President Donald Trump said the US military had carried out strikes Sunday on three Iranian nuclear sites and that Tehran “must now agree to end this war,” following days of speculation over whether the United States would join its ally Israel’s bombing campaign.
As the Iran-Israel war entered its second week, here are the latest developments:
US intervention
Trump said the US military carried out a “very successful attack” on three Iranian nuclear sites, including the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordo.
“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran,” including Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
“A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site,” Fordo, he said, adding that the planes were safely out of Iranian airspace and on the way home.
“I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier,” Trump said in a live address from the White House later.
The president said that after the strikes, Iran “must now agree to end this war,” insisting that under no circumstances should Iran possess a nuclear weapon.
Iranian media said part of the Fordo uranium enrichment facility as well as the Isfahan and Natanz nuclear sites were attacked.
Israel raised its alert level after the strikes, permitting only essential activities until further notice, the military announced.
‘Devastating’ response
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian warned his country’s “response to the continued aggression of the Zionist regime will be more devastating” during a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, according to the official IRNA news agency.
Israeli strikes on Iran have killed more than 400 people since they began last week, the Islamic republic’s health ministry said.
A US-based NGO, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, said on Friday that based on its sources and media reports, at least 657 people have been killed in Iran, including 263 civilians.
Agence France Presse (AFP) journalists reported hearing explosions in Tehran on Saturday evening, after Israeli strikes on Ahvaz, in Iran’s southwest.
Iranian media also reported an Israeli strike on an “evacuated” military base south of Tehran that wounded one person, while Israel reported it was attacking drone “storage facilities and a weapons facility” in southwestern Iran’s Bandar Abbas region.
Israel says killed 3 Iranian commanders
Israel’s military said it had killed Saeed Izadi, a top Revolutionary Guards official in charge of military coordination with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, as well as two other Iranian commanders overnight.
Iran’s Fars news agency reported Saturday evening that “five army officers were killed and nine others were wounded” in an Israeli strike in the western city of Sumar.
Israel building struck
Israeli rescue services said an Iranian “drone strike hit a two-storey residential building in northern Israel” following a wave of attacks reported by the military.
Iran’s strikes since June 13 have killed at least 25 people in Israel, according to official figures.
Isfahan nuclear site
Israel targeted “two centrifuge production sites” at Iran’s Isfahan nuclear facility overnight in a second wave of strikes on the location, a military official said.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed a centrifuge manufacturing workshop at the site had been hit in the strike.
Pezeshkian, during his call with Macron, said Iran had long been willing “to provide guarantees and build confidence in its peaceful nuclear activities”, and that its right to a nuclear programme “cannot be taken away from them by threats or war”.
The Arak heavy water reactor, which Israel struck earlier this week, was carrying out work related to “health and medicine”, Iran’s atomic agency chief said.
US stealth bombers
US stealth bombers flew Saturday across the Pacific Ocean, according to tracking data and media reports, fuelling speculation over their intended mission.
Multiple B-2 bomber aircraft left a base in the central United States overnight, The New York Times and specialist plane tracking sites reported.
The B-2 is capable of carrying America’s heaviest payloads, including the bunker-busting GBU-57—the only weapon capable of destroying Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facility in Fordo.
Houthi threat
Yemen’s Tehran-backed Houthi rebels said they would restart their attacks on US-linked vessels and warships in the Red Sea if Washington got “involved in… aggression against Iran with the Israeli enemy,” the group’s military spokesman Yahya Saree said.
The group agreed to a ceasefire with the United States last month after an intense bombing campaign by Washington, but it has not stopped firing missiles at Israel.
