U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday he’s “not at all” concerned about committing possible war crimes as he again threatened to destroy Iran’s bridges and power plants if Tehran does not meet his Tuesday 8 p.m. ET deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, the president refused to say whether any civilian targets would be off-limits.
Iran on Monday rejected a 45-day ceasefire proposal and said it wants a permanent
end to the conflict.
“We only accept an end of the war with guarantees that we won’t be attacked again,” Mojtaba Ferdousi Pour, head of the Iranian diplomatic mission in Cairo, told The Associated Press.
Israel and the United States carried out a wave of attacks on Iran on Monday, killing more than 25 people. Iran responded with missile fire on Israel and its Gulf Arab neighbors.
Here is the latest:
As reporters spoke on air, Channel 13 TV’s evening newscast showed a large digital clock marking down the hours and minutes until Tuesday night’s deadline.
The president continued to grumble about NATO allies’ refusal to get involved in reopening the Strait of Hormuz and their hesitance to assist U.S. offensive operations against Iran.
But as he wrapped up his lengthy news conference Monday, he also fumed about the lack of support from Pacific allies.
“You know who else didn’t help us? South Korea didn’t help us,” Trump said. “You know who else didn’t help us? Australia didn’t help us. You know who else didn’t help us? Japan. We’ve got 50,000 soldiers in Japan to protect them from North Korea. We have 45,000 soldiers in South Korea to protect us from Kim Jong Un, who I get along with very well.”
The president described the consequences that Iran would face if it didn’t reach a deal with the U.S. by Trump’s 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline.
“We have a plan, because of the power of our military, where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night,” Trump said during his Monday news conference.
Power plants in Iran, he continued, would be “burning, exploding and never to be used again.”
Trump refused to say whether any civilian targets would be off limits in the U.S. response.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned the U.S. that attacking civilian infrastructure is banned under international law, his spokesman said Monday.
“Even if specific civilian infrastructure were to qualify as a military objective,” spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, an attack would still be prohibited if it risks “excessive incidental civilian harm.”
A court would need to decide whether such attacks were war crimes, he said.
Trump says he’s “not at all” concerned about committing war crimes as he continues to threaten the destruction of Iran’s bridges and power plants if they don’t meet a Tuesday evening deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“I hope I don’t have to do it,” Trump added.
The military’s chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, says the army’s chief has approved battle plans for the next three weeks in the absence of a ceasefire.
“Every day that passes, we hit them more and more. Already we have very good achievements, and we want to reach excellent achievements,” he told a press conference Monday.
The Israeli and Greek defense ministries signed the four-year export agreement Monday in Athens, said a statement from Israel’s defense ministry.
The system, called PULS (Precise & Universal Launching System), is built to launch rockets of different ranges, the statement said.
Israeli defense giant Elbit Systems will supply the rocket launchers and the warheads to Greece. Greek defense industries are expected to produce some parts of the system.
Trump said the F-15E fighter jet that set off a two-day search-and-rescue operation was downed by a shoulder-launched rocket.
Trump described the weapon as a “hand-held shoulder missile— heat-seeking missile.”
The president went on to suggest that the fighter jet was ultimately downed not by the explosion but because of related damage to the aircraft’s engines.
“They shot it and it got sucked in right by the engine,” Trump said.
Asked why Iranians would want him to follow up on his threat to blow up the country’s infrastructure, Trump says everyday citizens are “willing to suffer ... in order to have freedom.”
“‘Please keep bombing. Do it,’” Trump claimed U.S. officials have heard Iranians say via “intercepts.”
“And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding,” he said.
He added, “And when we leave and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, ‘Please come back, come back, come back.’”
The president made the disclosure in response to a reporter’s question.
“Not everybody was on board,” Trump said. He continued: “There were military people that said, ‘You just don’t do this.’”
Referring to Hegseth and Caine, Trump made sure to clarify: “These two were totally on board.”
A U.S. aircraft that crashed amid the search for the downed airmen was hit by enemy fire while engaging Iranian forces, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday.
Caine, speaking at a briefing at the White House, said that a U.S. A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft was “violently suppressing and engaging the enemy in a close-in gun fight to keep them away” from the pilot of a downed F-15 fighter jet while also being “primarily responsible for communicating with the downed pilot.”
Caine said that after being hit, “this pilot continued to fight, continued the mission, and then upon exit, flew his aircraft into another country and determined that the airplane was not landable.”
