Author: Agencies

WASHINGTON, June 3 (Reuters) – U.S. ​President Donald Trump acknowledged calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “crazy” in an expletive-filled phone exchange over fighting in Lebanon, while the ‌U.S. was trying to negotiate an end to hostilities with Iran.

In an interview broadcast on Wednesday, Trump was asked whether he had called the longtime Israeli leader “effing crazy” and accused him of ingratitude, paraphrasing a report by Axios.

“I did,” Trump told the “Pod Force One” podcast. “I wouldn’t say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with ​Lebanon, you know.”

Trump went on to say he and Netanyahu get along very well.

According to the Axios report, which cited an unidentified ​U.S. official, Trump said to Netanyahu in a call on Monday: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it ⁠weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

Trump said in the interview: “At some point, I said, ​Bibi, we got to stop this. We got to stop it.”

NETANYAHU CITES COMMON GOALS

Netanyahu, asked about the Axios report, declined to offer details of the conversation ​but said his relationship with Trump had not changed.

“We have common goals. Sometimes we have, as in the best of families, you have these tactical disagreements,” he said in an interview on CNBC on Wednesday.

“He’s been the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House, and he respects me; I respect him. We always find a ​way to work out our differences.”

Iran has said it will not agree to a deal with the United States to end the war that ​Trump and Netanyahu launched in late February unless a ceasefire also covers Lebanon, which Israel invaded in March in pursuit of the Iran-aligned Hezbollah militia that fired across the ‌border in ⁠support of Tehran.

Hostilities have continued despite a U.S.-mediated agreement announced on Monday that led Israel to step back from attacking the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut, and the Iran-backed group to halt cross-border strikes.

Israeli drone strikes killed at least six people in southern Lebanon and targeted a car south of Beirut on Wednesday, Lebanese security sources said. Israel said it intercepted a hostile aircraft likely fired by Hezbollah.

Trump bristled when asked if Netanyahu “tricked” him into attacking Iran, saying ​his critics were “the enemy.”

“I mean, I’m ​the one that started it,” Trump ⁠said. “I started because we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

“Now that pertains to Israel, because they probably would have been the first one to get hit. There would be no Israel. Tell you what, if there wasn’t ​me, there would be no Israel right now.”

Trump maintained that Israel would have been in a far worse position ​if he had ⁠not abandoned a 2015 accord reached by President Barack Obama and other world leaders with Iran, under which Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear programme in return for the lifting of sanctions.

After Trump withdrew from that deal during his first White House term in 2018, Iran produced stockpiles of near-weapons-grade highly enriched uranium, which ⁠Trump now ​demands it relinquish. Trump’s critics say Iran is now closer to making a nuclear weapon, ​and it will be hard for Trump to negotiate a better deal.

Trump has used expletives about Israel in the past, including publicly saying last year that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the ​fuck they are doing.”

The United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire barely an hour before President Donald Trump’s Wednesday deadline to obliterate the country was set to expire, with Tehran to temporarily reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz.

Both sides claimed to have won the more than month-long conflict that has roiled global financial markets and sent oil prices skyrocketing, with Trump telling AFP the deal was a “total and complete victory” for the US.

Iran too cast the ceasefire as a win and said it had agreed to talks with Washington to begin Friday in Pakistan on a path to end the conflict.

“The enemy has suffered an undeniable, historic and crushing defeat in its cowardly, illegal and criminal war against the Iranian nation,” said a statement from the Iranian Supreme National Security Council.

“Iran achieved a great victory.”

The White House said Israel had also agreed to the ceasefire, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it does not include Lebanon, where Israeli assaults in response to rocket fire by Iranian-backed Hezbollah have led to more than 1,500 deaths, according to Lebanese authorities.

Israel had encouraged Trump to join the war against Iran, its arch-nemesis, and in the first strikes killed the long-serving supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Trump said he had spoken to Pakistan’s leaders who “requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran.”

He later told AFP he believed China had helped get Tehran to negotiate.

“Subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday.

Trump had set a deadline to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz by 8:00 pm Washington time (0000 GMT Wednesday), or 3:30 am in Tehran.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed safe passage for two weeks for ships through the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway for one-fifth of the world’s oil which Tehran sealed off in retaliation for the war launched on February 28.

“If attacks against Iran are halted, our Powerful Armed Forces will cease their defensive operations,” Araghchi said.

– Uranium to be ‘taken care of’ –

Oil prices plunged by more than 17 percent after the ceasefire announcement. Costs at the pump had risen sharply since the war across the globe and for ordinary Americans, putting heavy political pressure on Trump.

Stock prices also soared in early trade Wednesday in Asia.

Trump said that the United States was “very far along” in negotiating a long-term agreement with Iran, which had submitted a 10-point plan that he said was “workable.”

But Iran publicly released points that took maximalist positions, including lifting long-standing US sanctions, guaranteeing its own “dominion” over the Strait of Hormuz and removing US forces from the region.

Crucially, it also said its plan would also require Washington to accept its uranium enrichment programme.

Trump has alleged that Iran was near building an atomic bomb, an assertion not backed by the UN nuclear watchdog and most observers.

