US President Donald Trump says the US has a plan to blow up every bridge and every power plant in Iran within four hours tomorrow night if Tehran does not capitulate to his demands.
“We have a plan… where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again, I mean, complete demolition, by 12 o’clock, and it will happen over a period of four hours if we want that to happen,” he says.
“We don’t want that,” he adds, noting that the US may end up helping Iran rebuild, in which case, he would not want to have to reconstruct expensive infrastructure like that.
He says Iran did not take him seriously before, leading him to order the demolition of Tehran’s largest bridge last week within minutes of talks falling apart.
“Do I want to destroy their infrastructure? No. It would take them 100 years to rebuild,” he says.
“If we left today, it would take them 20 years to rebuild their country… and the only way they’re going to be able to rebuild their country is to utilize the genius of the United States of America,” he claims.
Asked whether he would accept Iran charging toll in the Strait of Hormuz after Tehran reopens the channel, Trump suggests the US could be the one charging such tolls.
“Why shouldn’t we? We’re the winner. We won. They are militarily defeated,” he says.
He later appears to back off the idea.
“We have to have a deal that’s acceptable to me, and part of the deal is going to be that we want free traffic of oil and everything else,” he says.
Trump: Israel would have been destroyed if 2015 nuclear deal remained
US President Donald Trump says he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel would have been destroyed had he not pulled out of former president Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal.
“I told this to Bibi Netanyahu yesterday,” he says at the White House.
Trump also repeats his bewilderment with the majority of Jews who vote for Democratic politicians.
“How Israel can vote for a Democrat — if you’re Jewish in New York City or any place else in this country, how you can vote for a Democrat is unbelievable because (Obama) chose Iran,” Trump says.
The president attacks the Kurds when asked if he would like them to get involved in the war.
“I’d rather have them stay away because I think they bring with them some problems and some difficulty… They bring death… to themselves,” he responds.
Earlier, he suggested that the Kurds held onto guns given to them by the US, which were intended for use by protesters in Iran. He did not provide evidence for that claim.
In shift, Trump says reopening Hormuz a ‘very big priority’
US President Donald Trump says reopening the Strait of Hormuz is a “very big priority,” adding that it does not take much for Iran to be able to obstruct traffic in the channel.
In the past, Trump has indicated that the reopening of the strait is not a necessity for US interests and that other countries can go in “and just take the oil.”
Asked to explain his seemingly contradictory messaging from the past several days in which he has both said the war is coming to an end and has threatened to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, Trump says it “depends” on what Iran does.
He recalls his Tuesday night ultimatum for Iran to accept a deal to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a deadline that he has already pushed off twice.
“They asked for an extension of seven days. I said, ‘Give them 10 days,'” Trump recalls. He would go on to push it off by an additional 24 hours on Sunday.
“I thought it was inappropriate [to attack] the day after Easter. I want to be a nice person. They have until tomorrow. Now we’ll see what happens,” Trump adds.
IDF says planes struck key IRGC sites, including facility linked to suppressing civilians
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