Iran War Live Updates: Trump Renews Threats Against Iranian Oil and Energy Facilities

While Iran’s security and military agencies continue to function, the government’s ability to plan new strategies or policies has been weakened.

The Trump administration has said a new government is in charge in Iran and has pressed it to make a quick deal. But the more degraded Iranian government decision making becomes, the more difficult it will be for it to negotiate with American envoys or make significant concessions.

With different leaders in place, Iranian negotiators may have little knowledge about what their government is willing to concede, or even whom precisely to ask.

What is more, American officials say hard-liners within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have become more influential, exerting more power than the religious leadership nominally in charge.

But whether someone emerges to make a deal, and whether that person can persuade other officials to agree to it, is far from clear. Former American officials say Iran will make a deal when it suffers enough economic pain from the war. While the damage has been severe, Iran may not yet feel as though it is losing, according to current and former officials.

On Monday, President Trump threatened to expand the war if a deal was not quickly reached, suggesting that U.S. forces might try to take Kharg Island, Iran’s main hub for oil exports.

Iran’s compromised communications have caused confusion and paranoia among the surviving government leaders, who fear that their calls and messages are being intercepted by Israeli intelligence, officials say. As a result, they have been reluctant to make calls, according to officials briefed on Western intelligence assessments.

Israel began the war with a strike on the leadership compound that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and much of the national security leadership. A number of lower-level officials seen by the United States as more pragmatic were also killed in the strike, U.S. officials said. Mr. Trump himself made reference in interviews that potential candidates to lead Iran had been killed.

The attack severed many connections between security, military and civilian policymakers, according to Western officials and others briefed on government assessments.

It is unclear how much control the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is exerting over the government. He has not been seen in public, and U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies believe he was wounded during the war.

Some intelligence officials believe that Mr. Khamenei may be more of a figurehead, and that the surviving leadership of the Revolutionary Guards is making the decisions.

A senior U.S. military official said Iranian command and control has been badly degraded by American and Israeli strikes. Still, the official and a senior intelligence official said, before the war Iran built a decentralized control system that allows local commanders in different regions of the country to make their own strike decisions, even in the absence of direct day-to-day orders from Tehran.

The United States is targeting those local commanders, the senior military official said. Nevertheless, Iran has proved it can still launch substantial offensive strikes like the missile and drone attack at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia last week.

But the retaliatory attacks have not been as large, or as effective, as they might have been because of the problems in the Iranian government. Given the decimation of its leadership, former U.S. officials say, Iran has been unable to launch larger barrages of missiles that could more easily overwhelm defenses. Instead, regional commands have had to muster counterattacks without coordinating with one another.

Mr. Trump has expressed frustration with what he has portrayed as mixed messaging from the Iranian leadership.

“The Iranian negotiators are very different and ‘strange,’” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Thursday. “They are ‘begging’ us to make a deal, which they should be doing since they have been militarily obliterated, with zero chance of a comeback, and yet they publicly state that they are only ‘looking at our proposal.’”

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said the campaign of airstrikes had resulted in new leadership in Iran and again claimed progress in talks.

“It’s a whole different group of people,” Mr. Trump said on Sunday. “So I would consider that regime change, and frankly, they’ve been very reasonable.”

In a social media post on Monday, Mr. Trump offered optimistic assessments of the current government but also threatened to expand the war by targeting energy and civilian infrastructure. He said that if a deal was not reached shortly, and if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed, he would attack Iran’s electrical generation plants, oil wells and desalination plants.

People briefed on intelligence assessments said Mr. Trump’s frustration reflected the inability of the current Iranian government to coordinate a response and make a decision about the American peace proposals.

Israeli officials have said the communication problems in Iran are not dissimilar to the problems with hostage negotiations during the Gaza war. In Gaza, offers from the United States and Israel went to Hamas leaders in Qatar, and then were conveyed in written notes to leaders in Gaza, a time-consuming process that introduced confusion.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

The semiofficial news agency Fars reported that 20 universities and dormitories had been attacked in the monthlong war.

