Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has vowed that his country will fight against Israeli aggression apparently in response to President Donald Trump.
“Any form of US military intervention will undoubtedly be met with irreparable harm,” Khamenei said.
“Wise people who know Iran, its people, and its history never speak to this nation in the language of threats, because Iranians are not those who surrender,” he added.
The US has insisted that Iran must scrap its uranium enrichment to prevent the country developing nuclear weapons – although Iran insists its nuclear activities are entirely peaceful.
Trump pulled out of a previous nuclear agreement between Iran and five other world powers in 2018. After returning to office, he dispatched negotiators to try to reach a new agreement with the Middle Eastern nation, without a breakthrough.
Trump appears to have cooled on traditional diplomacy in recent days. On Tuesday, while travelling back to the US from a G7 summit in Canada, he said he was “not too much in the mood to negotiate with Iran”.
Trump’s frustrated language implied that he was crossing a threshold that would be “very difficult to row back from”, Professor Amnon Aran, an Israeli foreign policy expert, told BBC Radio 5 Live.
“We’re definitely the closest we have been” to a US entry in the conflict since it began, he added.
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Other pundits suggested Trump could be forced into action. A former Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, speculated that the president would feel he had little choice but to intervene if Iran attacked a US ship or base.
However, such an attack might also be an Iranian tactic to prompt Trump to pressurise Israel into negotiating an end to the fighting, Mr Oren told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Trump himself told reporters on his return from the G7 that his goal was “an end, a real end, not a ceasefire”. His comments came just hours after he joined other leaders in the Western alliance in issuing a statement that called for de-escalation in the Middle East.
Trump left the summit early to respond to the crisis from Washington, before a series of statements left observers unclear which way he might choose to go.
A message urging Iranians to evacuate Tehran similarly caused a flurry of speculation, as well as anxiety in the Iranian capital itself.
Reported by BBC
