President Donald Trump demanded Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender’ in a social media post Friday morning, insisting “there will be no deal” to end his now seven-day-old war with the battered Persian Gulf power.
Trump said the United States and its allies “will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”
The president’s announcement came as air attacks spanned the Middle East, additional U.S. troops were on en route to the region, Trump brushed off domestic fears of rising gas prices.
“I don’t have any concern about it,” Trump told the Reuters news agency on Thursday. “They’ll drop very rapidly when this is over, and if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.”
The toll at home is seen in tumbling financial markets and the deaths of six U.S. soldiers killed in retaliatory attacks.
Follow along for live updates from USA TODAY.
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy
Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. military investigators believe it’s “likely” that a girls’ school in southern Iran was hit by United States forces. The Feb. 28 airstrike killed 175 people, most of them school children, Iranian authorities said. The reports cited unnamed U.S. sources.
“This investigation is ongoing. There are no conclusions at this time, and it is both irresponsible and false for Reuters to claim otherwise,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said of the report. “As we have said, unlike the terrorist Iranian regime, the United States does not target civilians.”
The Shajarah Tayyebeh Girls’ School, in the city of Minab near the Strait of Hormuz sits adjacent to military compounds of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official blamed Trump for the airstrike in a social media post on Thursday that decried the “massacre of innocent girls in a school in the city of Minab at the hands of Israeli and American criminals, staining the theory of ‘peace through strength’ with blood.”
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt side-stepped the question of reports that Russia is providing intelligence to Iran to target US forces.
The Washington Post, citing unnamed U.S. officials, first reported on Friday that Russia was providing Iran with targeting assistance against United States forces. The Associated Press and ABC News also reported on Russia’s involvement.
“It clearly is not making a difference with respect to the military operations in Iran because we are completely decimating them,” she said. “We’ve taken out nearly 30 of their ships. Their navy has been deemed combat ineffective, 90% reduction in ballistic missile retaliatory strikes against the United States and our Gulf Arab and partners in the region.”
Asked if President Donald Trump had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the alleged intelligence sharing, Leavitt said: “I’ll let the president speak on that directly.”
BrieAnna J. Frank
The war in Iran has heightened concerns among some service members about the influence of Christian nationalism on the military under Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s leadership.
Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told USA TODAY the organization had received “far greater than” 200 complaints related to religious freedom from service members across more than 50 military installations since the war broke out.
One such complaint alleged that a commander told non-commissioned officers in a March 2 briefing that President Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
The Pentagon did not respond to questions about whether it investigated or verified the complaint, nor whether commanders are permitted to make such comments to subordinates.
Jasper Ward, Reuters
The Kalshi prediction market was sued for a failure to pay out $54 million to people who bet that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would leave office before March 1, 2026, according to a class action lawsuit filed on Thursday in California. Khamenei was killed on Saturday in U.S-Israeli strikes.
Kalshi customers were drawn to the “Khamenei Market” because of the fluid geopolitical circumstances, the lawsuit said. However, the complaint added, it was not until after Iranian leader was killed that the company invoked a “death carveout” provision to avoid paying customers what they were owed.
“With an American naval armada amassed on Iran’s doorstep and military conflict not merely foreseeable but widely anticipated, consumers understood that the most likely − and in many cases the only realistic − mechanism by which an 85-year-old autocratic leader would ‘leave office’ was through his death. Defendants understood this as well,” the lawsuit said.
Kalshi did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
Francesca Chambers
The State Department says that chartered flights it is paying for have brought hundreds of Americans home since the U.S. went to war with Iran nearly a week ago.
Since Feb. 28, the U.S. government says it has provided 13,000 Americans abroad security guidance or travel assistance.
All told, roughly 24,000 American citizens have returned from the Middle East, assistant secretary of state for global public affairs Dylan Johnson said on March 6. The figures do not include Americans who have relocated to other countries or are still in transit to the United States.
Several flights chartered by the State Department are known to have already landed in the United States, including one on the jet that the New England Patriots NFL team uses. The State Department says the Patriots were not involved and the State Depatment paid for the flight.
A senior State Department official declined to say exactly how many flights have been chartered or how many Americans have on the government subsidized planes. The official said the number of flights was expected to be in double digits. The U.S. government is also chartering buses, but the official indicated they have been requested less.
Trump’s administration has come under heavy scrutiny for not providing assistance to stranded Americans in countries that are close to the fighting at a quicker pace.
The official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity said 30-40% of the Americans it is contacting are declining the flights that are offered to them by the government, as time goes on and commercial availability increases.
The number of displaced people in Lebanon is expected to rapidly increase after unprecedented Israeli evacuation orders covering large parts of the country, with about 100,000 already cramming shelters, a senior U.N. official said on Friday.
