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"Israelis had located a meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and planned to strike it to kill the heads of the three branches of power, then assassinate the Supreme Leader to finish off Iran altogether, but that didn't happen," said Ali Khamenei's advisor Ali Larijani in a televised interview on Sunday.
The United States intercepted private communications between senior Iranian officials discussing the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, in which the officials said the attacks were less damaging than expected, The Washington Post reported, citing four people familiar with classified intelligence circulating within the US government.
In the exchanges, Iranian officials speculated on why the strikes ordered by President Donald Trump were not as extensive or destructive as they had anticipated, the report added citing the unnamed sources.
The Trump administration did not dispute the existence of the intercepted messages but firmly rejected the Iranian assessment, casting doubt on Tehran’s ability to evaluate the level of destruction at the three targeted nuclear facilities.
“It’s shameful that The Washington Post is helping people commit felonies by publishing out-of-context leaks,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense. Their nuclear weapons program is over.”
"The US president exaggerated what happened in an unusual way, revealing that he needed to do so," reads a new post on the X account of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
"Anyone hearing those remarks could sense that behind the surface, there was another reality. They failed to achieve anything and are exaggerating in order to cover up and conceal the truth."
"On June 13 [the day when Israel attacked Iran] somebody contacted me and said you have 12 hours to leave Iran or stay away from Tehran, otherwise you’ll suffer the fate of your friends like Bagheri and Rashid and join them," said Ali Larijani, a top advisor to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
He said he “recognized from the caller ID where it was coming from and gave them the response Netanyahu deserved.”
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday he would consider lifting sanctions against Iran, including those targeting its oil exports, if the country shows it is willing to stop hostile behavior and pursue a more peaceful course.
“Sanctions cost us a lot of money but I would... start waiving them for countries like Iran, if they behave themselves, where they can sell oil and they can do the things that you want to be able to do," Trump told Fox News in an interview aired on Sunday.
Trump denied suggestions that his administration had allowed China to buy sanctioned Iranian oil, insisting that sanctions remained in place.
But he added that “if they do a job, and if they can be peaceful, and if they can show us they’re not going to do any more harm, I would take the sanctions off.”
