The White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt says Iran must accept the reality that it has been defeated, adding that Tehran should not “miscalculate again”
If Tehran fails to accept defeat, she added, the US will hit them harder.
When asked about potential candidates to lead Iran, Leavitt said President Trump would be looking for someone who no longer "chants Death to the United States."
A mass text message sent to mobile users in Iran promoted what it described as an “international campaign to reward the assassination of Trump,” according to screenshots of the message shared with Iran International.
The message urges recipients to register their support through a website and to confirm participation by sending a number via SMS. It also directs users to further information on the domestic platform Rubika.
The text included a link to the campaign's website that could not be accessed from outside Iran.
Tehran-based Didban Iran reported that the campaign has gained around 290,000 supporters, with total pledged amounts reaching $25 million.
The website says that these sums have not been collected and instead represent pledged amounts, according to the report.
A statement on the site said the campaign was launched following what it described as a jihad fatwa issued in response to the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, and that it aimed to fund a reward for the assassin of US President Donald Trump.
From the vantage of the region’s coastal states, where these waters have long mirrored both promise and peril, the current chorus of criticism directed at the United States–Israeli campaign against Iran strikes a discordant note.
“No imminent threat,” declare the sceptics. “An illegal war,” they insist. Such phrases betray a profound misunderstanding of history and responsibility. They treat sovereignty as a shield for aggression and “imminence” as a stopwatch that only starts once the warhead is in flight. We in the region’s Arab states—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman—ought to know better. We have lived with the Iranian threat for forty-seven years.
Since the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic has pursued a doctrine of exportable upheaval with methodical persistence. It has armed, trained and directed a transnational network of proxies that stretches from the Levant to the Horn of Africa, from the streets of Baghdad to the tri-border region of South America, and onward into Asia.
Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the various militias of Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi, and a constellation of smaller but lethal affiliates have served not as rogue actors but as calibrated instruments of Tehran’s will.
These groups have sown chaos on a truly global scale: the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 304 people—including 241 American servicemen and 58 French paratroopers—in the deadliest terrorist attack on Americans until 9/11; the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 truck-bomb attack on the AMIA Jewish community centre, which together claimed more than 114 lives in Argentina’s deadliest terrorist outrage; the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American airmen; the supply of explosively formed penetrators that killed and maimed hundreds of U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq after 2003; the 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in Washington; the 2019 Aramco strikes; and the relentless campaigns against international shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman.
These are not isolated incidents but chapters in a single, uninterrupted strategy of regional domination and global subversion.
Qassem Soleimani, slain Quds Force commander and architect of the “Axis of Resistance,” openly boasted of this empire. In a message to his American counterpart he declared: “Dear General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.” That assertion, with the regime’s repeated claims of commanding an “Axis of Resistance” spanning multiple Arab capitals, reveals Tehran’s long-standing ambition for hegemony across the region and into the eastern Mediterranean.
To dismiss this record as lacking “imminence” misunderstands the concept in the nuclear age. A responsible leader does not wait until the missile is on the launch pad and the warhead mated. As former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett observed in his recent interview with Christiane Amanpour, “responsible leaders… if you wait for the threat to be imminent, it is too late.”
Ethically, this position is anchored in the just war tradition. As Michael Walzer demonstrates in his seminal work Just and Unjust Wars, states—like individuals—have the moral right to defend themselves against violence that is imminent but not yet actual. “For aggression often begins without shots being fired or borders crossed. Both individuals and states can rightfully defend themselves against violence that is imminent but not actual.” Waiting for the first blow when an adversary possesses both declared intent and advancing nuclear capability is not moral prudence; it is moral abdication.
Iran possesses both the technical capability—advanced uranium enrichment, ballistic-missile production lines, and a clandestine weapons programme long documented by the IAEA—and the explicit intent, voiced repeatedly by its supreme leader and Revolutionary Guard commanders. Add to this an extensive missile arsenal capable of reaching every capital of the surrounding region and beyond, and the calculus changes. Imminence, in the nuclear age, is not a matter of hours but of irreversible momentum.
Nor is the charge of illegality sustainable. Critics invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter, which authorises self-defence “if an armed attack occurs.” Yet the Charter itself describes this right as “inherent,” a pre-existing principle of international law that has always encompassed anticipatory action when the necessity is clear and the danger existential.
