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US President Donald Trump said Iran was on the backfoot in its four-day-old war with Israel and that Tehran needed to quickly resort to diplomacy.
“Iran is not winning this war," Trump said at the G7 summit in Alberta on Monday. “They should talk — and they should do it immediately,” he warned.
Tehran had fallen afoul of a two-month deadline he had set for them making concessions on their nuclear program in talks, he added. “They had 60 days and on the 61st day we didn’t have a deal.”
Iran is now pushing for renewed negotiations, Trump said.
Asked what would prompt direct US military involvement, Trump refused to elaborate: “I don’t want to talk about that.”
But his support for Israel was unequivocal. “We’ve always supported Israel,” he said. “Israel is doing very well right now.”
The comments came as the war entered a dangerous new phase, with both sides stepping up deadly attacks and Israel targeting Iran's state broadcasting headquarters.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told ABC News that assassinating Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “is not going to escalate the conflict, it’s going to end the conflict.”
Despite the rhetoric, there are signs of diplomatic maneuvering. According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran has conveyed to Arab intermediaries that it is willing to resume nuclear negotiations—on condition that the US does not join Israel in further strikes.
“Iran has told Arab officials they would be open to returning to the negotiating table as long as the US doesn’t join the attack,” the officials said, according to the newspaper.
Messages relayed to Israel warned “it is in the interest of both sides to keep the violence contained.”
Iran, according to a Reuters report, has asked Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman to urge Trump to pressure Israel into a ceasefire, offering concessions on the nuclear file in return.
Israel's Haifa-based Bazan Group says damage from Iranian attack resulted in death of three company employees.
Israel's leadership had braced for around 5,000 civilian deaths in an all-out war with Iran but has found its foe unable to wreak serious damage, former senior intelligence officer Miri Eisin told Iran International.
Israel's leadership had braced for around 5,000 civilian deaths in an all-out war with Iran but has found its foe unable to wreak serious damage, former senior intelligence officer Miri Eisin told Iran International.
"If you put aside the human story, in general, life totally exists here, you can go out, there is food in the stores," said Eisin, a senior fellow at the International Institute for counter-terrorism and a retired colonel of the Israeli Defense Forces. Nobody is happy but the stress has not brought panic. That’s amazing in itself.”
Still, Iran’s retaliatory attacks are far heavier than the two last year when Iran first launched direct attacks on Israel, with missile payloads ranging from 500kg to a ton, says Eisin, who served as the first female Deputy Head of the Combat Intelligence Corps.
“We had estimated 5,000 deaths - we expected more barrages - and the risk of Hezbollah and the Houthis joining in simultaneously,” Eisin said, while as of Monday, the government cited just 24 fatalities.
“We do a guesstimate of what they can do based on worst case scenarios and expecting that the system is overwhelmed. You have to have the estimates as the hospital needs to be ready."
“Right now Iran has fired 370 missiles and 30 got through. If it hits urban areas you see the devastation there, but Israel continues to intercept more than 90% with its air defense systems which is amazing,"
The Israeli military on Monday said it had destroyed one third of Iran’s surface-to-surface missile launchers.
Delayed response
Israel’s strategy to create havoc among Iran’s command and control personnel was key to Israel's strategy, she said, a move which takes 12-15 hours to recover from.
In the first wave of attacks on Friday morning, Israel killed the senior leaders of Iran's military and struck at air defenses, missile sites and two nuclear facilities.
“I was expecting an immediate Iranian response and the lack of that is because we took out all that hierarchy and it takes several hours to get that back, hence the response was only from around 9pm and onwards,” she said.
The attacks from Iran have predominantly hit civilian targets, all the 24 deaths so far in heavily populated urban centers. Rescue service Magen David Adom said that it has dealt with a total of 708 casualties as of Monday.
Eisin said that like in Syria, many of Iran’s military and nuclear sites are deep underground and buried in urban areas, meaning that in spite of Israel sending warnings, there will also be a human toll on the Iranian side.
Multiple neighborhoods of Tehran have seen an exodus since Friday after massive strikes across the capital and Iran's health ministry said 224 Iranians have been killed since Friday, and more than 1200 injured - 90% civilians.
Israel's campaign focused on it's nemesis's nuclear program, Eisin said, and the surprise attack aimed to pave the way for Iran to make concessions in a negotiated settlement.
“The end game here is nuclear and the diplomatic channels for that are already working,” she said.
Iran has named Iman Tajik, a Revolutionary Guard colonel, as the spokesman for Operation True Promise 3, the public relations department of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said.
