threatens | The Independent

President Donald Trump is said to have threatened to “bomb the s***” out of Iran unless its negotiators finally commit to a peace deal and relinquish their nuclear ambitions after more than three months of war.

The U.S. fired 49 Tomahawk missiles at the country late Wednesday, the hostilities having resumed this week following the downing of an Army Apache attack helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz Monday.

The president was in the White House Situation Room to oversee the strikes with military leadership and spoke afterwards to Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst, who subsequently relayed his comments to anchor Laura Ingraham.

“The president said, ‘We hit them very hard tonight,’” the reporter told Ingraham and the network’s viewers, noting that Trump had characterized the strikes on Tehran and the Persian Gulf as “vicious” and “violent.”

Yingst went on to quote the commander-in-chief as saying of the Iranians: “If they don’t sign an agreement, we’ll bomb the ‘S’ out of them tomorrow.”

Trump also claimed that Iran’s “top officials” had begged him to stop the bombing – which was quickly denied by the Islamic Republic News Agency – and complained that the fragile truce agreed between the two nations in April had become “the most violated ceasefire in the history of the world.”

The revival of strikes this week saw Tehran hit back with attacks on U.S. military assets stationed in Bahrain and Kuwait and claim to have blocked all commercial shipping from passing through the all-important strait, which U.S. Central Command has denied.

Trump also rubbished the idea that Iran had control of the strait on Truth Social late Wednesday, repeating a claim he had made shortly beforehand in the Oval Office that U.S. forces had carried out a “secret mission” in May to retrieve more than 100 million barrels of oil from the area, which would not have been possible if Tehran were truly in charge.

“Their military is defeated, and their economy is lost,” the president crowed, glossing over his enemy’s ongoing ability to launch retaliatory strikes. “It’s over for Iran!”

Despite his gloating online, Trump struck a much more sober note in the Oval when he told reporters that his one wish for his upcoming 80th birthday is “peace for the world,” a pivot typical of the whiplash-inducing shifts in rhetoric he has engaged in throughout the conflict.

Earlier Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attended a meeting with Central Command leaders at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and emerged to tell reporters: “President Trump said we will be hitting Iran hard, and we will be.

“Iran has a chance to make a good deal, a great deal, to codify what they said they’ve been willing to do.”

General Majid Mousavi, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ aerospace forces, meanwhile ridiculed the U.S.’s latest moves, addressing the superpower via a statement to the Tasnim news agency that asked: “Are you trying to make the holy Strait of Hormuz unsafe?!

“We will make the region hell for you from all over Iran. This is the response to America’s aggression in the region.”