WASHINGTON — The war between the United States and Iran entered its ninth day Sunday with no clear path toward deescalation, as President Trump said deploying American ground troops to the Middle East remains under consideration and Iran’s foreign minister rejected calls for a ceasefire.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Saturday, Trump declined to rule out the possibility of sending U.S. forces inside Iran, saying it could “possibly happen” as the conflict intensifies.
“There would have to be a very good reason,” Trump said. “I would say if we ever did that they would be so decimated that they wouldn’t be able to fight at the ground level.”
As Trump weighs sending ground troops into the widening conflict, Iran has signaled it is not prepared to halt fighting and said it would be ready to fight American soldiers if they descend into the country.
“We have very brave soldiers, who are waiting for any enemy who enters into our soil to fight with them, and to kill them and destroy them,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Araghchi added that Iran is not considering a ceasefire at this time. He said the United States and Israel would first need to explain “why they started this aggression and then guarantee there would be a permanent end of the war.”
“Unless we get to that, I think we need to continue fighting for the sake of our people and our security,” he said.
Araghchi also pushed back on Trump’s demand last week that he be involved in determining Iran’s future leadership as part of condition to end the conflict.
“We allow nobody to interfere in our domestic affairs. This is up to the Iranian people to elect their new leader,” Araghchi said. “It’s only the business of the Iranian people, and nobody else’s business.”
As of Sunday, it remained unclear who would succeed Iran’s former leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, who was killed by American and Israeli strikes on the first day of the war. But the clerical body that will choose Iran’s next supreme leader appeared to be close to reaching a majority consensus on its pick, according to several news reports.
Trump said last week that Mojtaba Khamenei — the son of the former leader — would be an “unacceptable” choice.
As the war’s end remains nebulous, the battlefield actions continue to have an economic impact domestically, particularly on oil prices.
“If the war continues like this, there will be neither a way to sell oil nor have the ability to produce it,” Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said in a social media post Sunday. He added the war would affect not just the U.S., but also the rest of the world “due to [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s delusions,” referring to the Israeli prime minister.
Israeli strikes on Sunday hit an oil storage facility in Tehran, marking what appears to be the first time a civil industrial facility has been targeted in the war.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Sunday that there’s currently a “fear premium in the marketplace” and sought to assure Americans that the soaring oil prices are a short-term problem.
“We never know exactly the timeframe of this,” Wright said in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But in the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months thing.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed the same assurances in an interview with Fox News‘ “Sunday Morning Futures,” calling the rising gas prices a “short-term disruption.”
“Ultimately taking out the rogue Iranian regime is going to be a good thing for the oil industry,” Leavitt said. “Those prices are going to come back down just like they have over the course of the past year, because of President Trump’s American energy dominance agenda.”
The strike on the oil storage facility came as Netanyahu promised “many surprises” for the next phase of the conflict.
Iran also hit a desalination plant in Bahrain, and according to Araghchi, a U.S. airstrike damaged an Iranian desalination plan on Qeshm Island that is a critical drinking water supply in the parched deserts of the gulf.
“Attacking Iran’s infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The U.S. set this precedent, not Iran,” Araghchi wrote in a post on X.
The United States has also come under scrutiny after evidence suggested that an American strike was likely responsible for an explosion at an Iranian elementary school that killed more than 165 people, most of them children.
Trump administration officials have said the matter is under investigation and that no determination has been made as to who was responsible for the strike. But on Saturday, Trump said Iran was to blame for the explosion.
“It was done by Iran,” Trump told reporters. “They’re very inaccurate as you know with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Asked Sunday if Iran had any evidence that the strike was conducted by the Americans, Araghchi said it had to have been either the U.S. or Israeli military and said that Trump’s suggestion that Iran was responsible for the attack was “funny.”
“It is our school, these are our students and our girls and they are attacked by an American fighter, a jet fighter and they have been killed. Why [is] Iran responsible?” Araghchi said.