Iran/Israel and Trump Midday 3/2/2026…The Trump Bluffing Ain’t Working….

Listing his objectives, Mr. Trump said, “We’re destroying Iran’s missile capability, and we’re doing that hourly.” He added that the strikes were “annihilating their navy” and ensuring that “this sick and sinister regime” in Tehran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon,” and that the country cannot continue to sponsor militant groups across the Middle East.

Internationally, he claimed, “Everybody was behind us, they just didn’t have the courage to say so.” He concluded the event without taking questions from reporters.

The Pentagon said on Monday that more U.S. forces were headed to the Middle East, while Mr. Trump, in separate media interviews, declined to rule out sending ground troops into Iran and said that still bigger waves of airstrikes against that country were coming.

In another sign of the widening conflict, Qatar’s ministry of defense said its air force had shot down two Su-24 bombers coming from Iran, the first report that Iran, which has fired missiles and drones at its Gulf neighbors and Israel in retaliation for the Israeli-U.S. assault, had also sent warplanes into their airspace. President Trump spoke about the war at the White House in his first public event since the strikes began.

Jake Tapper of CNN reported that Mr. Trump had told him in a phone call on Monday that the huge U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran that began early Saturday could soon intensify. “We haven’t even started hitting them hard, the big wave hasn’t even happened,” Mr. Trump said, according to CNN. “The big one is coming soon.”

And the New York Post reported that the president had said in an interview: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it.”

As U.S. and Israeli planes pounded targets in Iran for the third day, the fighting expanded into Lebanon, where the Iran-allied militia Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel, prompting Israel to bombard the militia’s strongholds outside Beirut.

Israeli fighter jets also streaked through the skies over the Iranian capital, Tehran, and Iran fired explosive drones across the Persian Gulf. Three U.S. jets were shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses in what the U.S. military called an “apparent friendly fire incident.”

The attacks have claimed hundreds of lives, at least, in Iran, rattled global markets, sent oil prices soaring and raised fears of a spiral into a wider, more intensive regional war.

Four U.S. service members have been killed so far, and “we expect to take additional losses,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference.

The president has offered conflicting visions of how the war could end and who should take over in Iran after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s autocratic supreme leader, was killed in a U.S.-Israeli attack on Saturday. Critics say the Trump administration has no clear endgame.

Iran’s leaders remained defiant. The country’s top security official, Ali Larijani, denied news reports that Iran’s new leaders were seeking to negotiate with Washington, denouncing Mr. Trump for “delusional fantasies” and for plunging the Middle East “into chaos.” Iran, he said in a string of fiery social media posts, “has prepared itself for a long war.”

Here’s what we’re covering:

• Iran: The Israeli military said it was bombarding sites in Tehran and across the country, with little apparent resistance from Iran’s air defenses. The U.S. and Israel have struck more than 2,000 targets in Iran since Saturday, military officials said.

• Persian Gulf: Attacks affected oil and gas facilities in Saudi Arabia, where a small fire broke out at a refinery after drones targeting the facility were intercepted, and in Qatar, where unspecified “military attacks” on two facilities prompted the state-owned petroleum company to stop production of liquefied natural gas, the authorities in those countries said. Iranian missiles and drone attacks also led to explosions in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and other countries where the U.S. has military bases.

• Lebanon: Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets at Israel overnight on Monday as a fragile yearlong truce between the sides collapsed in the wake of Mr. Khamenei’s killing. Israel subsequently launched waves of airstrikes around the capital of Beirut and across Lebanon.

• Israel: Israelis repeatedly sought shelter as the country’s air defenses have repelled most of the attacks from Iran, though a direct hit on Sunday killed at least nine people in Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem.

• Cyprus: The Mediterranean island nation’s president said that an Iranian drone had crashed into a British air base there. The incident risked dragging Britain deeper into a conflict that Prime Minister Keir Starmer has sought to maintain distance from. Read more ›

• Economic fallout: Oil and natural gas markets remained highly volatile as the fighting shut down shipping routes and damaged oil and gas facilities. Naval traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for one-fifth of the world’s oil supply, has shut down, according to shipping companies and Iranian media….

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