President Trump on Monday 6 April escalated his threats to devastate Iran if it does not agree to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by his Tuesday night deadline, even as he again floated the possibility that there could be a diplomatic resolution to the war.
“We have a plan, because of the power of our military, where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” Mr. Trump said at a White House news conference. If the attacks take place, he added, “It will take them 100 years to rebuild.”
Mr. Trump also gave a laudatory depiction of the rescue of a missing American airman shot down over Iran. The mission involved 155 aircraft and hundreds of people, he said, though “a lot of it was subterfuge” designed to lead Iranian forces away from the aviator. He also revealed that the plane, a U.S. Air Force F-15E, had been downed by a single shoulder-fired missile.
His remarks to reporters came after Iran delivered a new 10-point peace proposal dotted with conditions that American representatives have already rejected as unacceptable. The full contents of the Iranian plan were not made public, but diplomatic efforts have yielded little so far, despite Mr. Trump’s repeated claims of progress.
“We have to have a deal that’s acceptable to me,” Mr. Trump said of the Iranian plan, which was made through Pakistani mediators, adding, “and part of that deal’s going to be we want free traffic of oil, and everything else.”
Later he said, “I can tell you that we have an active, willing participant on the other side. They would like to make a deal.”
He has threatened repeatedly to bombard critical Iranian infrastructure, like power plants and bridges, setting deadlines for opening the strait, and then repeatedly postponing them. On Sunday, he pushed back the deadline by a day, to Tuesday evening in the United States. Analysts say that without tangible progress toward peace, the postponements risk eroding the power of his warnings.
Iran’s response:
Iran said on Monday that it would retaliate forcefully if President Trump carried out his threatened attacks, which would affect millions of civilians, in what many legal experts argue could be considered war crimes under international law. “If attacks on civilian targets are repeated, the subsequent phases of our offensive and retaliatory operations will be carried out much more crushingly and extensively,” Ebrahim Zolfaghari, an Iranian military spokesman, said on Monday.
University bombed: Overnight airstrikes hit Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran’s top science, engineering and math institute, prompting outraged responses from Iranians, including opponents of the regime. The university is under Western sanctions for ties to the Iranian military and agencies that develop weapons systems.
Rescued airmen: The two U.S. airmen who were rescued after being shot down over Iran were receiving care at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a military hospital in Germany, a U.S. military official said.
Attacks across the Middle East: Israel said it had bombed a major Iranian petrochemical complex on Monday, just days after it struck a similar site — part of an avowed goal to destroy factories that fill Iran’s coffers. Another Israeli strike overnight killed Majid Khademi, the intelligence chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Iran fired volleys of missiles at its neighbors and at Israel, where rescue workers retrieved the bodies of four people killed by a missile strike in Haifa, according to the Israeli authorities.
