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Trump says when to end war will be ‘mutual’ decision with Netanyahu – report
Donald Trump has said a decision on when to end the war with Iran will be a “mutual” one he’ll make together with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Times of Israel has reported.
It said Trump also claimed in a brief telephone interview on Sunday that Iran would have destroyed Israel if he and Netanyahu had not been around. The US president said:
double quotation markIran was going to destroy Israel and everything else around it … We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel.
The report said Trump was asked whether he alone would decide when the war with Iran ends or if Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, would also have a say. Trump responded:
double quotation markI think it’s mutual … a little bit. We’ve been talking. I’ll make a decision at the right time, but everything’s going to be taken into account.
The report said that when Trump was asked whether Israel could continue the war against Iran even after the US decided to halt its strikes, he said he declined to entertain the possibility before adding: “I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.”
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Callum Jones
After crossing $100 per barrel for the first time in four years, global oil prices are still rising.
A short time ago Brent crude, the international benchmark, was 23.1% higher, at $114.13 per barrel. The West Texas Intermediate benchmark price of US crude was up 23.5% at $112.26 per barrel.
Donald Trump insisted overnight that this extraordinary spike was a “short term” effect of the US-Israel war on Iran. Over the weekend his energy secretary, Chris Wright, also predicted the disruption would not last long, telling CNN: “In the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months thing.”
Such statements appear to have fallen on deaf ears.
Stock markets across Asia remain under pressure – Japan’s Nikkei 225 is down 7%, South Korea’s Kospi is down 7.3% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index is down 2.6% – as Australia’s ASX 200 endures its worst day in almost a year.
We have a while to wait before Wall Street opens for trading, but pre-market trading data currently puts the Dow Jones industrial average and the benchmark S&P 500 on course to open deep in the red.
Read more from my colleague Jillian Ambrose:
Updated at 23.37 EDT
Iranian attack injures 32 in Bahrain, it says, amid fresh strikes on Gulf states
More on Bahrain now: the country said on Monday that an Iranian drone attack on the island of Sitra injured 32 people overnight, as Gulf nations reported new attacks with Tehran pressing its retaliatory strikes across the region.
All of the wounded were Bahraini citizens and there were four “serious cases”, including children, the health ministry said in a statement carried by the state news agency.
The wounded included a 17-year-old girl who suffered severe head and eye injuries, and a two-month-old baby, according to the ministry.
The report from Agence-France Presse said several explosions were also heard on Monday in the Qatari capital of Doha, while Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait all reported new attacks.
Smoke rises from a building on fire in Kuwait City on Sunday after a reported drone attack. Photograph: Social Media/Reuters
Qatar’s defence ministry said on Monday that its forces had intercepted a missile attack.
Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry said the kingdom intercepted and destroyed two drones heading towards the Shaybah oil field in the country’s south-east.
Kuwait’s defence ministry said the country’s air defences were working to intercept a missile and drone attack on Monday.
Updated at 23.12 EDT
Rocket and drone attacks have targeted a US diplomatic facility near Baghdad international airport and been intercepted by defence systems, police sources are being quoted as saying.
ShareWho is Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei?
The man who has been chosen as the successor to Iran’s slain supreme leader is a 56-year-old cleric who has never held elected office or formally occupied a senior position in the Iranian government.
Mojtaba Khamenei has spent much of his life at the centre of Iranian power while mainly staying out of public view.
Khamenei is the second son of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the clerical body responsible for selecting Iran’s highest authority announced the decision on Sunday, calling on Iranians to rally behind him and preserve national unity.
But Donald Trump had already said Khamenei would be an “unacceptable” choice, while Israel warned it would also pursue Iran’s next supreme leader.
Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of Iran’s late supreme leader, has been named his successor and is shown in a image from video provided by Iranian state TV.
Photograph: AP
Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969 in the north-eastern Iranian city of Mashhad and was raised within the political and clerical world that emerged after the 1979 revolution.
As the Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo has also written:
double quotation markAs a young man he studied theology in the seminaries of Qom and reportedly took part in the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war.
