President Trump announced during the NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday that the United States expects to carry out another strike on Iran overnight, in the latest sign that the ceasefire between Washington and Tehran has effectively collapsed.
"We'll probably hit them again tonight with heavy force," Trump told NATO leaders. He struck an aggressive tone toward Iran throughout the day, saying "the Iranians are scum, nobody likes them, we hit them hard tonight." He added that the United States had "wasted enough time, the ceasefire is over."
Trump laid out what he said triggered the latest American military response. "We told them go take care of your funeral business, and instead they started firing rockets at ships yesterday," he said, describing the strength of the American response as unusually severe. "We hit them very hard last night, very hard, I'd say twenty to one, twenty times harder."
At the same time, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps released footage of missile and drone launches toward American bases in the Gulf, a response to the American strikes on Iranian targets. The move came alongside unprecedented threats from senior figures in Tehran. Kayhan, the newspaper widely seen as the regime's mouthpiece, ran a banner headline reading "I Want Trump's Head," with its editor, Hossein Shariatmadari, calling for Iran to officially declare Trump and his associates marked for death and demanding a formal bounty be placed on the American president, claiming more than 100 million dollars has already been raised for that purpose. Mohsen Rezaei, an adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader, said avenging both Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now part of the Iranian revolution's stated goals.
