President Donald Trump said Monday night that he is dissatisfied with the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s new supreme leader following the death of his father, and suggested the new leader may struggle to maintain stability. Trump also indicated that Iran’s government may be seeking negotiations as the U.S.-Israel war with Tehran moves into its second week.
Speaking with Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst during a flight on Air Force One from Miami back to Washington, Trump said Iranian officials appear eager to open discussions aimed at ending the conflict.
“It’s possible, depends on what terms, possible, only possible,” Trump told Yingst while aboard Air Force One en route to Washington from Miami. “You know, we sort of don’t have to speak anymore, you know, if you really think about it, but it’s possible.”
Trump added that he was displeased with the decision to elevate Mojtaba Khamenei to Iran’s highest position of power following the death of his father, the longtime supreme leader.
Earlier Monday, Trump had spoken with reporters at his Trump National Doral Miami golf club, where he delivered an upbeat assessment of the military campaign known as Operation Epic Fury.
“They have no navy, they have no air force, they have no anti-aircraft equipment, it’s all been blown up,” the president said of Iran’s military strength. “They have no radar. They have no telecommunications, and they have no leadership. It’s all gone.
“So, you know, you could look at that statement. We could, we could call it a tremendous success right now as we leave here. I could call it, or we could go further and we’re going to go further.”
Trump also defended the decision to launch the operation on Feb. 28, explaining that acting sooner prevented what he believed would have been an Iranian attack on U.S. or allied forces.
“if we had waited three days, I believe we would have been attacked” by Iran.
“When we attacked them first, we knocked out 50% of their missiles, and if we didn’t, it would have been a much harder fight,” said Trump, adding: “No other president had the guts to do it … I didn’t want some president who hasn’t got the courage in five years or ten years to go in.”
The president also said he had been informed last month by special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner that Iranian officials claimed to possess enough enriched uranium to build multiple nuclear weapons.
“I said, ‘You know, they’re not playing this smart. Because they’re basically saying that I have to attack them,’” Trump told Fox News. “They should have just said, ‘We’re not going to build a nuclear missile.’”
According to U.S. Central Command, American forces have struck more than 5,000 targets during the first ten days of Operation Epic Fury. Those strikes have included attacks on over 50 Iranian naval vessels that officials say were damaged or destroyed.
Trump also told reporters Monday evening that several major Iranian targets have intentionally been left untouched for the time being, suggesting they could be hit later if the conflict escalates.
“we’ve left some of the most important targets for later in case we need to do it. If we hit them, it’s going to take many years for them to be rebuilt.”
He explained that many of those potential targets involve infrastructure tied to Iran’s power supply and other critical systems.
“electricity production and many other things, so we’re not looking to do that if we don’t have to. But they’re the kind of things that are very easy to hit but very devastating if they are hit.
“We are waiting to see what happens before we hit them. We could take them all out in one day.”
{Matzav.com}New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani hosted controversial anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil and his family for a Ramadan meal at Gracie Mansion, drawing renewed attention to the mayor’s public support for the Syrian-born activist, who has been accused by the Trump administration of sympathizing with Hamas.
The gathering took place as Khalil marked a year since his arrest by federal immigration authorities. Mamdani described the dinner in a message posted Monday on social media.
“Last night, as we marked the one year anniversary of his detention, Rama and I were honored to welcome Mahmoud, Noor, and their son Deen to Gracie Mansion to break our fast together,” Mamdani wrote in a Monday Instagram post.
The mayor shared a photo from the evening showing his wife, Rama Duwaji, holding a plate of food beside Khalil, who was seated at the table and smiling as he ate.
Khalil, who was born in Syria and later studied as a graduate student at Columbia University, was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement early last year. The Trump administration has sought to deport him, alleging that he committed fraud on his green card application.
Federal officials have also argued that Khalil supports Hamas and have invoked a little-used provision of immigration law that allows noncitizens to be removed from the country if their views are considered a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests.
