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Attempting to strangle the Strait could send global oil prices skyrocketing, derail the world economy and invite conflict with the U.S. Navy’s massive Fifth Fleet that patrols the Gulf from its base in Bahrain.
“It’s economic suicide for them if they do it. And we retain options to deal with that,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
As Tehran weighed its options, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was expected to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday. The Kremlin has a strategic partnership with Iran, but also close links with Israel.
Speaking in Istanbul on Sunday, Araqchi said his country would consider all possible responses and there would be no return to diplomacy until it had retaliated. TASS news agency later quoted him as saying Iran and Russia were coordinating their positions.
‘HEIGHTENED THREAT’
The US Department of Homeland Security warned of a “heightened threat environment” in America, citing the possibility of cyberattacks or targeted violence. Law enforcement in major US cities stepped up patrols with a focus on religious, cultural and diplomatic sites.
The US State Department issued a security alert for all US citizens abroad that warned of the potential for demonstrations against Americans and travel disruptions due to closed airspace across the Middle East, calling on them to “exercise increased caution.”
Caine said the US military had increased protection of troops in the region, including in Iraq and Syria.
The United States already has a sizeable force in the Middle East, with nearly 40,000 troops in the region, including air defense systems, fighter aircraft and warships that can detect and shoot down enemy missiles.
Reuters reported last week that the Pentagon had started to move some aircraft and ships from bases in the Middle East that may be vulnerable to any potential Iranian attack.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that there were no other planned military operations against Iran “unless they mess around.”
Rubio also called on China to encourage Iran not to shut down the strait, telling Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo” show it would be a “terrible mistake.”
“It’s economic suicide for them if they do it. And we retain options to deal with that, but other countries should be looking at that as well. It would hurt other countries’ economies a lot worse than ours,” he said.
The UN Security Council met on Sunday to discuss the US strikes as Russia, China and Pakistan proposed that the 15-member body adopt a resolution calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Middle East.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council the US bombings in Iran marked a perilous turn in the region and urged a halt to fighting and return to negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
‘RESCUE’ FLIGHTS
Israeli authorities opened the country’s main airport, Ben Gurion near Tel Aviv, for rescue flight landings on Sunday between 1100 and 1700 GMT. The small Haifa Airport serving Israel’s north was also open from 1100 to 1700 GMT.
Tens of thousands of Israelis and others who had booked tickets to Israel are stuck abroad and nearly 40,000 tourists in Israel are looking to leave, some of whom are going via Jordan’s borders to Amman and Aqaba and others via Egypt and by boat to Cyprus.
Israel’s Airports Authority said so-called rescue flights to the country would expand starting on Monday with 24 a day from various destinations, although each flight would be limited to 50 passengers. El Al said it would start servicing eight international destinations on Monday after getting a massive wave of requests to leave the country.
Following an early barrage of Iranian missiles, Israel also reopened its airspace for six hours on Sunday to bring back those stranded abroad since the conflict with Iran began on June 13.
Israel is also expanding flight operations on Monday, aiming to help tens of thousands of travelers stranded by widespread cancellations across the Middle East after the US attacked Iran.
An organization that monitors flight risks warned on Sunday that US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites could heighten the threat to American operators in the region.
With Russian and Ukrainian airspace also closed due to war, the Middle East has become a more important route for flights between Europe and Asia, but flight tracking website FlightRadar24 showed empty space over Iran, Iraq, Syria and Israel. Airlines have chosen routings such as north via the Caspian Sea or south via Egypt and Saudi Arabia, even if these mean higher fuel and crew costs and longer flight times.
Air France KLM AIRF.PA said it has cancelled flights to and from Dubai and Riyadh on Sunday and Monday. Singapore Airlines said it cancelled flights from Singapore to Dubai following a security assessment and British Airways cancelled flights to and from Dubai and Doha. Those cancellations were only for Sunday, but Singapore said other flights between Singapore and Dubai may be affected as the situation remains “fluid.”
BA, owned by IAG ICAG.L, said customers scheduled to travel between now and June 24 to Dubai and Doha can rebook up to and including July 6, free of charge.
Israel, meanwhile, is starting to find ways for citizens stranded abroad to get home and for foreign tourists to leave, if slowly. Israeli airline El Al on Sunday said it had received applications to leave the country from about 25,000 people in about a day.
Safe Airspace, a website run by OPSGROUP, said the US attacks on Iran may increase risks to US operators in the region.
“While there have been no specific threats made against civil aviation, Iran has previously warned it would retaliate by attacking U.S. military interests in the Middle East – either directly or via proxies such as Hezbollah,” Safe Airspace said.
Missile and drone barrages in a growing number of conflict zones represent a high risk to airline traffic.
In the nine days since Israel attacked Iran, carriers have suspended flights to destinations in the affected countries, though there have been some evacuation flights from neighboring nations and some bringing stranded Israelis home.
Airlines are also concerned about a potential spike in oil prices following the US attacks, which will increase the cost of jet fuel.
In the days before the US strikes, American Airlines suspended flights to Qatar and United Airlines did the same with flights to Dubai.
Safe Airspace said airspace risks could now extend to Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