The pilot then decided to eject over friendly territory and, according to Caine, “was quickly and safely recovered, and is doing fine.”
The defense secretary said the coordination call held by national security officials during the daring mission to rescue the U.S. airmen lasted nearly two days straight.
“For 45 hours and 56 minutes, we held that call open for coordination,” Hegseth said, describing the call that was held in a secure facility. “Our mission was unblinking.”
Hegseth continued, “The meeting never stopped. The planning never ceased.”
Speaking at a White House press conference, Ratcliffe said the agency used “exquisite technologies that no other intelligence service” possesses to locate the aviator after the F-15 was shot down in Iran.
At the same time, the CIA mounted a deception operation to mislead the Iranians who were looking.
Ratcliffe said the search and rescue operation was “comparable to hunting for a single grain of sand in the middle of a desert.”
The CIA declined to respond to questions Monday about the kind of technology used to locate the airman.
The Defense secretary, who has frequently infused his leadership of the Pentagon with references to Christianity and the language of his faith, said the airman who evaded capture for more than a day was shot down on Good Friday, “hidden in a cave” on Saturday, and on Easter Sunday, “a pilot reborn, all home and accounted for.”
Hegseth said that when the airman was finally able to activate an emergency transponder, his first transmitted message was: “God is good.”
Trump threatened to jail the journalist who first reported that U.S. forces were searching for an F-15 weapons officer shot down in Iran, if they don’t reveal their sources.
“The person that did the story will go to jail if he doesn’t say, and that doesn’t last long,” Trump said.
Trump didn’t name the journalist or news organization. He said the leak tipped off the Iranians, endangering the officer and his rescuers. He called the leaker “a sick person.”
Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei expressed condolences over the killing of the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence chief.
In a written social media post, Khamenei said Maj. Gen. Majid Khademi joined a “steadfast line of warriors and fighters” to sacrifice their lives. Israeli strikes have killed dozens of top Iranian leaders, including Khamenei’s father.
The younger Khamenei has not been seen or spoken in public since he succeeded his father as supreme leader.
The president described the scale of the operation undertaken by the U.S. to rescue the second airman from the downed aircraft — which included 155 aircraft.
More specifically, it included four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, and 13 rescue aircraft, among others, Trump said.
Much of it was an effort to throw off the Iranians, who were also looking for the missing crew member, the president said.
“We were bringing them all over and a lot of it was subterfuge,” Trump said. “We wanted to have them think he was in a different location.”
Trump says the downed weapons officer followed his training to get as far away from the crash site as possible.
When a plane crashes in hostile territory, “they all head right to that site, you want to be as far away as you can,” Trump said.
Trump says the officer was “bleeding profusely” but was able climb mountainous terrain and contact U.S. forces to communicate his location. Rescuers mobilized a massive response that included subterfuge to confuse the Iranians about where they were looking.
The president began describing the rescue efforts from Friday and over the weekend after two airmen ejected and landed alive “deep in enemy territory” in Iran.
Trump said 21 aircraft were deployed to help with the search and rescue in the first wave, flying for hours under “very, very heavy enemy fire.” He said the U.S. has one helicopter with many bullets in it.
The U.S. president made his way to the briefing room lectern shortly before 1:10 p.m.
He is accompanied by his top national security advisers, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and special envoy Steve Witkoff. Also in attendance are his children, Eric and Tiffany Trump, as well as their spouses.
Declaring that “this was one of our better Easters,” Trump started his news conference by speaking about the dramatic rescue of two U.S. airmen in Iran over the weekend.
In a surreal scene on the White House lawn with flowers and Easter décor, Trump decided to give reporters an update on the Iran war.
With children waiting nearby, someone in a bunny costume steps away, and soft, cheerful music in the background, the president spoke about the rescue of a missing airman shot down in Iran, defended his expletive-laden threats on social media, and warned that Iran should capitulate or face threats to its bridges and power plants.
“We are striving to seize any chance, however small, for hostilities to cease and negotiations to open,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised address following a Cabinet meeting. He did not provide details.
Erdogan, a vocal critic of Israel, again accused the country of undermining all attempts to stop the fighting.
The president used not-suitable-for-work language in a Sunday social media posting warning Iran he was serious about targeting the country’s infrastructure if it doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by his Tuesday deadline. He ended the short post by saying, “Praise be to Allah.”