Unlike many figures in Iran’s leadership, Khamenei never pursued elected office or a prominent government role. Instead, he gradually became an influential presence inside his father’s office, where he was widely seen as part of a small circle managing political access to the supreme leader.
Over the years he cultivated close relationships with conservative clerics and elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
His name surfaced publicly during the disputed 2009 presidential election, when reformist figures accused him of playing a role in supporting the security crackdown that followed mass protests. But he has never discussed the issue of succession publicly.
Updated at 23.16 EDT
An Iranian drone attack that targeted the Bahrain island of Sitra overnight has wounded 32 civilians, the country’s health ministry is being quoted as saying.
The wounded were all Bahrain citizens and there were four serious cases, including children, the ministry said in a statement reported by the state news agency.
Updated at 23.07 EDT
Australian shares plunge as oil price spike sparks global inflation fears
Jonathan Barrett
The Australian share market plunged on Monday, wiping about $13obn from the value of the ASX midway through the trading session, after a sharp rise in oil prices caused by the Middle East conflict sparked concerns of a breakout in global inflation.
The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 was down 4% in lunchtime trading to dive below the 8,500 point mark, marking the single biggest one-day drop since the announcement of Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs last year.
The selldown is linked to disrupted oil supplies, the single biggest contributor to global inflation, which make almost all goods and services more expensive, from petrol and groceries to utilities and travel.
Global oil prices surged past $US100 a barrel shortly before the Australian share market opened for the week, spooking investors.
Updated at 23.49 EDT
A loud explosion was heard in Beirut’s southern suburbs a short while ago.
Plumes of smoke were seen rising from the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs after the blast was heard, a journalist with Agence-France-Presse reported.
The area – a Hezbollah stronghold whose residents the Israeli military ordered to evacuate – has been pounded by Israel over the past week but had not suffered any strikes since Saturday.
The Israel military is reportedly saying it has begun a wave of attacks in central Iran, and that it has also struck Hezbollah targets in Beirut.
We’ll bring you more on this shortly.
ShareOpening summary
Hello and welcome to our continuing live coverage of the war on Iran.
Here are the main developments:
Iran has named Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s new supreme leader after the killing of his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes, state-run media announced. He was selected by Iran’s Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of elected senior clerics tasked with choosing the supreme leader.
Donald Trump warned that Iran’s new leader “is not going to last long” if the Iranians do not get his approval first for the theocratic posting. “He’s going to have to get approval from us,” the president told ABC News. “If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it.”
The Iran war has driven the price of crude oil above $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022.
Trump brushed aside concerns about the surging price of oil caused by the US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, even as the price of crude topped $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022. “Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace,” Trump wrote, adding all in capitals that “only fools would think differently”.
Another US military service member has died from wounds sustained during Iran’s initial counter-attack a week ago, bringing the number of US troops killed in action so far in the war with Iran to seven, the US military said on Sunday.
Lebanon’s health ministry said the number of people killed from Israeli airstrikes in the past week had increased to 394, including many women and children.
Rescue workers search for victims at a destroyed building hit by an Israeli airstrike in Ghaziyeh town, south Lebanon, on Sunday. Photograph: Mohammed Zaatari/AP
The Iranian army said on Sunday that at least 104 people were killed and 32 were wounded in an attack by the US on an Iranian warship off Sri Lanka’s coast last week.
The Israel Defense Forces began “extensive strikes” against the “infrastructure” of the Iranian regime in Tehran and across other areas in Iran. Despite Israel saying it is striking military or “terror” targets in its war on Iran, many civilians have been killed in its attacks.
Overnight strikes by the US and Israel hit five oil sites around Tehran, according to an Iran official. The official said the five facilities “were damaged” but the “fire was brought under control”. “If you can tolerate oil at more than $200 per barrel, continue this game,” a spokesperson for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Sunday.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said the US-Israeli aerial bombardment of Iranian energy infrastructure sites marked a “dangerous new phase” of the conflict and amounted to a war crime.
Updated at 22.06 EDT