{"id":154666,"date":"2025-06-25T15:37:52","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T15:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/deadly-israel-iran-conflict-is-now-over-trump-declares-at-nato-live-updates-usa-today\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T15:37:52","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T15:37:52","slug":"deadly-israel-iran-conflict-is-now-over-trump-declares-at-nato-live-updates-usa-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/deadly-israel-iran-conflict-is-now-over-trump-declares-at-nato-live-updates-usa-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Deadly Israel-Iran conflict is now 'over,' Trump declares at NATO: Live updates – USA Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration believes the deadly, 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran is over and will not restart, President Donald Trump<\/a> said Wednesday.
“We think it’s over, I don’t think they’re going to be going back at each other,” Trump said at a news conference closing out a NATO Summit in The Netherlands.
Trump spent his final day at NATO disputing leaked intelligence that assessed that U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities set the country back by months, not years, as he and other members of his administration have been claiming.
The president said U.S. “dealt decisively” with Iran’s nuclear program. “But we’ve also reasserted the credibility of American deterrance,” he said.
“It was devastating. They obliterated,” Trump said in later remarks. “You can’t get into the tunnels.”
He added, “And I think all of the nuclear stuff is down there. It’s very hard to move.”
Iran and Israel were both claiming victory in the short but deadly conflict<\/a> as the world waited to determine whether a ceasefire would hold<\/a>.
Israeli Prime Miniser Benjamin Netanyahu<\/a> said his country had achieved the goals of its attacks on Iran by destroying the nation’s nuclear program. Israel\u2019s Atomic Energy Commission on Wednesday issued an assessment of the damage, saying Iran\u2019s nuclear program has been set back \u201cmany years.\u201d
A Pentagon intelligence assessment was less definitive, saying the 30,000-pound weapons may not have reached deep enough to destroy the underground installations and likely only\u00a0delayed Iran’s nuclear program<\/a>\u00a0by a few months. Trump\u00a0said Wednesday the intelligence was inconclusive.
“The intelligence says we don’t know. It could’ve been very severe, that’s what the intelligence suggests,”\u00a0Trump\u00a0told reporters while meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. “It was very severe. There was obliteration.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth<\/a>, speaking at the NATO summit Wednesday, said the FBI was investigating the leak of the Pentagon intelligence assessment, which he said was “top secret.”
“It was devastation,” Hegseth said at a briefing with Trump. “Any assessment that tells you it was something otherwise is speculating with other motives.”
Hegseth said the assessment was preliminary, low confidence and for “internal purposes.” He said it estimated that the damage was “moderate to severe and we believe far more likely severe and obliterated.”
Israel\u2019s Atomic Energy Commission says the combination of U.S. and Israeli assaults on Iran\u2019s nuclear sites set back Iran’s program “many years” and possibly “indefinitely.”
“The devastating US strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable,’ the agency said in a report. “We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”
The report said the “achievement can continue indefinitely” if Iran is kept from gaining access to nuclear material.
Trump said the Israeli statement about the success of the U.S. bombing confirmed they had been obliterated.
\u201cIt was complete total destruction,\u201d Trump said.
The attack resulted in “extensive damage” to Iran’s uranium conversion and enrichment facilities, the International Atomic Energy Agency says. Director General Rafael Mariano\u00a0Grossi said the agency’s early report shows some “localized radioactive as well as chemical release” inside the facilities that contained nuclear material \u2013 mainly enriched uranium. But there has been no report of increased off-site radiation, he said. \u00a0
The IAEA is aware of concerns in the region regarding radiological consequences as a result of the strikes, he said.
\u201cBased on the data available to us, the IAEA can provide assurances that there has been no radiological impact to the population and the environment in neighboring countries. Crucially in terms of nuclear safety, Iran\u2019s research and power reactors were not targeted,\u201dGrossi said.
The saga between Iran and the United States goes back seven decades<\/a> and 13 presidents, a relationship that broke down after the people of Iran rose up against a regime the United States helped install 1953. While Trump’s decision to bomb the country’s nuclear sites has Americans on edge, the United States has a long history of punishing Iran’s government, most often through sanctions.
