US President Donald Trump asserted on Wednesday that US and Iranian officials will hold talks next week, giving rise to cautious hope for longer-term peace, a day after a fragile ceasefire appeared to hold, even as Tehran insisted it will not give up its nuclear program.
Trump, who negotiated the ceasefire that took hold Tuesday on the 12th day of fighting between Israel and Iran, told reporters at the NATO summit in The Hague that he wasn’t particularly interested in restarting negotiations with Iran, insisting that US strikes had destroyed its nuclear program.
“We may sign an agreement, I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary,” Trump said. “The way I look at it, they fought, the war is done.”
However, Iran has insisted it will not give up its nuclear program, and its parliament agreed to fast-track a proposal that would effectively stop the country’s cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran also has not acknowledged any talks taking place next week, and an Iranian official questioned whether the United States could be trusted after its weekend attack on Iranian nuclear sites.
Earlier, Trump said the ceasefire was going “very well,” adding that Iran was “not going to have a bomb and they’re not going to enrich.” He said: “They had a war, they fought, and now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”
“We destroyed the nuclear,” Trump declared. “It’s blown up, to Kingdom Come, so I don’t feel strongly about it…We’re gonna meet with them actually. We’re gonna meet with them.”
“I could get a statement that they’re not going to go nuclear, we’re probably going to ask for that,” he continued. “But they’re not going to be doing it anyway. They’ve had it.”
Trump added that he asked US Secretary of State Marco Rubio if he wanted to draft an agreement for Iran to sign.
The US and Iran had engaged in several rounds of negotiations to reach an agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program, but the talks had stalled before Israel launched airstrikes on June 13, targeting Iran’s top military leaders, nuclear scientists, uranium enrichment sites and ballistic missile program.
Israel said the campaign was necessary to prevent the Islamic Republic from realizing its declared plan to destroy the Jewish state. On June 22, the US struck key Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan.
While Trump claimed that the US and Iran would return to the negotiating table, it is unclear if the meetings would return to the earlier nuclear talks or if they would center on a “comprehensive peace deal,” like White House envoy Steve Witkoff suggested earlier Wednesday.
The US “had a great victory” in Iran, Trump told the NATO conference, saying that he “dealt with” Iran and Israel by convincing the two sides to reach a ceasefire, because “they’re both tired and exhausted” from 12 days of intense fighting.
“They were both satisfied to go home and get out,” he claimed, but conceded that conflict could soon resume. “Can it start again? I guess someday, it can. It could maybe start soon.”
Iran “fought bravely,” said Trump, noting that Tehran “somewhat, not much, violated the ceasefire.”
“I don’t see them getting back involved in the nuclear business anymore,” he said.
In addition to his claims of planned talks with Iran, Trump again insisted that he had spoken “to people who have seen” the Fordo nuclear site after US struck it earlier this week, saying that “the site is obliterated.”
“You can’t get into the tunnels [of the underground site],” he said. “There’s no way you can even get down. The whole thing is collapsed and a disaster. And I think all the nuclear stuff is down there because it’s very hard to remove.”
He had earlier suggested that Israeli agents had visited the site, but Israeli officials told the Kan public broadcaster Wednesday that they were unaware of any Israeli operation at the Fordo nuclear facility after the strike.
Shas chairman Aryeh Deri, a regular observer in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet, also denied Trump’s claim, declaring that “no one has visited there.”
Trump also claimed that Iran was not able to move highly enriched uranium from key facilities before they were hit by American bombs on Sunday, despite reports that Tehran may have successfully moved the material before the strikes.
“We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move, and if you knew about that material, it’s very hard, and very dangerous to move,” he told the press. “Oh yeah, we think we got it. We think it’s covered with granite and steel.”
Trump added that he is not relying on Israeli intelligence for his assessment that Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated,” and said that the US will soon issue a report on the damage to the sites.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also pushed back on reports that Fordo may not have been as damaged as US officials have claimed, angrily saying Wednesday that the evidence regarding what is left of Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordo “is buried under a mountain, devastated and obliterated.”
“So if you want to make an assessment about what happened at Fordo, you’d better get a big shovel, and go really deep,” he fumed.
“Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded,” he argued.
Also on Wednesday, Netanyahu denied that Israel pushed the United States into joining its campaign against Iran, dismissing a Tuesday report by the Washington Post that claimed otherwise as “nonsense.”
“The Washington Post story suggesting that Israel pushed President Trump into his bold decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites is nonsense,” the official account of the premier wrote on X, adding that Trump “acted in the best interest of the USA based on the same intel we had. We are grateful to President Trump for his decisive leadership and for being a tremendous friend to Israel!”
Current and former Israeli officials told the Post that Netanyahu had issued a general order to prepare for the Iran strikes months before Trump announced that the US and Iran had agreed to hold negotiations on the latter’s nuclear program.
As part of the ongoing preparation, which began in the last year of former US President Joe Biden’s term in office, Israeli officials met with US counterparts in Washington to sway the US into joining the attack, believing this would make it a much more decisive operation, the report said.
Throughout the fall, Israelis met with Biden officials to discuss recent intelligence from both countries that showed nuclear scientists in Iran were meeting to resume theoretical research on weaponization.
However, US intelligence agencies during both the Biden and Trump administrations consistently assessed that Iran’s leadership had not decided to pursue nuclear weapons, multiple sources say in the report.
After the US joined the offensive earlier this week, Channel 12 reported that Trump’s decision came following appeals from Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who urged the president to “take part in history” by annihilating the Iranian nuclear threat.