Asked by a reporter about his salty language, Trump responded he used it “only to make my point.”
Trump added about his use of an expletive, “I think you’ve heard it before.”
Trump appeared to confirm that the U.S. had intended to arm Iranian protesters after mass demonstrations against the government broke out throughout Iran in late 2025 and continued early into this year.
Thousands of anti-government protesters were killed during the crackdowns by government forces. Fox News reported on Sunday that Trump had told the network’s Trey Yingst in a telephone interview that Kurdish groups who were supposed to be delivering the U.S.-provided weapons held on to them.
“They were supposed to go to the people so they could fight back against these thugs,” Trump told reporters on Monday about the weapons intended for protesters. “You know what happened? The people that they sent them to kept them because they said, ‘What a beautiful gun. I think I’ll keep it.’ So, I’m very upset with a certain group of people and they’re going to pay a big price for that.”
President Trump said that he’d prefer to use U.S. military power to take control of Iran’s vast oil reserves, but acknowledged there’s not much appetite for such a move among the American electorate.
“Take the oil because it’s there for the taking,” Trump said. “There’s not a thing they can do about it. Unfortunately, the American people would like to see us come home. If it were up to me, I’d take the oil. I’d keep the oil. I would make plenty of money.”
Shortly after state media reported Iran had rejected a ceasefire proposal, Trump offered a new harsh warning to Iran.
“They just don’t want to say ‘uncle,‘” Trump told reporters as he and first lady Melania Trump hosted the White House Easter Egg Roll. “They don’t want to cry as the expression goes ‘uncle,’ but they will. And if they don’t, They’ll have no bridges. They’ll have no power plants. They’ll have no anything.”
He added another ominous warning, “I won’t go further because there are other things that are worse than those two.”
“We are still talking to both sides,” he says, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door diplomacy.
He said Monday’s strike on an Iranian petrochemical facility is part of a systematic campaign aimed at destroying the Guard’s “money machine.”
“We are destroying factories, we are eliminating activists and we continue to eliminate senior figures,” he said in a videotaped statement.
Netanyahu said he also spoke to President Trump about the U.S. rescue of two downed crew members in Iran. He said the president thanked Israel for assisting in the mission.
A resident of Tehran in his early twenties says U.S.-Israeli strikes on civilian infrastructure and Trump’s intensifying threats have “terrified” people.
“Everyone is very anxious and scared that the water, power and gas will be cut,” he said, speaking anonymously for his security.
The student first spoke with The Associated Press on the eve of the war, when he participated in anti-government protests at his Tehran university’s campus. At the time, he described heated disagreements with friends who said they hoped a threatened Israeli-U.S. attack would overthrow the Islamic Republic.
“Those who were supporting the war are no longer supporting it,” he said Monday.
Sunday, he heard the sound of “a lot of explosions” around the city from his home in the Sattar Khan area. He said he’d turned to taking sleeping pills to get through nightly bombardments.
— Amir-Hussein Radjy in Cairo
Beth Hammack, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press that if inflation remains persistently above the Fed’s 2% target, the central bank should consider lifting its benchmark interest rate.
While Hammack also said the Fed might have to cut its rate if higher gas prices caused the economy to slow and unemployment to rise, a potential rate hike is a noticeable shift for the Fed from before the Iran war, when officials forecast two rate cuts this year. A hike could lift longer-term interest rates for things like mortgages and auto loans.
“My baseline is that we’re on hold for quite some time,” Hammack said, “but I can foresee scenarios where we would need to reduce rates ... if the labor market deteriorates significantly. Or I could see where we might need to raise rates if inflation stays persistently above our target.”
The Iran-backed Houthis said they launched a barrage of cruise missiles and drones at several military sites in southern Israel, “successfully achieving its objectives,” according to the group’s military spokesperson.
Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, the military spokesperson for the Houthis, said in a statement Monday that the missiles were launched as part of a joint operation with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian praised Maj. Gen. Majid Khademi, intelligence chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, according to Iran’s state media.
Iran’s media reported Pezeshkian lauded Khademi’s intelligence role and security efforts “against all kinds of conspiracies of enemies.”
“His martyrdom speaks to the fact that the security and independence of Islamic Iran is indebted to the sacrifice and selflessness of the brave sons who, in the most difficult circumstances, work tirelessly for the honor and peace of this land,” he said.
The agency said it had has conveyed its response to the U.S. through Pakistan, a key mediator.