Khalil has previously drawn criticism for comments he made about the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre carried out by Hamas against Israeli civilians, describing the attack as an inevitable development connected to the group’s “struggle.”
Despite that controversy, Mamdani praised Khalil in his social media post, portraying the past year of the activist’s life as a period marked by resilience.
For Mamdani, however, Khalil’s year “has been marked by profound hardship—and by profound courage,” he wrote glowingly in his Monday social media post.
“And yet, even in the face of that cruelty, there has also been beauty. New Yorkers raising their voices in solidarity. A city refusing to look away. Mahmoud won his freedom, and a father was finally reunited with his child,” the mayor continued.
Khalil’s son, the couple’s first child, was born while his father remained in ICE detention in another state. The child is expected to celebrate his first birthday on April 21.
“Mahmoud is a New Yorker, and he belongs in New York City,” Hizzoner declared.
Mamdani has repeatedly defended Khalil publicly. The activist spent three months in a federal detention facility in Louisiana before a three-judge appellate panel in New Jersey ruled in June that he should have been allowed to pursue his immigration case while continuing to work.
“I see this attack on him as part of a larger attack on the freedom of speech that is especially pronounced when it comes to the use of that speech to stand up for policy to human rights,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference in January.
Khalil himself faced backlash late last year after comments he made appeared to justify the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In remarks to The New York Times, he described the attack as a moment of desperation that Palestinians felt compelled to reach in order to be heard.
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t avoid such a moment,” he said in an interview with the New York Times when asked about the attack by the terror group.
“To me, it felt frightening that we had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle,” Khalil added.
Officials in Washington were among those who sharply criticized those remarks, arguing that they reflected a pattern in which Khalil minimized the brutality of Hamas’ actions.
After being released from custody, Khalil again drew headlines when he attended an anti-Israel demonstration in New York City. At the rally, he cited the words of Anas al-Sharif, described as a Hamas operative and an Al Jazeera correspondent who was killed in an Israeli missile strike last August.
“The time is now, the bridges towards liberation start with us,” Khalil bellowed to the crowd as he recalled al-Sharif’s final words.
{Matzav.com}President Donald Trump has indicated that he would support the killing of Iran’s newly installed supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, if the Iranian leader refuses to comply with U.S. demands, including halting Iran’s nuclear program, according to American officials who spoke to The Wall Street Journal.
The White House declined to comment on the report. However, Trump told the New York Post that he is “not happy” that Khamenei was selected to lead Iran after previously calling his potential leadership “unacceptable.” Trump wrote last week on social media that he wants to be involved in choosing a “great and acceptable” leader for Iran following what he described as the country’s “unconditional surrender.”
“I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei,” Trump told Time magazine last week.
A current and a former U.S. official said Israel is expected to carry out an operation aimed at eliminating Khamenei, who was appointed supreme leader on Sunday. The officials noted that Israel has taken the lead in targeting Iranian leadership figures. When recently asked on CNN whether Khamenei was a target for Israel, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar responded: “You’ll have to wait and see.”
Younger Khamenei is viewed in Washington as a hardline successor to his father, carefully chosen by Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to current and former U.S. officials. American officials said they do not expect Khamenei to abandon Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons or to enter negotiations to end the conflict under terms favorable to the United States.
French President Emmanuel Macron also addressed the war with Iran, saying that airstrikes alone will not be enough to bring down Iran’s political regime and warning that the conflict is likely to continue for some time.
“I don’t think we can achieve profound change in a regime or political system through bombing alone,” Macron said in a television interview aboard France’s aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, which arrived in Cyprus on Monday.
The war “will certainly continue in an intense phase for several days, perhaps several weeks,” he added.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel estimates roughly 7,000 members of Iran’s security forces have been killed since the start of the war, according to a senior Israeli security official.
