Iran’s top diplomat said there could be no negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program while Israeli bombs continue to fall, making a ceasefire in the eight-day war a condition for renewed talks with the Trump administration.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s statement came a day after President Donald Trump opened a possible two-week window for talks, turning down expectations of imminent U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
“There is no room for negotiations with the U.S. until Israeli aggression stops,” Araghchi was quoted as saying on Iranian state TV on June 20.
But the airstrikes kept coming. Israel said it hit Iranian missile facilites overnight, while an Iranian missile stuck in southern Israel. The number of casualites were unclear. Iran said June 16 that 240 people had been killed in Israeli attacks. At least 24 Israelis have been killed by Iranian fire.
Follow along with USA TODAY for live updates of the Israel-Iran crisis.
As Israel downs incoming volleys of Iranian missiles, a shortage of its missile interceptors could put both the U.S. and Israel in a bind.
After a week of aerial war with Iran, Israel’s long-range Arrow interceptors are running low, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 18. In addition to Arrow interceptors, which are Israeli-made, Israel also has U.S.-made THAAD batteries, which intercept medium-range ballistic missiles.
If the U.S. chooses to replenish Israel’s missile interceptors, it would mean drawing from other stockpiles, since Congress wouldn’t have time to surge U.S. defense production of more, according to Brandan Buck, a research fellow at the Cato Institute.
That could include siphoning off THAAD interceptors from Ukraine, those marked off to defend Taiwan, or the U.S.’s own national stock, Buck said.
“If they truly do run out… that’s going to put us in a position in which we have to make some serious decisions,” Buck said.
-Cybele Mayes-Osterman
Israel’s U.N. envoy, Danny Danon, told the Security Council his country would not stop its attacks “until Iran’s nuclear threat is dismantled.” Iran’s envoy Amir Saeid Iravani called for Security Council action and said Tehran was alarmed by reports the U.S. may join the war.
The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog used the June 20 meeting at the United Nations in New York to warn against attacks on nuclear facilities. “Armed attack on nuclear facilities… could result in radioactive releases with great consequences within and beyond the boundaries of the state which has been attacked,” International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi said.
He spoke a day after an Israeli military official said it had been “a mistake” when a spokesperson said Israel had struck Bushehr, Iran’s only nuclear power plant. Iran said on its air defences had been activated in Bushehr, without elaborating.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned the conflict could “ignite a fire no one can control” and called on all parties to “give peace a chance.” Russia and China demanded immediate de-escalation.
The White House said on Thursday President Donald Trump would decide on U.S. involvement in the conflict in the next two weeks. A three hour meeting on June 20 between European foreign ministers and Iran ended without apparent progress.
-Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was worried when asked if he was concerned the world was heading towards World War Three.
Putin, speaking at an economic forum in St Petersburg on June 20, said world conflict was growing.
He mentioned Russia’s own war in Ukraine, the conflict between Israel and Iran, and said he was concerned by what was happening around nuclear facilities in Iran where Russian specialists are building two new nuclear reactors for Tehran.
“It is disturbing. I am speaking without any irony, without any jokes. Of course, there is a lot of conflict potential, it is growing, and it is right under our noses, and it affects us directly,” said Putin.
On June 18, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure put the world “millimeters” from catastrophe.
-Reuters
Russian leader Vladimir Putin said President Trump had agreed to ensure the Israelis don’t strike the Russian-operated Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran.
On June 19, the Israeli military mistakenly announced that Bushehr, Iran’s only nuclear power plant, had been hit by an airstrike. The claim was later retracted, but it sent a wave of concern across the region. Bushehr is on Iran’s southern coast, not far from other Persian Gulf nations.
The head of Russia’s nuclear energy corporation warned an attack on Bushehr could lead to a “Chernobyl-style catastrophe.”
Russian reports on June 20 said both Trump and the Israeli government had agreed to safeguard the safety of Russian staff at Bushehr.
The 3,000 megawatt plant isn’t connected to Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Spent fuel is shipped back to Russia, making it unavailable for enrichment in Iran.
-Dan Morrison
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said a European posing as a tourist had been charged with espionage in northern Iran after they were caught with photos of sensitive military installations. The suspect wasn’t named. The report came as officials separately announced they had arrested “internal agents of the enemy,” and encouraged Iranians to watch out for spies.