Trump insisted that the nuclear material would be covered by any peace deal.

“That will be perfectly taken care of, or I wouldn’t have settled,” Trump told AFP, without giving any specifics about what would happen to the uranium.

Trump would not say whether he would go back to his original threats to lay waste to all power plants and bridges across the country of 90 million people if the deal fell apart.

“You’re going to have to see,” Trump told AFP.

Trump had made threats shocking even by his own standards when he warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

– Heavy strikes before deadline –

The United States and Israel struck key infrastructure before Trump’s deadline, with Netanyahu saying attacks hit railways and bridges allegedly used by the Revolutionary Guards.

The Israeli military also offered a rare statement of regret after it acknowledged damaging a synagogue in Tehran, saying it had been targeting a senior Iranian commander.

Iran, run by Shia Muslim clerics, is home to around 100 synagogues for its historic Jewish minority.

Infrastructure attacks reported by Iranian authorities Tuesday included a US-Israeli strike on a bridge outside the city of Qom and another on a rail bridge in central Iran that killed two people.

Iran has retaliated with weeks of drone and missile attacks on Gulf Arab states, citing their role as hubs for US troops.

The attacks have shattered the monarchies’ hard-fought reputation for safety and stability.

Qatar said early Wednesday that four people were hurt by falling missile debris, including a child. AFP reporters also heard explosions in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates said they responded to missile threats.

Two civilians, one of them an eight-year-old child, were killed in Baghdad when a projectile crashed into their home, police told AFP.

– ‘Terrified’ –

Iranian university student Metanat, 27, whose classmate was killed two weeks ago in an attack, told AFP before Trump’s suspension of the bombing she felt “terrified and so should everyone else in the country.”

State media published photos purporting to show groups of Iranians forming human chains to protect power plants.

The show of patriotism in the face of attacks came several months after Iran’s cleric-run government cracked down violently on mass protests, with rights groups reporting thousands of deaths.

A peace agreement would leave in place the Islamic republic despite hopes by Israel and the United States of toppling it.

The United States and Israel said that they attacked Iran to degrade its military capacity.

The rescue had unfolded with near‑perfect precision. Under cover of darkness, US commandos slipped deep into Iran, undetected, scaled a 7,000‑foot ridge and pulled a stranded American weapons specialist to safety, moving him toward a secret rendezvous point before dawn on Sunday.

Then everything stopped.

Two MC-130 aircraft that had ferried some of the roughly 100 special operations forces into rugged terrain south of Tehran suffered a mechanical failure and could not take off, a US official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Suddenly, elite commandos risked being stuck behind enemy lines.

Their commanders made a high-risk decision, ordering additional aircraft to fly into Iran to extract the group in waves — a decision that left the elite commandos waiting for a couple of tense hours.

“If there was a ‘holy shit’ moment, that was it,” said the official, who credited quick decision-making with saving the day. The official, along with others who spoke to Reuters for this story, was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly about the operation.

The gamble worked. The rescue force was pulled out in stages, and US troops destroyed the disabled MC‑130s and four additional helicopters inside Iran rather than risk leaving sensitive equipment behind.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The successful extraction ended one of the most perilous episodes of the five-week-old conflict, averting what could have been a catastrophic loss of American lives and easing a mounting crisis for President Donald Trump as he weighs whether to escalate a war that has already killed thousands.

 

Downed pilot hides, makes contact

 

The rescued US weapons specialist was the second of two crew members on an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet that Iran said ​on Friday had been hit by its air defenses. The US official said the plane was flying over Isfahan province when it was brought down and the two airmen ejected separately. The pilot was rescued while the second airman remained in Iran.

US air crews are trained in Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) techniques if downed behind enemy lines, but few are fluent in Persian and face a challenge in staying undetected while seeking rescue.

A US source familiar with some of the operational details said the American officer, whom Trump said held the rank of colonel, sprained his ankle and hid in a crevice on a hilltop.

The official said the airman later established contact with the US military and authenticated himself – a critical step to ensure rescue forces were not walking into a trap.

The CIA had run a deception campaign earlier, hoping to confuse Tehran by planting information inside Iran that US forces had already located the missing airman and were moving him before the operation took place, a senior Trump administration official said.

But the US military took additional steps, jamming electronics and bombing key roads around the location to prevent people from getting close, the U.S. source familiar with the planning said.

The source told Reuters that the aircraft eventually sent to extract the airman and rescue forces were much smaller turboprop aircraft, capable of landing on small airfields and relatively light.

Throughout the operation, the White House, the Pentagon and the US military’s Central Command were uncharacteristically silent. Trump was so relatively quiet that a local reporter went to check if he was at Walter Reed Hospital.

Once the mission was complete, Trump was triumphant.

“Over the past several hours, the United States Military pulled off one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in US History,” Trump said in a statement, adding that the airman was injured, but “he will be just fine.”

 

US aircraft hit

 

The initial search effort encountered fierce resistance from Iran when it began on Friday, after the F-15 pilot was initially rescued.