“Israel and its partner in crime believe that knowledge can be bombed away,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in a statement that only indirectly referred to the United States — part of Iranian officials’ efforts to portray Washington as serving Israeli interests by starting a war with Iran.

Intentional attacks against educational institutions may be considered a war crime under international law.

Israeli and U.S. military spokesmen did not immediately respond to a request for comment on four separate university attacks in the past two weeks. But on Monday, Israel claimed strikes on a university that it said was being used for military research.

On Sunday, the Revolutionary Guards warned of possible retaliation.

“We advise all staff, professors and students of American universities in the region, as well as residents in their surrounding areas, to keep a distance of at least one kilometer from these universities to ensure their safety,” said a statement published by Tasnim, a semiofficial news outlet affiliated with the Guards.

Many American universities in the region had already moved most of their courses online because of the war. But some campuses took further security measures after the warnings. The American University of Beirut said that while it had “no evidence of direct threats,” it had decided to move all classes online for Monday and Tuesday, and it had suspended the few exams and laboratory sessions still being held in person.

Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region — considered one of Washington’s most important regional security allies — closed not only American and international universities, but also all of its schools in response.

Videos posted on March 28 and 29 showed the aftermath of a recent attack on the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran, in which an entire building was reduced to rubble, while other classrooms were littered with shards of glass and debris.

Another strike on a research institute at the Isfahan University of Technology damaged several buildings and injured four staff members, according to the semiofficial news agency Mehr.

Other universities that have been hit, according to United Students, a group run by student activists, are the faculty of pharmacy at Shiraz University, in the south, and both the science and technology campus as well as the veterinary hospital campus at Urmia University in northeastern Iran.

Some universities that have been attacked were the sites of large demonstrations against the government just days before the war began, as students defied a bloody crackdown on protests that had already killed thousands earlier this year.

On Monday, Israel claimed strikes on the Imam Hossein University, which it called the “main military university” of the Revolutionary Guards.

It said the university contained wind tunnels used to test and develop ballistic missiles, as well as a chemistry center used for research and development of chemical weapons.

Hwaida Saad and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting

About 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers are stationed in the region as part of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, which was established in 1978 during Lebanon’s civil war.

The internal report seen by The Times indicated that the U.N. peacekeeping force did not immediately know who was responsible for the latest strike and deaths. There was no immediate comment from Israel, Hezbollah or UNIFIL. The other strike was also being investigated, UNIFIL said in a statement.

In the latest explosion on Monday, a U.N. convoy that was heading between two UNIFIL bases was struck, destroying the lead vehicle and killing the peacekeepers. Several others were injured, one of them seriously, according to the report. The explosion, which again affected UNIFIL’s Indonesian battalion, occurred near the southern Lebanese town of Bani Haiyyan, the report said.

The three deaths over the past 24 hours were the first in a combat incident since a conflict that was sparked when Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel in 2023 in support of its Palestinian ally in Gaza, Hamas.

That war ended in a fragile cease-fire, but erupted again this month after Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel in solidarity with Tehran, opening a new front in the broader U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Israel has responded with a large-scale bombing campaign and ground invasion that has killed more than 1,200 people in Lebanon and displaced well over a million others, according to Lebanese authorities.

Hezbollah has responded by attacking Israeli troops as they advance into southern Lebanon and keeping up rocket fire across the border into Israel, in a conflict that shows little sign of abating.

But he also reiterated threats of extreme destruction against Iranian targets that he said the U.S. military had “purposefully not yet ‘touched,’” since it started bombing Iran alongside Israel over a month ago. Those targets included Kharg Island, electricity plants, oil wells and “possibly all desalinization plants,” he said.

Mr. Trump has made fluctuating and freewheeling public comments on the war, often alternating between claims of diplomatic progress and threats of stronger military action. In an interview published on Sunday, Mr. Trump had suggested that the United States might try to take over Kharg Island, which has emerged as a potential target for the U.S. military.

“Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t,” Mr. Trump told The Financial Times. “We have a lot of options.”

He shrugged off Iran’s ability to protect the island, a territory about one-third the size of Manhattan that is in the Persian Gulf, about 20 miles offshore.

“I don’t think they have any defense,” Mr. Trump said. “We could take it very easily.”

Mr. Trump has said that he has no plans to send ground troops into Iran, but he has left himself some wiggle room. There are now over 50,000 American troops in the Middle East — too small a number for any major land invasion, military analysts say, but enough to give Mr. Trump new options to escalate the war, or attempt an operation like seizing Kharg island.

The U.S. bombarded the island this month, focusing on its military installations while leaving its oil export facilities untouched. An invasion would be a much riskier operation and would likely roil global energy markets even further.

Even if U.S. troops were able to take control of the island — a scenario that Mr. Trump has envisioned since the late 1980s — maintaining control of it would be costly and difficult. Mr. Trump told The Financial Times that American troops would have “to be there for a while.”

Airstrikes against Kharg Island’s oil infrastructure, or seizing the island outright, would cripple Iran’s ability to export oil. That would risk sending energy prices higher, especially if Iran retaliates by striking other infrastructure in the Middle East or oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz — which would remain a powerful source of leverage.

Helene Cooper, Anton Troianovski, Rebecca F. Elliott and Peter Eavis contributed reporting.

“The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead,” he said. He suggested that Iran had moved onto its “third regime,” and that American negotiators were speaking to “a whole different group of people,” who have “been very reasonable.”

Iranian leaders have not confirmed that they are participating in talks with U.S. officials, and their de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital route for oil shipments, has rattled global markets.

The United States and Israel began attacking Iran on Feb. 28, killing its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many top Iranian leaders. But a war that Mr. Trump initially predicted would last weeks and would create the conditions for Iran’s elite military forces to “surrender to the people” has shown little sign of letting up as more civilians are killed, and as Iran’s retaliatory attacks disrupt daily life across the Middle East.

Though the United States and Israel have killed a string of Iran’s leaders after Ayatollah Khamenei, its pillars of power — chiefly top clerics and the hardened officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — remain in place.

Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of the slain supreme leader, was chosen to succeed him. And there has been no sign of any popular Iranian movement to overthrow the government, as Mr. Trump had once signaled was an objective.

Some Iran experts and politicians from the country’s reformist movement argue that the killings have ushered more hard-line figures into top posts.

The slain head of Iran’s National Security Council, Ali Larijani, was seen as more pragmatic than the man appointed to replace him, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr. The new commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, is also seen as more radical than his predecessor, and the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader was seen as a victory by hard-liners against backers of more moderate candidates.

Mr. Trump’s comments on Sunday appeared to be another sign of him scaling back his objectives in the war. The Iranian leaders the United States was dealing with now, he said, are “different people than anybody’s dealt with before.”

“I would consider that regime change,” he said, adding, “You can’t do much better than that.”

Since the start, Mr. Trump has not laid out a clear objective for the war with Iran, nor has he been explicit about what victory would look like. Weeks before ordering the bombing campaign, he was asked by reporters if he wanted regime change in Iran. He said it seemed “like that would be the best thing that could happen.”

But by mid-March, Mr. Trump did not mention regime change at all when he announced that he was considering “winding down” military operations in Iran.

In recent days, he has appeared to grow frustrated with the extent to which the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign has failed to keep the war from spiraling across the region. One key irritant is that Iranian attacks have all but sealed off the Strait of Hormuz, sending the price of oil climbing by 56 percent since the war began.

Erika Solomon contributed reporting.

But to many outside experts, Iran’s ability to turn the spigot of oil deliveries on and off simply demonstrates its power to control the narrow, 21-mile-wide passage. Previously Mr. Trump had said he did not care much about what went through the strait because most of the oil goes to customers in Asia and Europe, and very little to the United States.

