Washington: US President Donald Trump has warned that a “whole civilisation will die tonight” but said Iran still has time to capitulate ahead of a deadline set for 8 p.m. in Washington.
The American leader issued the stark threat Tuesday, about 12 hours ahead of his deadline for Iran to agree to a deal that includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz or face punishing strikes.
Iran rejected a 45-day ceasefire proposal and said it wants a permanent end to the war as Trump’s ultimatum to make a deal ticked closer with an expanded threat of strikes against the Islamic Republic to include all power plants and bridges.
Trump said Monday he is “not at all” concerned about committing possible war crimes as he again threatened to destroy Iranian infrastructure if Tehran does not meet his deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned the US that attacking civilian infrastructure is banned under international law, his spokesperson said Monday.
US Vice President JD Vance says he’s confident Iran will respond to US demands by evening deadline
“I hope they’re smart,” he said. Speaking during a news conference in Hungary’s capital Budapest, Vance said the United States had already defeated Iran’s militarily and that Iran was now “trying to exact as much economic pain on the world as possible” by keeping the Straight of Hormuz closed.
The US, he said, “has the ability to extract much greater economic cost on Iran than Iran has an ability to extract cost on us or on our friends in the world”.
“We feel confident that we can get a response, whether it is positive or negative, by 8 o’clock tonight,” he said referring to the 8 p.m. ET deadline set by President Trump.
US again strikes Kharg Island, a critical oil hub for Iran
That’s according to a White House official who wasn’t authorised to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The US hit military targets on the island, the official said Tuesday. The strikes came hours ahead of a deadline Trump set for Iran to capitulate to his demands or face a major attack. He said Tuesday morning that “whole civilisation will die tonight” if Iran did not make a deal.
Trump has threatened to deploy ground troops to seize critical oil infrastructure on the island, but experts warn such an operation would cost the lives of many US military members and would not be a decisive move to ending the war.
The US had earlier in the war struck several targets on the island, including air defences, a radar site, an airport and a hovercraft base, according to satellite analysis by the Institute for the Study of War and American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.
Earlier Tuesday, the semiofficial Mehr news agency put out a report saying there had been several explosions on Kharg Island, without elaborating.
Strikes on Iran’s railroads threaten to disrupt travel out of the country
Since the war shut Iran’s air travel, trains, along with buses and rented taxis, have ferried thousands of Iranians toward the Turkish border, carrying to safety those who’ve chosen to wait out the war abroad.
Passenger trains were booked through this week, one Tehran resident told The Associated Press shortly after he crossed into Turkey at the end of March.
Speaking anonymously for his security, he said he had rented a taxi to travel roughly 545 miles (880 kilometers) west to the border. He planned on returning to Iran after a few months.
Earlier Tuesday, Israel’s military warned Iranians not to use train travel “for the sake of your security”.
Israel’s foreign ministry condemned the attack on its consulate in Istanbul
And the foreign ministry said it appreciated the action of Turkish security forces to combat it.
“Terror will not deter us,” the ministry wrote on X.
President Trump warns a whole civilisation could die but adds Iran still has time to capitulate
The American leader issued the stark threat Tuesday, about 12 hours ahead of his deadline for Iran to agree to a deal that includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz or face punishing strikes.
Trump wrote on his social media site: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
He added: “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
But Trump’s statement nonetheless kept the possibility of an off-ramp open, saying that “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen.”
Missile strikes UAE telecommunications building, injuring two
A telecommunications building in the United Arab Emirates was struck Tuesday by an Iranian ballistic missile, injuring two people, authorities said.
The missile hit an administrative building for the Thuraya Telecommunications Company in Sharjah, the medical office said.
The two Pakistani nationals injured in the strike were taken to a hospital, the office said.
Bridges struck by airstrikes in Iran
Iranian authorities said Tuesday that a series of airstrikes took out a railway bridge in Kashan, a train station in Mashhad and highway bridge near Tabriz on Tabriz-Tehran freeway.
Neither the United States nor Israel immediately claimed the attacks.
Tehran resident fears Iran will be destroyed’ by US infrastructure attacks
A northern Tehran resident says friends and family are storing water and charging phones over fears the US will take out Iran’s energy infrastructure.
“By attacking infrastructure, the Islamic Republic will not be destroyed, only we will be destroyed,” the resident told The Associated Press, speaking anonymously for her safety.
The teacher in her 20s spoke to the AP in the weeks before the war when Iranians were reeling from the killing of thousands of anti-government protesters.
Many opponents of Iran’s government hoped a threatened US-Israeli strike would quickly overthrow it, she said.
“Like the people who were desperate and were afraid of people getting killed again, I believed Trump’s words. I thought that he would kill a few leaders of the regime and the work of this regime would be finished,” she said Tuesday.
Now she fears US and Israeli attacks will spread chaos: “If we don’t have the internet, and if we don’t have electricity, water, and gas, we’re really going back to the Stone Age, as Trump said.”
Iran’s internet remains largely blocked, throttling news as panic spreads that critical infrastructure will be destroyed in the next 24 hours.
Iranians express fears, hopes ahead of US deadline
Ahead of US President Donald Trump’s Strait of Hormuz deadline, Iranians have expressed both their hopes and fears about the war.
“I had expected Trump would offer us something fancier than hell,” said Mahmoud Azimi, 35, who was carrying home milk and a sack of potatoes. “We have experienced an inferno because of many bad things like sanctions, assassinations and wars. So, at the end, hell is being replaced by hell!”
Reza Alaghemand 24, who runs an ice cream stall, urged Iran to keep fighting against Israel and the US.”
“If we stop the war, they soon wage another war,” he said. “Once and for all, we should teach them an unforgettable lesson not to attack us.”
Maryam Mehrabi, a 67-year-old retiree, recounted how it was the third war she’d seen in her life.
“There was the 1980s war that Iraq waged against Iran. Then the June war that the US and Israel launched and I lost a close friend,” she said. “I have no idea what is waiting for us ahead of these threats.”
One young couple, in a coffee shop in central Tehran, offered their opinions on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
“I hate this situation. Why are officials on both sides only threatening to go into a deeper war with more damages?” the woman asked. “All night long, we hear the sound of strikes and bombings and then in the daytime, we are occasionally stopped by mushrooming checkpoints.”
Her partner shrugged.
“I feel we are stuck between the blades of a pair of scissors,” he said. “It is more than a month that we have had no internet and now we are going to face a power cut.
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