Katz says Israel could strike Iran again if necessary
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Wednesday said Israel had twice carried out “proactive preemptive attacks” against Iran and would strike a third time if necessary.
“We crushed the nuclear program it was advancing and removed an existential threat from over the citizens of Israel,” Katz said.
“We thwarted its leaders, headed by (former Supreme Leader Ali) Khamenei, who led the plan to destroy Israel,” he added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that Israel would "remain in the protective strip in southern Lebanon for as long as necessary."
Netanyahu called Lebanon a “beautiful and miserable country” that was “being captured by a fanatical sect,” referring to Hezbollah.
He added that Israel would “do everything” to eventually reach a peace agreement with Lebanon.
White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said negotiations with Iran were continuing toward a final deal to eliminate its nuclear capabilities, but warned that the United States would respond if Tehran fired on American forces.
“Either way, we have paved the way for denuclearization of Iran,” Kelly told Fox News on Wednesday. “Their ballistic missiles, again, are destroyed. Their military capabilities are totally demolished. And now those negotiations continue towards a final deal. So either way, the United States is safer and wins.”
“But the president's been clear. If they shoot at us, we'll shoot back,” she said. “But he feels like the United States and Iran have a good opportunity to make a deal that would eliminate their nuclear capabilities.”
Iran’s agriculture minister said the Islamic Republic could increase agricultural trade with US companies if they offered favorable terms, adding there was no obligation to buy from them.
Gholamreza Nouri Qezeljeh told the Student News Network (SNN) that some agricultural contracts under the previous administration were signed with US companies and paid for using Tehran's blocked funds tied to sanctions.
He said Iran would source needed goods from elsewhere if prices offered by US companies were not suitable.
Since becoming Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei has repeatedly used ba’sat, a term rooted in divine mission, to cast Iranians not just as citizens but as a force tasked with carrying forward the Islamic Republic’s project at home and beyond.
Around 20 messages and written statements have been issued in Mojtaba Khamenei’s name since the Assembly of Experts named him Iran’s new Supreme Leader on March 8.
Some have been routine: condolences, formal greetings and remarks for official occasions. But at least half go further, offering an early view of his political and ideological vocabulary.
They cover a wide range of subjects, from the army, parliament and the Persian language to Hajj, Shiite’s anniversary of Eid al-Ghadir, the Persian Gulf, the US-Iran memorandum of understanding and the so-called Axis of Resistance.
Read together, one word stands out: ba’sat (be’that).
In Islamic tradition, ba’sat refers to being chosen and sent on a divine mission. It is most closely associated with prophethood: the moment a prophet is commissioned to carry a message and fulfill a sacred duty.
In Mojtaba Khamenei’s messages, however, the word is not used only as a religious expression. It becomes a political language for describing the role of the people.
A sacred word enters politics
Mojtaba Khamenei has used ba’sat in several forms: the ba’sat of the Iranian nation, the ba’sat of the people, the ba’sat of artists, a mission-bearing nation and even a commissioned Islamic ummah.
The ummah, in Islamic political language, refers to the wider Muslim community beyond national borders.
In this framework, Iranians are not presented merely as citizens of a country, voters in a political system or supporters of the Islamic Republic.
They are described as bearers of a historical mission. That is where ba’sat becomes politically important.
It casts the people as the human force of a larger ideological project, rather than simply as a society expected to support the government.
The first clear example appeared in Mojtaba Khamenei’s Hajj message in late May.
He wrote that after the killing of Ali Khamenei, the Iranian nation experienced a divine ba’sat and astonished the world by appearing wherever its presence was needed.
The more revealing line came later. Following the ba’sat of the Iranian nation and the Axis of Resistance, he wrote, the ba’sat of the Islamic ummah would follow.
In a single sequence, he linked the Iranian people, Tehran’s regional network of allied forces and the wider Muslim world.
The message was not only that Iranians had awakened. It was that they had been assigned a role in a project extending beyond Iran’s borders.
People or a mission-bearing nation?
The same pattern appears in other messages. In a statement marking Ferdowsi Day, artists were asked to carry out their own ba’sat in continuation of the people’s ba’sat, and to record the story of this uprising for history.
In a message marking the start of the third year of the 12th parliament, the legislature was told to bring itself into line with a mission-bearing nation.
The chain is revealing.
The mission begins with the people, moves into culture and art, enters formal institutions such as parliament, and is then projected outward toward the Islamic ummah and the Axis of Resistance.
This is not just ceremonial language. In Mojtaba Khamenei’s early vocabulary, the people are not treated simply as a source of legitimacy or as a crowd mobilized for elections, funerals and rallies.
They are framed as a force expected to move the system forward.
That role is tied to resistance against the United States and Israel, support for Tehran’s regional allies, and the claim that Iran is helping shape a new regional and global order.
People inside an old project
This language also connects Mojtaba Khamenei to one of Ali Khamenei’s central ideological themes.
For years, the former Supreme Leader spoke of a five-stage process leading to a new Islamic civilization.
In that theory, the Islamic Revolution was only the beginning.
It was to be followed by an Islamic system, an Islamic government, an Islamic society and, finally, a new Islamic civilization.
Institutions alone were never enough for that project. The theory required society itself to be transformed, with people seeing themselves not merely as subjects of a government but as participants in a long ideological struggle.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s use of ba’sat appears to supply that missing human engine.
If Ali Khamenei’s five-stage theory was the roadmap, ba’sat is Mojtaba Khamenei’s way of describing the people expected to carry it forward.
The Iranian nation becomes mission-bearing. Artists must narrate that mission. Parliament must adjust itself to it. The Axis of Resistance gives it regional depth. And the Islamic ummah gives it a transnational horizon.
Resistance remains central
This is why ba’sat matters beyond the number of times it appears.
Terms such as resistance, America, Israel and the Iranian nation have long been central to the Islamic Republic’s political vocabulary.
Ba’sat does something more specific. It redefines the relationship between people and power.
In this view, people are not only expected to obey, vote, mourn, rally or endure.
They are said to have been commissioned into a larger project, one that links domestic loyalty to regional confrontation and an imagined future order.
In Mojtaba Khamenei’s first message after becoming Supreme Leader, he described the Axis of Resistance as an inseparable part of the values of the Islamic Revolution.
In later messages, he returned to Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Yemen.
After the US-Iran memorandum, he said he had initially opposed the agreement but allowed its implementation because the president and the Supreme National Security Council had pledged to protect both the rights of the Iranian nation and those of the Axis of Resistance.
In his Persian Gulf message, he linked the policy of resistance and a strong Iran to the beginning of a new regional and global order.
Mojtaba Khamenei is not abandoning the ideological architecture of his predecessor. He is recasting it in a new vocabulary, with the people placed more explicitly at the center of the mission.
If this reading is correct, ba’sat is more than a religious flourish.
It may be the connecting term between the second and third leaders of the Islamic Republic: a word that preserves Ali Khamenei’s project of a new Islamic civilization while giving Mojtaba Khamenei a language of his own.
The result is not an ideological break. It is an effort to continue the same project with a sharper definition of the people’s role in it: not simply as supporters of the Islamic Republic, but as a people told they have been given a mission.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) warned airlines to continue avoiding airspace over Iran, Iraq and Lebanon and to exercise caution over the rest of the Middle East, citing uncertainty over the longer-term durability of the US-Iran ceasefire.
In a bulletin, EASA said “the sustainability of the ceasefire remains uncertain in the longer term, with a possibility of rapid escalation.”
The agency extended its recommendation until July 8, after previously extending it to July 1.