Reuters reported on Friday that two Black Hawk helicopters involved in the search were hit by Iranian fire but escaped from Iranian airspace.

In a separate incident, a pilot ejected from an A-10 Warthog fighter aircraft after it was hit over Kuwait and crashed, the officials said, though the extent of crew injuries was unclear.

The conflict has killed 13 US military service members, with more than 300 wounded, the U.S. Central Command says. No US troops have been taken prisoner by Iran.

While Trump has repeatedly sought to portray the Iranian military as being in tatters, its ability to repeatedly hit US aircraft is significant, military experts say.

​Iran’s Khatam ​al-Anbiya joint military command said ​on ​Saturday the military used a ​new air ‌defense system on Friday ​to ​target a US ⁠fighter jet.

Reuters first reported on US intelligence showing that Iran retains large amounts of missile and drone capability.

Until just over a week ago, the US could only determine with certainty that it had destroyed about one-third of Iran’s missile arsenal.

The status of about another third was less clear, but bombings probably damaged, destroyed or buried those missiles in underground tunnels and bunkers, Reuters sources said.

Appearing unburdened after the successful rescue, Trump used harsh language on Sunday to threaten Tehran ​if it did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz for oil flows vital to the world economy.

US President Donald Trump said Wednesday the US-Israeli war campaign against Iran was almost complete but that the country would be hit hard over the next two to three weeks as Washington pressed toward its military objectives.

Speaking in his first national address since the war began on February 28, Trump sought to reassure war-weary Americans that the offensive was worth the effort.

“Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” Trump said from the White House.

The war’s “core strategic objectives are nearing completion,” he said, cautioning however that “we are going to hit them, extremely hard, over the next two to three weeks.”

He also assured regional allies — Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain — battered by Iranian drone and missile attacks, that the United States “will not let them get hurt or fail in any way, shape or form.”

Trump indicated that talks may be possible with Iran’s new leadership, which he described as “less radical and much more reasonable” than its predecessor, signalling he is pursuing some form of deal to end the conflict.

But he warned that if none was reached, Washington had “our eyes on key targets including the country’s electric generating plants.”

The speech did little to calm energy markets, with oil prices surging Thursday as Trump called on other nations to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

One-fifth of global oil normally passes through the narrow waterway, and its effective closure has sent energy prices soaring and destabilized the world economy.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards vowed Wednesday to keep it shut to the country’s “enemies.”

– ‘Irrational’ –

Iran on Thursday dismissed Washington’s ceasefire overtures, describing US demands to end the conflict as “maximalist and irrational.”

“Messages have been received through intermediaries, including Pakistan, but there is no direct negotiation with the US,” said Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei, quoted by the ISNA news agency.

Trump had claimed earlier Wednesday that Iran’s president had sought a ceasefire, but said the Islamic republic must first reopen Hormuz — which he said in his address would happen “naturally” once the conflict ended.

The speech came as Trump faces plunging approval ratings, economic jitters and spiralling diplomatic fallout from a war that began when the United States and Israel launched a massive surprise airstrike campaign on Iran, killing supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

Hours before Trump’s address, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian asked the American people whether the conflict was truly putting “America First,” accusing Washington of war crimes and of being influenced by Israel.

In an open letter posted on social media, he also said ordinary Americans were not Iran’s enemy, “even in the face of repeated foreign interventions and pressures.”

– Passover –

Tehran announced Wednesday evening another barrage of missile and drone attacks targeting Israel and US bases in the Gulf, striking Israeli cities including Tel Aviv and Eilat as well as US military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait.

Israel’s military said early Thursday its air defences were operating to intercept the incoming fire.

As Israel prepared for the Passover holiday, which began at sunset Wednesday, air-raid sirens sounded repeatedly in the Tel Aviv area.

Emergency services said an Iranian missile attack Wednesday morning wounded 14 people, including an 11-year-old girl.

The Revolutionary Guards also confirmed hitting an oil tanker in the Gulf they said belonged to Israel; a British maritime security agency said the vessel was struck off Qatar, reporting damage but no casualties.

– ‘Cruel and ruthless’ –

An AFP journalist reported huge explosions in Tehran on Wednesday afternoon and earlier strikes near the former US embassy.

Iranian media said an airport in Isfahan province and steel complexes elsewhere in the country had been damaged.

Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei — not seen publicly since his father was killed in an airstrike on the war’s first day — said “the cruel and ruthless American and Zionist enemy knows no human, moral or vital limits.”

Thousands of Iranians gathered in Tehran for the funeral of the Guards’ naval commander, killed in an Israeli airstrike. “We will resist until the end,” said Moussa Nowruzi, a 57-year-old mourner.

In Lebanon, seven people were killed in strikes around south Beirut, with the Israeli military saying it had struck a senior Hezbollah commander.

Lebanon’s health ministry said Israeli attacks had killed more than 1,300 people in the country since war erupted between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah on March 2.

Across the Gulf, strikes caused a large fire at Kuwait’s international airport, Bahrain reported a blaze at a business facility, and Saudi Arabia said several drones were intercepted. A Bangladeshi national was killed by shrapnel from an intercepted drone in the United Arab Emirates.