Iran vows tough response to any attack, while Trump says he would ‘knock them out’ if nuclear work resumes

Tehran, Iran — Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Tuesday promised a tough response to any attack, appearing to respond to a warning issued the day before by President Trump about Iran’s alleged attempts to rebuild its nuclear program.

“The response of the Islamic Republic of Iran to any cruel aggression will be harsh and discouraging,” Pezeshkian said in a social media post.

Pezeshkian did not provide further details, but his statement came a day after Mr. Trump suggested that the United States could carry out new military strikes if Iran tried to reconstitute its nuclear program.

Mr. Trump made the comment during a wide-ranging talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the American leader’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“Now I hear that Iran is trying to rebuild itself,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference with Netanyahu after their meeting. “And if they are, we’ll have to knock them down. We’ll knock them down. We’ll knock them out. But I hope that doesn’t happen.”

The two leaders discussed the possibility of renewed military action against Tehran months after a 12-day air war in June that killed nearly 1,100 Iranians, including top military commanders and scientists. Iran’s retaliatory missile barrage killed 28 people in Israel.

Mr Trump has repeatedly declared “total annihilation” of Iran’s nuclear program after three sites were bombed in a covert US-led attack in June, but questions were raised on the extent of the damage caused. A initial classified assessment determined that the strikes set back Tehran’s nuclear program by months, while Mr. Trump said it was a setback “basically decades.”

Some Democratic lawmakers, after a confidential briefing on the strikes, argued that Mr. Trump had misled the American people about the level of success achieved.

Mr. Trump suggested Monday that he could order a new U.S. strike against Iran if he considers it necessary.

“If this is confirmed, they know the consequences, and they will be very powerful, perhaps more powerful than last time,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump said he had heard that Iran was rebuilding its capabilities after his closed-door meeting Monday with Netanyahu, who has for decades pressured successive U.S. administrations to take a tougher line on Iran.

“Netanyahu remains focused on reducing Iran’s threats to Israel, which he has done for his nearly 30 years in power,” Samantha Vinograd, a CBS News national security contributor and former senior homeland security official in the Obama administration, said Tuesday.

But Vinograd added that “the United States and Israel may have different intelligence assessments of Iran’s intentions and its capabilities.”

She said the summer’s U.S. strikes – known as Operation Midnight Hammer – “did damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities, but Iran retains highly enriched uranium that could be used to make a bomb.”

Vinograd said, however, that the most immediate threat posed by Iran — not only to Israel but also to U.S. forces in the region — may well be its massive stockpile of conventional ballistic missiles, not its massive stockpile of conventional ballistic missiles. potential to try to build a viable nuclear weapon.

“Iran has more ballistic missiles than any other country in the region except Israel, and this is truly its leverage when it comes to wreaking havoc in the region, both against targets in Israel, against U.S. troops abroad, through proxies and more.”

“There appears to be some sort of intelligence gap between what the United States thinks Iran is doing and is capable of doing, and what Israeli intelligence is saying on these fronts.”

Pezeshkian said Saturday that tensions between the two sides had already risen again, saying: “We are in a full-scale war with the United States, Israel and Europe; they do not want our country to remain stable.”

Iran has insisted it is no longer enriching uranium at any site in the country, trying to signal to the West that it remains open to possible negotiations over its atomic program.

U.S. intelligence agencies and the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that Iran last had an organized nuclear weapons program in 2003, although Tehran has continued to enrich uranium to 60 percent, which is a small technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.