Israel-Iran
conflict at critical juncture as Trump demands Tehran’s ‘unconditional
surrender’
US president
triggers speculation about American military involvement after five days of
Israeli bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes
Julian
Borger in Jaffa, Patrick Wintour and Peter Walker in Banff
Tue 17 Jun
2025 21.38 BST
Israel’s war
on Iran appeared to be approaching a pivotal moment on Tuesday night after five
days of bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes, as Donald Trump
demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and weighed his military
options.
Trump
convened a meeting of his national security team in the White House situation
room after a day of febrile rhetoric in which the president gave sharply
conflicting signals over whether US forces would participate directly in
Israel’s bombing campaign over Iran.
He told
journalists in the morning that he expected the Iranian nuclear programme to be
“wiped out” long before US intervention would be necessary. Later he took to
his own social media platform, Truth Social, to suggest that the US had Iran’s
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in its bomb-sights, and could make an
imminent decision to take offensive action.
“We know
exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target,
but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for
now,” Trump said. “But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American
soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.”
In a post a
few minutes later, Trump bluntly demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”.
It was not
just Trump’s all-caps threats that triggered speculation that the US might join
offensive operations. They were accompanied by the sudden forward deployment of
US military aircraft to Europe and the Middle East, amid a general consensus
that Iran’s deeply buried uranium enrichment facilities could prove impregnable
without huge bunker-busting bombs that only the US air force possesses.
“If Iran
does not back down, complete destruction of Iranian nuclear programme is on the
agenda, which Israel cannot achieve alone,” German chancellor Friedrich Merz
told ZDF television a day after meeting Trump at the G7 summit in Canada.
But France’s
president, Emmanuel Macron, urged restraint, saying: “We recognize Israel’s
right to self-defense, but we do not support actions that threaten stability in
the region. The biggest mistake that can be made today is to try to change the
regime in Iran by military means – because that would lead to chaos.”
Despite the
US military deployments and Trump’s menacing comments, the UK prime minister,
Keir Starmer, who was also at the G7 meeting, insisted the US was not about to
join the Israeli bombing campaign.
“There’s
nothing the president said that suggests that he’s about to get involved in
this conflict,” Starmer said. “On the contrary, the G7 statement was about
de-escalation ... I was sitting right next to President Trump [at the dinner],
so I’ve no doubt, in my mind, the level of agreement.”
Trump left
the Canadian summit a day early and flew back to Washington around midnight on
Monday. On the way, he told journalists he was not seeking a ceasefire in
Israel’s war on Iran but instead wanted to see a “complete give-up” by Iran, as
well as “a real end” to Iran’s nuclear programme, with Tehran abandoning its
uranium enrichment “entirely”.
The vice
president, JD Vance, also took to social media to discuss Trump’s options.
“He may
decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment. That decision
ultimately belongs to the president,” Vance wrote, before adding that “people
are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of
idiotic foreign policy”.
The US
president predicted Israel would not let up in its bombing campaign and
suggested a decisive moment in that campaign was imminent, though he made clear
he expected Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities without US help.
“You’re
going to find out over the next two days … Nobody’s slowed up so far,” he told
CBS News on the flight back to Washington, saying he was returning to the White
House to focus on the conflict.
Israel’s
justification for its shock attack on Iran was called into question on Tuesday
when CNN cited US intelligence assessments as saying that when Iran was
attacked, it had been “up to three years away from being able to produce and
deliver [a nuclear bomb] to a target of its choosing”.
The report
echoed a public assessment in March by Trump’s own director of national
intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who told Congress “Iran is not building a nuclear
weapon” and the supreme leader “has not authorised the nuclear weapons program
that he suspended in 2003”.
On Tuesday,
Trump shrugged off that assessment, siding instead with Israel’s claims that
Tehran was on the brink of making a warhead.
“I don’t
care what she said,” Trump said. “I think they were very close to having it.”
In
freewheeling remarks to reporters on Air Force One, Trump also stressed that
any Iranian attack on Americans or US bases, which Iran has threatened, would
be met with overwhelming force, saying: “We’ll come down so hard, it’d be
gloves off.”
Iran’s
foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran was open to resuming talks with the
US. “If President Trump is genuine about diplomacy and interested in stopping
this war, next steps are consequential,” he said.