Iran maintains more than one million security personnel across various organizations, including the regular army (Artesh), the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Basij resistance militia.
{Matzav.com}A special simchah was celebrated today in the city of Modiin Illit, where a local family welcomed their 21st child, bli ayin hara. Even more unusual is the fact that all of the children were born as single births, with no twins among them.
According to sources, the oldest child in the family, who lives in Kiryat Sefer, is just 22 years old. This means that nearly every year the family merited to welcome a new baby boy or girl.
At present, all 21 children are still single and living in their parents’ home.
The extraordinary story even surpasses a previously known “record” of a family in Bnei Brak that also had 21 children, though in that case one of the births was a set of twins.
The baby was born today at Maayanei HaYeshua Hospital in Bnei Brak.
News of the home blessed with 21 children quickly spread throughout the neighborhood, and neighbors have already begun enthusiastically organizing assistance for the mother and her husband.
Oif simchos!
{Matzav.com}Israeli and American forces have succeeded in destroying a large portion of Iran’s ballistic missile launch platforms, a development that significantly limits Tehran’s ability to carry out missile attacks, according to former Israel Defense Forces spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus.
Speaking Monday on Newsmax, Conricus said the campaign against Iran has focused heavily on eliminating the launchers used to fire missiles, which he described as the critical weak point in Iran’s missile capabilities.
“So I’m happy to say that Israel and the U.S. have been successful in taking out approximately 70% of Iran’s missile launchers, the ballistic missile launchers,” Conricus said on “Bianca Across the Nation.”
Conricus explained that destroying the launch infrastructure is strategically more important than the number of missiles Iran still has in its arsenal.
“And that’s a very important figure because that is the bottleneck, and that is the most important number,” he said. “If we take out all the launchers, then they can have stockpiles of weapons — of missiles — but they won’t be able to fire them.”
According to Conricus, Israeli and American forces have concentrated on tracking and striking mobile launch systems across western Iran. The effort involves a combination of intelligence gathering, aerial operations, and precision long-range strikes.
“And that’s what we are hunting now over western Iran in Iranian skies and with continuous steady success,” Conricus said.
The current campaign began on Feb. 28, when President Donald Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury, a sweeping military effort targeting Iran’s missile and drone infrastructure, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command systems, military installations, and air defense networks after tensions escalated in the region.
Defense officials say the results of those strikes have already been visible on the battlefield. Iranian missile and drone launches have dropped significantly as launch platforms and support systems have been destroyed.
Military briefings and open-source analysis indicate that Iranian missile barrages have declined by more than 80 percent since the operation began, largely due to the systematic targeting of the transporter-erector-launchers used to deploy ballistic missiles.
Even with those gains, Conricus noted that Israeli civilians still face the threat of incoming attacks.
“Granted, Israelis still rush to shelters,” he said. “I had to go to shelters … three or four times today.”
Missiles launched from Iran and rockets fired from Lebanon continue to target Israeli population centers despite the damage inflicted on Iran’s launch capabilities.
“We have incoming missiles from Iran and rockets from Lebanon,” Conricus said.
The continued attacks have also resulted in civilian casualties inside Israel.
“Sadly, today, two Israeli civilians were killed,” he said, adding that the total number of civilians killed in Israel from Iranian ballistic missile strikes had reached 14.
“That’s, of course, a tragedy for us,” he said.
Still, Conricus said Israeli society remains determined to withstand the current conflict.
“But Israeli society is strong,” he said. “I think we’re resolute here, and we understand that this is a period that we will have to tough through.”
He added that the broader goal of the military campaign is to weaken Iran’s capabilities to such an extent that the regime will no longer be able to threaten Israel or other countries in the region.
“And eventually, I think when you boil it down to the military mechanics of it, Israel and the U.S. will be able to really degrade military capabilities of Iran and bring that regime to a situation where they don’t have the teeth or the muscle to actually do anything,” Conricus said.
{Matzav.com}