With hostilities raging between Israel and Hezbollah amid a spreading U.S.-led war on Iran, the Israeli military on Thursday ordered residents out of Beirut’s southern suburbs, including districts controlled by the Iran-backed group, before intensifying its air strikes on the area.
Israel has also ordered peopleout of areas of the eastern Bekaa Valley, and a swathe of the south.
“What we saw in the last couple of days is, I would say … unprecedented in terms of the scale here in Lebanon of the warnings, the displacement orders, and the reaction, the panic also, that this has all created,” Imran Riza, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Lebanon, told Reuters.
More than 200 people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes since Hezbollah reignited the war on Israel’s northern border with rocket attacks on Monday.
Rachel Barber
The U.S. military is putting together a plan to get ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNBC and Bloomberg Television.
The strait, a choke point for 20% of the world’s oil exports, has been closed to ships since shortly after the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran on Feb. 28.
U.S. gas prices were up an average of 27 cents a gallon on Thursday, March 5, according to the AAA.
Zac Anderson
President Trump said he wants Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”
The president added in a March 6 social media post that Iran must have “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)” after the military operation killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of other top Iranian officials.
Trump’s post came hours after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on social media that attempts at mediating an end to the war were under way.
“Some countries have begun mediation efforts,” he said on X. “Let’s be clear: we are committed to lasting peace in the region yet we have no hesitation in defending our nation’s dignity & sovereignty. Mediation should address those who underestimated the Iranian people and ignited this conflict.”
Trump told Reuters on March 5 that he will have a role in selecting Iran’s next leader. The military campaign launched by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28 is nearly a week old, with more U.S. forces headed to the region. Trump’s call for unconditional surrender adds to the uncertainly around the timeline for an end to the conflict.
Reuters
U.S. stock index futures slipped on Friday as the conflict raging in the Middle East threatened to fuel inflation through higher energy costs, and investors awaited a pivotal jobs report.
The U.S.-Israel air campaign against Iran was nearing a week with no end in sight. Oil prices have surged the most this week since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as shipping through the strategic Strait of Hormuz ground to a halt.
Natural gas producer Qatar said even if the Middle East war ended immediately, it would take “weeks to months” to return to a normal cycle of deliveries, according to a report.
Crude prices edged higher and sent airlines American AAL.O and Delta DAL.N 1% lower in premarket trading. The S&P 500’s passenger airlines subindex .SPLRCALI is on track for a 9%weekly drop.
Read more.
Reuters
Qatar expects all Gulf energy producers to shut down exports within weeks if the Iran conflict continues and drives oil to $150 a barrel, the country’s Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi told the Financial Times in an interview published on Friday.
Qatar halted its production of liquefied natural gas on Monday, as Iran continued to strike Gulf countries in retaliation for Israeli and U.S. attacks. The country’s LNG production is equivalent to about 20% of global supply and plays a major role in balancing both Asian and European markets’ demand for the fuel.
“Everybody that has not called for force majeure we expect will do so in the next few days that this continues. All exporters in the Gulf region will have to call force majeure,” Kaabi told the FT. “If this war continues for a few weeks, GDP growth around the world will be impacted,” he said.
“Everybody’s energy price is going to go higher. There will be shortages of some products and there will be a chain reaction of factories that cannot supply,” Kaabi said.
Kaabi said even if the war ended immediately it would take Qatar “weeks to months” to return to a normal cycle of deliveries.
Analysts and economists have highlighted the potential impact of the war on economies globally.
Dinah Voyles Pulver
Crowdfunding for the families of four of the U.S. Army reservists killed March 1 by a drone attack in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, have been verified by the GoFundMe social platform, said Angelique McNaughton, communications manager.
Together the four pages have raised more than $200,000 this week, as of March 5.
One verified fundraiser is for the family of Sgt. First Class Noah Lee Tietjens, who was a husband, father, Blackbelt in Taekwondo and martial arts instructor.
The fundraiser in honor of Capt. Cody Khork, a military police officer, states it is intended to help pay for funeral costs and travel expenses for his family.
The family of Sgt. First Class Nicole Amor states its fundraiser is devoted to building a greenhouse in her honor, “a place that would have made her incredibly happy and at peace,” and donating to a local nonprofit, Garden-in-a-Box.
Marianne Crandall, the aunt of Sgt. Declan Coady, a sophomore at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, established the GoFund Me page for his family.
Rebecca Morin
President Trump told Reuters Thursday that the United States will have a role in choosing Iran’s next leader after joint attacks with Israel over the weekend killed the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Trump told the news agency he was very early in the process of picking a new leader. The United States has said top military officials were killed in the airstrikes over the weekend. The president said slain supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, was an unlikely choice.
“We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future,” Trump said. “We don’t have to go back every five years and do this again and again … Somebody that’s going to be great for the people, great for the country.”