The reported arrests came in the wake of a massive operation in which Israeli forces were able to knock out key parts of Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure in a surprise attack on June 13, while killing top generals and nuclear scientists in targeted strikes on their homes and other locations.
Israel spent years smuggling weapons into Iran, where it established a secret base for explosive-laden drones that later savaged Iranian targets, and positioned short-range weapons near Iranian surface-to-air missile systems, according to U.S. and Israeli media reports.
Now, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are on the hunt for enemies within who may have helped Israel prepare its devastating blow. A security official quoted by Tasnim praised the “timely reporting of suspicious activities.”
-Dan Morrison
As President Donald Trump delays a decision on bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, giving time for European nations to pursue diplomacy, two numbers loom over any future nuclear accord: 3.67% and 90%.
The first number was the level of uranium enrichment the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog verified Iran was enriching at around the time Trump, in his first term, pulled the United States out of the Obama-era nuclear deal, known as JCPOA, between Iran and world powers.
Since Trump scrapped the deal in May 2018 Iran’s enrichment level has closed in on 90%, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. That’s the level, the IAEA and other nuclear watchdogs say, that puts Iran on the cusp of turning enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon.
The JCPOA’s critics, many of them decades-long Iran hawks such as former national security adviser John Bolton and Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (now U.S. Secretary of State), have long pointed out that the accord did nothing to address Iran’s ballistic missile program and its regional militia proxies.
But the enrichment controls were, according to the IAEA, working. This raises questions about what kind of new deal could potentially emerge, and if it will be an improvement on what Trump abandoned in 2018.
-Kim Hjelmgaard
European diplomats sat down with Iran’s foreign minister in a last-ditch effort to restart U.S.-Iran nuclear talks.
Presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio met at the White House on June 19 with UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who is now in Geneva for the European talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
“A window now exists within the next two weeks to achieve a diplomatic solution,” Lammy said in a post on X.
Rubio has been burning up the phones with his European counterparts, including French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot. Working with the Trump administration’s blessing, the Europeans called “for a return to the diplomatic track and to continue negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program,” the French foreign ministry said.
President Trump on June 19 opened a two-week window for talks to end Iran’s nuclear program, under the threat of the U.S. joining Israel’s airstrikes.
-Francesca Chambers
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said his government was preparing a “very promising” proposal for the Trump administration in talks over its nuclear program when Israel attacked on June 13.
Araghchi on June 20 called Israel’s attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets grave war crimes, speaking at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, ahead of talks with European diplomats.
Iranian and U.S. negotiators were set to meet on June 15. Araghchi said Israel had betrayed diplomacy by striking before that planned round of U.S.-Iran talks.
President Trump has said repeatedly Iran should have accepted a U.S. offer. The details of Washington’s offer aren’t publicly known, except for a single condition: A complete end to nuclear enrichment, which Iran says it can’t accept.
“They had to sign a document, and I think they wished they signed it,” Trump said June 18. “It was a fair deal, and now it’s a harder thing to sign.”
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro said the Pentagon has for years been refining plans for strikes on Iran that President Donald Trump can tap into if he decide to give the go-ahead.
“He’s clearly ordered the forces into the theater that would support the strike if and when he makes that decision,” said Shapiro, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East at the end of the Biden administration.
U.S. airstrikes could also prompt retaliation. Tehran’s response could include attacks on U.S. military bases in Gulf countries or Iraq and Syria, the targeting of regional energy facilities, and blocking oil and gas shipments from crossing the Strait of Hormuz, Shapiro said.
The conflict is now in a phase of “coercive diplomacy,” where Trump is signaling that he’s preparing for military strikes, he said.
“There’s potentially one last opportunity for Iran to come to a negotiating table, whether it’s with the U.S. or through some other partners, and make the concession that they wouldn’t make in the talks that were being held before the hostility started,” Shapiro, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, told USA TODAY.
-Francesca Chambers
For the eighth day in a row, the consussion of missile and interceptors echoed over Tel Aviv. Iranian news reports said a new fusillade of missiles had been fired toward Israel.
Israeli officials said they were working to intercept the ballistic missiles. While taking a pummeling from Israel, Iran has managed several times to pierce its enemy’s “Iron Dome” defensive shield, striking neighborhoods, hospitals and a research institute.