President Donald Trump warned that the United States is "not finished" attacking Iran as strikes continued, with Tehran broadening its offensive against Gulf states after its Houthi allies threatened to blockade Saudi ports. Two weeks after fighting resumed between the decades-old foes, Trump said Iran would need more than 20 years to recover from the damage inflicted in the Middle East war. "If we left right now, it would take Iran 20, 25 years to rebuild," he said. "We're not finished at all...we're not leaving right now."
The US military said it had completed an eleventh consecutive night of strikes against Iran, targeting military infrastructure to "further degrade Iran's ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz." Trump also said the next US military target could be an underground complex known as Pickaxe Mountain, a subterranean nuclear site near Natanz where Western intelligence suspects Iran is building an undeclared enrichment facility. "We'll be hitting that area pretty soon, and very heavily," Trump said, adding that he would not normally announce targets but "there's not a thing they can do about it".
Iran threatened reprisal, with the Khatam Al-Anbiya military command saying it would "consider it as an expansion of war in the region" if such an attack were carried out, threatening strikes on "all the interests of America, the allies and supporters", according to state-run broadcaster IRIB. Bahrain said it intercepted Iranian attacks as sirens sounded repeatedly, while Kuwait and Jordan said they had intercepted drone and missile strikes. Kuwait's army said Wednesday morning its air defences were engaging with drone attacks from Iran.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards confirmed a strike on Jordan, saying they had targeted a "complex housing US terrorist forces in the region of Rukban". The Iranian army had earlier said it targeted US assets in Kuwait and Bahrain, including air defence systems, radar installations and administrative buildings. "With this radar sweep, the enemy should prepare for even more decisive and powerful waves of drone and missile attacks," the Guards said in a statement carried by state news agency IRNA.
Trump said he would "take care of" Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels if they followed through on a threat Monday to blockade Saudi Arabia's ports. "If something like that happens, we take care of it," Trump said. "We've done that with the Houthis before, and we haven't heard from them in a while since we did what we did originally." Saudi Arabia strongly condemned the threat from what it called the "terrorist Houthi militia". It remains unclear how the Houthis would enforce such a blockade. But maritime intelligence provider Vanguard Tech said a Singapore-flagged tanker and a Liberia-flagged tanker both "reversed course" in the Red Sea after loading crude at the Saudi port of Yanbu.