“We won’t merely accept a ceasefire,” Mojtaba Ferdousi Pour, head of the Iranian diplomatic mission in Cairo, told The Associated Press on Monday. “We only accept an end of the war with guarantees that we won’t be attacked again.”
The response came ahead of a deadline by President Trump to begin bombing Iranian energy and infrastructure.
Israel’s ministry of defense said Monday that the country’s defense industries would “significantly increase” production and stockpiling of missile interceptors as the war with Iran stretches on.
In a statement, the ministry said production of missile interceptors for the Arrow system, which defends against long-range ballistic missiles, would be sped up. Arrow has been critical in Israeli air defense during the current war, throughout which Israeli authorities have maintained there’s no shortage of interceptor missiles.
Samir Geagea, who leads the Lebanese Forces political party, made the remarks in statement after an Israeli strike hit an apartment building in the town of Ain Saadeh late Sunday, killing a party official, his wife and a woman visiting them.
The strike heightened existing tensions between host communities and more than a million displaced Lebanese, largely Shia from southern Lebanon, deeply divided over Hezbollah and their position on the war.
“Taking responsibility from the outset would have been better for everyone,” he said, talking about the Lebanese security agencies’ sluggish disarmament process of Hezbollah.
The military says the strikes hit dozens of helicopters and aircraft it said belonged to the Iranian Air Force. It said the strikes targeted Bahram airport, Mehrabad airport and Azmayesh airport.
A resident of central Tehran has described living with “anxiety and fear” as U.S.-Israeli strikes pummel the capital.
“Constantly, there is the sound of bombs, air defenses, drones,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity for her safety.
At least one strike hit near her home, waking her on Wednesday, she said. Rushing into the neighboring street, she saw it “filled with people in pajamas, some of them wrapped in blankets, some of them crying with fear.”
She also described her anger at the popular satellite channel, Iran International, which is based abroad. She said its coverage had amplified exiled Iranian voices supporting strikes on the Islamic Republic. “Some people thought war might bring good things, but war doesn’t bring anything but destruction and bloodshed.”
Iranian authorities have moved to ban any contact with several Persian-language satellite channels based abroad. Many viewers inside Iran say the frequencies are often disrupted.
— Amir-Hussein Radjy
The U.S. stock market is making only hesitant moves, while oil prices are unsettled as mediators try to forge a ceasefire agreement ahead of a deadline President Trump has set to bomb Iranian power plants.
The S&P 500 rose 0.1% in early trading Monday. The index is coming off its first winning week in the last six. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 107 points, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.4%.
Oil prices flipped between gains and losses as uncertainty continued about what will happen in the war with Iran and how long it will slow the flow of oil and natural gas.
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In a statement released Monday, Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, raised alarm about destruction of civilian infrastructure and nuclear facilities in the Iran war.
“Across the Middle East, our teams are seeing the destruction of infrastructure essential for civilian life,” including hospitals, schools, power plants, water systems and more, Spoljaric wrote.
“Most alarming are potential threats to nuclear facilities. Any miscalculation can cause irreversible consequences for generations to come.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, held a telephone conversation Monday, during which they discussed “the state of the war” and other developments, a Turkish official said. The official provided the information on condition of anonymity in line with government rules and did not elaborate.
The call came as two Middle East officials said mediators from Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey sent Washington and Tehran a proposal calling for a 45‑day ceasefire and for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
— Suzan Fraser
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, has told journalists in Tehran that messages are being exchanged, but “negotiations are entirely incompatible with ultimatums, crimes and threats of war crimes.”
It comes after Israel’s military said Iran had launched missiles toward the country.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee wrote in a social media post on Monday that Israel’s military and Mossad secret service had assisted in the U.S. effort to rescue an airman whose plane was downed by Iran.
Huckabee thanked Israel for helping the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in the post to X.
Israeli officials have said Israel provided support, including intelligence, in the rescue, but troops weren’t actively involved on the ground.
A former Iranian foreign minister and adviser to the supreme leader called for Arab countries to discourage U.S. President Donald Trump from striking Iran’s power plants.
Ali Akbar Velayati warned the entire region would go “dark” if Trump fulfilled his threat and bombed Iran’s power plants.
“The rulers of #Arab_countries should, in order to prevent the region from going dark, make Trump understand that the #Persian_Gulf is not a place for gambling,” he wrote on social media.