Benjamin
Netanyahu was also dismissive of the idea of diplomacy. “Of course they want to
stop. They want to stop, and to keep producing the tools of death. We gave that
a chance,” the Israeli prime minister said, laying out a new, expanded set of
war aims.
“We want
three central results: eliminating the nuclear programme, eliminating the
ability to produce ballistic missiles and eliminating the axis of terror.”
He left
vague what the third war aim would entail. Later on Tuesday, his foreign
minister, Gideon Sa’ar, described it differently as a mission to “severely
damage [the Iranians’] plan to eliminate the state of Israel”.
Asked how
that would be achieved, Sa’ar told the Guardian: “We are doing that gradually.
First we cut the [tentacles] of the octopus, when we dealt with Hamas and
Hezbollah. Now we are dealing with the head of the octopus.”
“Regime
change is not an objective of this war,” the minister insisted however, during
a visit to a missile strike site in Rishon LeZion, east of Tel Aviv. He added
that regime change “may be a result, but its not an objective” of the war.
Israel’s
choice of targets has broadened over the course of the campaign, in line with
its rhetoric. In recent days it has bombed the Iranian capital, ordering the
residents of a part of northern Tehran, a third of a million people, to leave
their homes. On Tuesday night, loud blasts were reported across the city.
The Israeli
evacuation order was modelled on those routinely issued to Palestinians in
Gaza, where bombing by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has flattened entire
residential neighbourhoods over the course of a 20-month conflict.
The Israeli
ultimatum on Monday said the bombing of Tehran would be aimed at “military
infrastructure”, but one of the targets hit was a state television station,
killing three staff and ending live broadcasts. Israel has also been bombing
Iran’s oil and gas installations, and Iran has retaliated with strikes on
Haifa, damaging a power station and a refinery in the Mediterranean port.
Israeli
airstrikes killed at least 24 Iranians across the country on Tuesday morning,
bringing the toll since Friday’s surprise attack to at least 224 people dead
and more than 1,400 injured, Iran’s health ministry said. The scale of
destruction and the threats from the IDF and Trump triggered an exodus of
Tehranis, jamming the roads out of the capital overnight.
In Israel,
the death toll after four days was 24, with about 600 injured. Iran fired a
total of 20 to 30 missiles on Tuesday morning, according to the IDF, lightly
wounding five people, marking a significant drop in the tempo of its attack
compared with the previous few days.
The IDF said
Iran had used 370 missiles in eight salvoes out of a US-estimated arsenal of
3,000 ballistic missiles. The IDF further claims to have destroyed 200 of
Iran’s missile launchers, half the total.
Israel has
also struck a severe blow to Iran’s chain of command, killing at least 11 top
generals and, in some cases, their replacements. On Tuesday the IDF said it had
killed the acting armed forces commander, Maj Gen Ali Shadmani, who had been in
the post for only four days, after his predecessor was targeted in the first
wave of strikes on Friday morning.
“Iran is
completely naked and we have full freedom of action. This is an unprecedented
achievement,” an IDF general staff officer told the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
Iran
continued to threaten Israeli cities however, with its senior army commander
echoing Israeli methods by calling for the residents of Haifa and Tel Aviv to
evacuate immediately.
If those
threats prove empty and IDF claims of its dominance are borne out, it will
leave Iran with few cards to play. The Iranian parliament has prepared a bill
that would withdraw Iran from the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty, so
that it would no longer be legally bound to forgo nuclear weapons, but the
government insists it remains opposed to all weapons of mass destruction.
State TV has
also aired calls from hardline politicians suggesting that Iran block the
strategically important strait of Hormuz, potentially stopping the passage of
more than 17m barrels of oil a day and producing a dramatic spike in world oil
prices and global inflation.
On Tuesday,
the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Israeli bombing sorties
on the enrichment plant in Natanz had penetrated to its underground levels.
But, as the war enters its sixth day, the focus of key decisions in Israel and
the US is likely to be the underground facility at Fordow, near the religious
centre of Qom, which houses Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium as well
as an enrichment plant. However, Kelsey Davenport, the director for
nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said its presence was
not likely to be relevant to military calculations
“Blowing up
the stockpiles at Fordow would release a limited amount of radiation and
chemical toxicity from the UF6, but it would be confined to the site,”
Davenport said. “There may be a very slight risk that if Iran has enough 60
percent enriched uranium stored at the site, an explosion could trigger a chain
reaction. But I would be very surprised if that is the reason Fordow is not
being bombed. Israel knows it cannot destroy the site.”
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