It was not clear where the 20 cargo ships were headed. China and India are major buyers of Iranian oil. The ships may also belong to Gulf Arab states. Last week, the Iranians allowed about 10 ships to transit the strait, a development that Mr. Trump also hailed as a sign of progress.

The movement of the oil is an issue that has arisen only after the United States and Israel began their military action on Feb. 28. The core of the negotiations center on the future of Iran’s nuclear program, the size and range of its arsenal of missiles and, based on Mr. Trump’s earlier goals, the freedom of the Iranian people to protest without being shot in the streets by the government.

Mr. Trump insisted to the reporters, however, that he had already achieved “regime change” in Iran because the leaders in place when the attacks on the country began have been killed, starting with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.

“I think we’ve had regime change,’’ said Mr. Trump. “It truly is regime change.”

But the government, led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the nation’s top clerics, remains in place. Only the leaders have changed.

Mr. Trump made no announcements of a face-to-face meeting between American and Iranian negotiators. Last week, the administration had hoped to send Vice President JD Vance to Pakistan, to lead a delegation to discuss peace terms with Iranian leaders. But the Iranians have insisted that the United States must agree to reparations for attacking the country, acknowledge Iran’s sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and lift sanctions imposed by a series of American presidents.

But as specialized ground troops, they could be deployed to help safeguard the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively closed. Or they could be deployed as part of a mission to try to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s oil hub in the northern Persian Gulf. Alternatively, they could be used in a mission aimed at Iran’s highly enriched uranium at the Isfahan nuclear site.

The commandos join 2,500 Marines and another 2,500 sailors, who recently arrived in the region. Altogether there are more than 50,000 American troops in the Middle East now, roughly 10,000 more than usual, as Mr. Trump decides on his next step in the war.

While it is still unclear just what the Marines, from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, will be charged with, U.S. officials say the president is weighing how to try to open the strait.

The narrow waterway, through which around 20 percent of the world’s oil usually traverses, has been largely closed because of attacks by Iranian forces who are retaliating against the U.S. and Israeli war on their country.

Usually there are around 40,000 American troops scattered among bases and on ships at any time around the region, including in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. But as Mr. Trump has escalated the war in Iran, that number has reached more than 50,000, according to a U.S. military official.

The number of troops no longer includes the 4,500 aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, however. That ship has been hobbled by constant mishaps, including a fire that broke out in the laundry. The Ford withdrew from the region on March 23 and sailed to Crete. On Friday it arrived in Croatia. It remains unclear where it is headed next.

Last week, the Pentagon also ordered about 2,000 soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East to give Mr. Trump additional military options.

The location of the Army paratroopers is not public, the military official said. But they will be within striking distance of Iran. The paratroopers could also be used on Kharg Island, where U.S. warplanes bombed more than 90 military targets earlier this month. Or they could be deployed for other ground operations in conjunction with the Marines.

But military experts caution that even 50,000 troops, many of them at sea, are a small number for any kind of major land operation. Israel used more than 300,000 troops for its operations in the Gaza Strip that began in October 2023. The U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 was close to 250,000 at the beginning.

At almost a third the size of the continental United States, Iran has around 93 million people. Taking, let alone holding, a country of its size and complexity and weaponry with 50,000 troops is not doable, military experts say.

The speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, called the American 15-point plan to end the war, passed to Iran via Pakistan, an attempt to achieve through diplomacy what the United States had failed to achieve through force. Iranian forces were “waiting for American soldiers to enter on the ground so they can set them on fire,” he added.

Here’s what else happened on Sunday:

Iran: The U.S.-Israeli bombardment of Tehran continued on Sunday, a day after the Iranian capital suffered what the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said was one of the heaviest days of strikes since the war began on Feb. 28.

Among the sites hit was the Tehran headquarters of Al Araby TV, a network owned by a Qatari company, according to Iranian news agencies. The network said that the building housing the headquarters also contained several other businesses and that the strike had injured 10 people. U.S.-Israeli strikes also hit a southern Iranian port, killing at least five people, Iranian state media said.

