Iran-US war latest: Tehran denies wanting ceasefire and warns Trump it will fight for ‘as long as it takes’

Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has issued a defiant message after President Donald Trump claimed that the Islamic Republic had been pleading for a deal.

”We never asked for a cease fire, and we have never asked even for negotiation,” he told CBS News.

“We are ready to defend ourselves as long as it takes. And this is what we have done so far, and we continue to do that until President Trump comes to the point that this is an illegal war with no victory.”

He also appeared to refer to Trump’s comments about striking Kharg Island “just for fun”.

“And you know, there are people being killed only because President Trump wants to have fun.”

Israel is to widen the scope of strikes against Iran, the military has said in a new update.

Several central command centres of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are said to have been damaged as well as several command centres associated with the Basij unit of the country’s security forces.

“The IDF is expanding in these days the scope of strikes targeting infrastructure of the Iranian terror regime in additional areas in western and central Iran, with the aim of broadly and systematically impairing the regime’s command and control capabilities,” it wrote in a statement on Sunday afternoon.

“The completed strikes are part of the phase of deepening the damage to the core arrays of the Iranian terror regime and its foundations.”

The US Central Command has shared new footage of strikes on Iranian targets on Sunday.

“Iranian combat power declines, as US dominance builds over vast swaths of Iran,” it wrote in a caption to the video.

Five people in Bahrain have been arrested for allegedly collecting and passing on “precise and sensitive information” to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

They were also arrested for “recruiting terrorist elements” in order to carry out plots against Bahrain, the country’s ministry of the interior confirmed on Sunday.

A sixth individual is on the run.

Oil loading operations at the Fujairah port have now resumed, several sources familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.

Earlier on Saturday, a fire broke out at the Fujairah port in the UAE, which had been targeted in an Iranian drone strike, forcing the facility to suspend part of its operations. It is one of the Middle East’s largest oil storage hubs, heightening concerns over already-surging oil prices.

The Fujairah media office said the blaze was sparked by debris from a drone intercepted by air defences and that no injuries were reported.

Lebanese authorities have reported that the death toll in Lebanon has climbed to 850 following Israeli attacks in the south of the country and on its capital Beirut.

Israel issued evacuation orders for several neighbourhoods and said it civilians would be at risk if they did not move.

Spokesperson Avichay Adraee said the warning applies especially to residents of Haret Hreik, Ghobeiry, Lilaki, Hadath, Burj al-Barajneh, Tahwitat al-Ghadir and Chiyah.

Adraee warned that Israel will not hesitate to target “anyone found in the vicinity of Hezbollah operatives”.

“You are putting yourselves and your lives at risk… evacuate the area immediately,” he writes on X.

US energy secretary Chris Wright said on Sunday that he expects the war with Iran to end within “the next few weeks,” with oil supplies rebounding and energy costs declining afterwards.

“I think that this conflict will certainly come to the end in the next few weeks – could be sooner than that. But the conflict will come to the end in the next few weeks, and we’ll see a rebound in supplies and a pushing down in prices after that,” Wright told ABC’s This Week program.

During a call with NBC News on Saturday, Trump boasted that the U.S. military “totally demolished” the island, adding that “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.”

According to the Pentagon, the U.S. military used $11.3 billion worth of munitions in the first week of the war in Iran.

Trump also told NBC News in a 30-minute telephone interview that Iran wanted to negotiate a ceasefire but said that he had not agreed “because the terms aren’t good enough yet.” He did not give details on the supposed offer or what he would consider acceptable except to say that any deal needed to be “very solid” and would involve Iran committing not to build a nuclear weapon.

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