The classic precedent remains the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba to prevent Soviet nuclear missiles from becoming operational—acting before any launch, not after. No credible legal authority has ever branded that decisive intervention unlawful. The same logic governs here. Iran’s decades-long pattern of armed attacks, direct and by proxy, combined with its nuclear advances, satisfies every test of necessity and proportionality under international law.
General Jim Mattis, in his Firing Line interview, dismantled the illegality argument with the clarity of a commander who confronted this threat for decades: one could “probably never make a charge that this is an illegal war” given Iran’s long pattern of direct and proxy assaults on its neighbours, on American forces and on allied interests across the region.
These are not hypothetical grievances; they are a documented record of aggression that previous administrations, through sanctions that proved porous and diplomacy that proved naïve, allowed to fester. The result was not peace but emboldenment.
We in the region did not seek this war, nor did we initiate it. For years we counselled against military confrontation, exercising a restraint that has exceeded even our critics’ expectations. We did so not from illusion but from a pragmatic assessment of the risks: the sudden collapse of the current theocracy, absent any ready alternative, could plunge Iran into civil war, unleashing waves of refugees, radicalism and instability across our borders. Its ballistic-missile arsenal and deeply entrenched proxy networks might fracture into even more dangerous splinter groups, turning a contained threat into a hydra of uncontrolled violence.
Today, we absorb provocations — drone swarms, missile barrages, economic sabotage — against a history of flagrant aggression that had justified retaliation long ago. Yet we are pursuing every diplomatic channel precisely to avert such chaos.
Nonetheless, let there be no mistake: when the Islamic Republic turned its weapons directly and unprovoked against neighbouring territory, our shipping lanes and our citizens, the calculus shifted. Unlimited restraint is no longer prudence; lest it be confused with surrender. The gloves have come off because the alternative — endless appeasement of an aggressor that has already crossed every red line — poses the greater peril.
The campaign now under way is neither precipitous nor unlawful. It is the overdue correction of a strategic imbalance that earlier hesitancy only worsened. It is unfashionable, in some quarters, to acknowledge that President Trump has done what multiple preceding administrations—Republican and Democrat alike—would not or could not. Decades of half-measures allowed Iran’s nuclear programme to advance, its proxy empire to entrench itself, and its ideology of resistance to metastasise.
The cost has been borne disproportionately by the peoples of the region, by the Lebanese and Yemenis caught in proxy crossfire, and by Israelis living under the perpetual shadow of annihilation. To pretend otherwise is to rewrite history in real time.
The states of the region stand ready, as always, for a stable and prosperous Middle East free of hegemonic ambition. We seek no wider conflagration. But we will not feign blindness to the threat that has defined our security landscape for nearly half a century.
True legality and true responsibility lie not in waiting for the perfect casus belli to arrive gift-wrapped in a mushroom cloud, but in acting when the evidence of capability, intent and historical conduct is overwhelming. Iran’s revolution exported war; the present campaign seeks, at long last, to contain it. The states of the region understand this. The world ought to listen.
Iran could open a new front in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait if attacks are carried out on its territory or islands, IRGC-affiliated Tasnim reported, citing an unnamed military source.
“If the Americans intend to take action regarding the Strait of Hormuz, they should be careful not to add another strait to their challenges ... Iran is fully prepared to escalate the situation,” Tasnim quoted the source as saying.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis had previously attacked ships near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday named veteran French diplomat Jean Arnault as his personal envoy on the conflict in the Middle East.
"It is time to stop climbing the escalation ladder – and start climbing the diplomatic ladder," he said.
Guterres said initiatives for dialogue and peace were underway and warned that prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz was choking movement of oil, gas and fertilizer.
"My message to the United States and Israel is that it is high time to end the war," he said.
"My message to Iran is to stop attacking their neighbors," he added.
Jazeera Airways shifted operations to Saudi Arabia’s Al Qaisumah airport on March 11 after Kuwait closed its airspace due to the Iran crisis, the airline’s CEO said on Wednesday.
The CEO said the airline is flying to seven countries from Saudi Arabia and there is no indication when Kuwait’s airspace will reopen.
He added that the airline has spread its 23-aircraft fleet across different locations to minimize risks, with some units still in Kuwait.