JERUSALEM: US President Donald Trump said Friday (Jun 20) that Iran had a “maximum” of two weeks to avoid possible American air strikes, as Israel claimed it has already set back Iran’s presumed nuclear programme by at least two years.
“I’m giving them a period of time, and I would say two weeks would be the maximum,” Trump told reporters when asked if he could decide to strike Iran before that.
He added that the aim was to “see whether or not people come to their senses.”
Trump’s latest comments indicated he could take a decision before the fortnight deadline he set a day earlier, as he dismissed European efforts to end the conflict and said it would be “very hard” to ask Israel to cease its attacks.
“Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this,” he said.
A series of blasts were heard in Tehran on Friday as Israel kept up the massive wave of strikes it says is aimed at stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons – an ambition Tehran has denied.
“According to the assessment we hear, we already delayed for at least two or three years the possibility for them to have a nuclear bomb,” Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar said in an interview published on Saturday.
Saar also said Israel’s week-long onslaught will continue. “We will do everything that we can do there in order to remove this threat,” he told German newspaper Bild.
“We already achieved a lot, but we will do whatever we can do. We will not stop until we will do everything that we can do there in order to remove this threat.”
As Trump mulls the prospect of joining the war on Israel’s side, top diplomats from Britain, France and Germany met their Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi in Geneva and urged him to resume talks with the US that had been derailed by Israel’s attacks.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said: “We invited the Iranian minister to consider negotiations with all sides, including the United States, without awaiting the cessation of strikes, which we also hope for.”
But Araghchi told NBC News after the meeting that “we’re not prepared to negotiate with them (the United States) anymore, as long as the aggression continues.”
Trump also said he was unlikely to ask Israel to stop its attacks to get Iran back to the table.
“If somebody’s winning, it’s a little bit harder to do,” he said.
Any US involvement would likely feature powerful bunker-busting bombs that no other country possesses to destroy an underground uranium enrichment facility in Fordo.
On the streets of Tehran, many shops were closed and normally busting markets largely abandoned on Friday.