The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that Khondab Heavy Water Complex in Iran’s Markazi Province had been severely damaged and was no longer operational, after Iranian reports that it had been attacked on Friday. The complex did not contain any declared nuclear material, and there was no radiation risk, the agency said.

Lebanon: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said he had ordered his forces to increase the territory they control in southern Lebanon, saying that Israel was “determined to fundamentally change the situation” on the Israeli-Lebanese border. President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon has denounced the Israeli operation in southern Lebanon, particularly the destruction of bridges there, as dangerous escalations and a violation of Lebanese sovereignty.

Hundreds of people gathered in the rain in Beirut to mourn three Lebanese journalists killed in Israeli airstrikes over the weekend. An airstrike on an ambulance in Bint Jbeil, in southern Lebanon, also killed a paramedic, said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization. He said that 51 other Lebanese health workers had been killed since the start of Israel’s war with Hezbollah.

Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia intercepted and destroyed 10 drones, its defense ministry said. The kingdom’s foreign minister met with his counterparts from Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan in Islamabad as part of Pakistan’s efforts to mediate the war.

Israel: Iran fired a series of ballistic missiles toward Israel. No casualties were reported, though the Israeli military said fragments from missile interceptions fell on an industrial park in southern Israel, causing a fire.

Israeli police prevented two senior Roman Catholic leaders from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, prompting outrage from church officials and world leaders. Israeli police late on Sunday said they were instituting a “limited” plan for prayer at the church, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he had instructed the authorities to give the Latin Patriarch “full and immediate access” to the church and to allow him “to hold services as he wishes.”

An Israeli soldier from the United States was killed in southern Lebanon in an incident that injured three other soldiers, the Israeli military said. It did not provide further details.

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Custody of the Holy Land said in a statement that it was “the first time in centuries” that senior church officials had been unable to celebrate Palm Sunday Mass at the church. According to tradition, the church was built on the site in Jerusalem where Jesus Christ was both crucified and buried.

The statement said the two church leaders were traveling privately and not part of “a procession or ceremonial act” when they were barred from going to the church. The statement described the episode as a “grave precedent.”

Dean Elsdunne, an Israeli police spokesman, said the church leaders had been blocked from the building because the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem’s Old City, would be difficult to access in an emergency.

“The narrow alleys of the Old City, where emergency and rescue vehicles cannot quickly arrive to a scene or victims, means a single incident can become a tragedy,” he said.

World leaders including Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, condemned the decision. Ms. Meloni called it an “offense” to the faithful, while Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, said he had summoned the Israeli ambassador to discuss the matter.

President Emmanuel Macron of France said on social media post that Sunday’s episode joined “a concerning sequence of violations of the status of the holy sites in Jerusalem.”

And the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, described the episode as an “unfortunate overreach already having major repercussions around the world.”

Small religious gatherings have been permitted across Israel despite security precautions, Mr. Huckabee said, making the decision to deny entry to the two Catholic leaders “difficult to understand or justify.”

The closures of holy sites have stemmed from a lack of sheltered spaces amid frequent missile attacks from Iran, according to Israeli officials. Earlier this month, shrapnel from an Iranian missile that fell in the Old City of Jerusalem came close to hitting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The Al Aqsa Mosque compound, which is sacred to both Muslims and Jews, was also hit by debris.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that the decision to block the church officials had been made “out of special concern” for their safety, and said there was no malicious intent.

The prime minister’s office added that Israeli officials would work to “enable church leaders to worship at the holy site in the coming days,” citing the coming Easter holiday.

On Sunday night, Israeli police said they were instituting a “limited” plan for prayer at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher after a situational assessment between the Israeli authorities and a representative of the Latin Patriarchate but did not provide additional details.

Mr. Netanyahu, in a post on social media on Sunday night, said he had instructed the authorities to give Cardinal Pizzaballa “full and immediate access” to the church and to allow him “to hold services as he wishes,” despite safety concerns.

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said he called Cardinal Pizzaballa following Sunday’s episode to “express his great sorrow” over its handling.