At the center of it all is the state of Israel, the United States’ key ally in the region \u2212 one that consistently finds itself at war with Iran or with the Islamic extremist groups that are proxies for Iran’s interests. For some key key moments in the relationship between the U.S. and Iran, read more here<\/a>.
In Iran, the Supreme National Security Council declared that the Islamic Republic\u2019s military response to the attack forced Israel and its Western supporters to unilaterally halt offensive operations. And Iran’s top nuclear official, Mohammad Eslami, told the Mehr News Agency<\/a> that preparations made ahead of the attack will prevent any hiatus in progress for Iran’s nuclear industry.
Israel\u2019s sweeping assault, which began June 13, targeted military leaders, nuclear scientists, uranium enrichment facilities and Iran\u2019s ballistic missile program.
The war has been costly. Iranian Health Minister Mohammad Reza Zafarqandi said more than 600 Iranians have been killed by Israeli missiles. Iran\u2019s missile attacks in response killed about 30 and wounded thousands in Israel, severely damaging apartment buildings, a university and a hospital, according to the Times of Israel<\/a>.\u00a0
Some residents and tourists in major American cities say they feel uneasy about the possibility of violence breaking out at home<\/a>. At New York’s Penn Station, Catherine Wagoner, a kindergarten teacher from Boston waiting for her train home after visiting friends, told USA TODAY she felt less safe traveling since the attacks in Iran.
\u201cBeing in New York feels more of a threat \u2013 more of a target,\u201d she said, adding, \u201cI definitely have a lot of privilege, and I don’t feel like I’m necessarily the target, so I can recognize that. But I just have a constant state of anxiety about the state of the world.\u201d
Wagoner’s feelings were echoed\u00a0in a recent Reuters\/Ipsos poll<\/a>\u00a0that surveyed 1,139 U.S. adults nationwide and found that some 79% of respondents said they worried “that Iran may target U.S. civilians in response to the U.S. airstrikes.” Read more here<\/a>.
\u2212 Christopher Cann and Michael Collins<\/em>
The U.S. intelligence community has been consistent: It does not believe Iran has been building a nuclear weapon. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard<\/a> said as much when she testified to Congress about Iran\u2019s nuclear program in March.
U.S. spy agencies, Gabbard said, \u201ccontinue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
Trump and Netanyahu dismissed that assessment. Trump has doubted U.S. intelligence agencies before \u2212 for example, over who was responsible for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi (it was Saudi Arabia). Netanyahu, meanwhile, has been talking about Iran’s existential nuclear threat to Israel for as along as he’s been in the public eye.
Still, U.S. intelligence agencies, Trump, Netanyahu and the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog \u2212 the International Atomic Energy Agency \u2212 agree on the issue of Iran’s uranium.
All believe Iran has developed a large stockpile, and at a sufficiently enriched level, to sustain a nuclear reaction that could be used in a bomb if it decided to. But how quickly Iran could then “sprint to a nuclear weapon,” as Gen. Michael E. Kurilla put it on June 10, is also a matter of dispute, and estimates range from one week to one year.
\u2212Kim Hjelmgaard<\/em>
Trump ordered the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities \u2212\u00a0Operation Midnight Hammer<\/a>\u00a0\u2212 effectively joining a war that Israel started on June 13 when it began bombing Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure. Israel said it helped the U.S. coordinate and plan the strikes.
Trump said all three sites were “totally obliterated.” But an independent assessment has not yet been carried out. The International Atomic Energy Agency \u2212 the United Nation’s nuclear watchdog \u2212 released a statement saying that so far it had not detected an increase in “off-site radiation levels,” one of the feared consequences of the strikes.
Contributing: Reuters<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Trump administration believes the deadly, 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran is over and will not restart, President Donald Trump said Wednesday.“We think it’s over, I don’t think they’re going to be going back at each other,” Trump said at a news conference closing out a NATO Summit in The Netherlands.Trump spent his final […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":154667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}