Iran official disputes Trump nuclear pledge claim - CNBC

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he expected regime change in Iran because the country's current leadership had been "enormously" weakened, but said he could not predict when that would happen.

"You can’t quite predict when a regime like that goes under," Netanyahu said in an interview with CNBC. "You didn’t predict it in a number of cases: Not in Romania, and not in the fall of the Berlin Wall, and nobody predicted it, but it happened. Why? Because the cracks were propagating underneath."

"In fact, you have enormous cracks right now in Iran, and you can’t predict when it’ll happen," he said.

"But I said yesterday in a public forum here ... 'Look, I believe that ultimately these cracks will propagate and the regime will fall, and we’ll do our best,'" Netanyahu added.

"I think that we have to help the Iranian people to bring down this regime, and that hasn’t changed, but it’s not going to happen, you know, exactly at the moment of our choosing," he said.

"I think they’ve been enormously weakened," Netanyahu added.

Iran's Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of Hassan Mosallavi (Torfi), a 38-year-old political prisoner, on charges of "waging war against God" and "membership in Arab groups opposed to the Islamic Republic," Karun Human Rights Organization reported.

The rights group said the ruling was communicated to Mosallavi, in recent days at Sheiban Prison in Ahvaz, in southwestern Iran.

Mosallavi was arrested by security forces in 2022 and sentenced to death in absentia in August 2023 by Mehran Mehmannavaz, head of Branch 1 of the Mahshahr Revolutionary Court, the report said.

He had previously been arrested in 2019 along with several Arab cultural activists and spent more than 10 months in detention, the group added.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview with CNBC that Israel and US forces were ready if needed in Iran.

Netanyahu said he would leave it to US President Donald Trump to decide whether military escalation was needed.

He said opening the Strait of Hormuz was possible militarily and that Trump was weighing many options.

Netanyahu added that he and Trump speak once every two day.

A group of Iranian lawmakers called for the range of Iran's missiles to be increased to reach the White House, in a letter to Mojtaba Khamenei calling for "revenge for the blood" of Iran's former supreme leader Ali Khamenei and commanders of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

"We will support our military forces and defense industries until the day the range of our missiles reaches the office of Khamenei's killers," the lawmakers said in the statement.

The signatory lawmakers also called for the status of the Strait of Hormuz to become irreversible from its pre-war condition, the rejection of any negotiations over nuclear capabilities, full compensation for the material and moral damages of the war, the withdrawal of US forces from the region and punishment of the "aggressors in such a way that the possibility of repeated attacks is eliminated."

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) condemned what it called Iran's "ongoing aggression" against member states Kuwait and Bahrain, saying attacks on civilian objects amounted to a "dangerous and unprecedented escalation."

Jasem Mohamed Albudaiwi, the GCC secretary-general, said the attacks "reflect the Iranian regime's insistence on pursuing rejected hostile policies targeting the security, stability and sovereignty" of GCC member states.