US President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t turn the war in Iran into a nuclear conflict but threatened, “The clock is ticking” for Tehran to make a peace deal with Washington as a third American aircraft carrier arrived in the Middle East. The warning came as Iranian media reported blasts over Tehran, a first since an increasingly tenuous ceasefire came into effect two weeks ago.
The cause of the blast is still unknown. However, Israeli sources told news agency AFP that their country was not currently striking Iran.
Trump’s Threat
Talking to reporters in the White House, Trump said he has no plans of deploying nuclear arms but maintained that the Islamic Republic was already “decimated” through conventional means.
“Why would I use a nuclear weapon? We’ve totally, in a very conventional way, decimated them without it,” he said.
“No, I wouldn’t use it. A nuclear weapon should never be allowed to be used by anybody.”
Trump, meanwhile, ordered the US Navy to destroy any Iranian boat caught laying mines in Hormuz.
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Later, he posted on his Truth Social platform that the ‘clock was ticking’ for Iran to make a deal.
“I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t — The clock is ticking!” Trump said, adding that Iran’s military was destroyed and “their leaders are no longer with us, the Blockade is airtight and strong and, from there, it only gets worse.”
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US-Iran Standoff
Prospective peace talks between Iran and the US, set to be held in Pakistan, are hanging in the balance, with no sign of a return to diplomacy to end a standoff in the Strait of Hormuz. Since Trump indefinitely extended the ceasefire, both Washington and Tehran have shifted their focus to the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas exports ordinarily flow. Iran has, in effect, closed it in retaliation for the war.
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US’ Third Aircraft Carrier In Gulf
The USS George HW Bush aircraft carrier has arrived in the Middle East, bringing the number of massive American warships operating in the region to three. “A second carrier was operating in the Red Sea on Thursday, while a third is also in the region,” US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a post on X.
Earlier, US forces boarded a vessel in the Indian Ocean that was transporting oil from Iran, and a senior Iranian official said Tehran had banked its first proceeds from the tolls it exacts on shipping through the strait.
Trump had said he “ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be… that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz”.