President Donald Trump said today that Iran may be trying to rebuild its weapons capabilities at sites that are different than the ones that the US attacked earlier this year.
“I hope Iran is not trying to build up, as I’ve been reading, that they’re building up weapons and other things,” he said. “If they are, they’re not using the sites that we obliterated, but they’re using possibly different sites.”
Standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump again warned Iran against rebuilding its ballistic missile program and threatened “very powerful” consequences if the nation proceeds. Trump added that while he doesn’t believe Iran has sought to expand its nuclear capabilities, he worried that it “may be behaving badly,” without offering any more specifics.
“If they are, we’re going to have no choice but very quickly to eradicate that buildup,” he said. “We know exactly where they’re going, what they’re doing, and I hope they’re not doing it.”
Trump added later: “This is just what we hear — usually, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
How Iran has responded: We’re hearing from Ali Shamkhani, a top political adviser to the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Under Iran’s defense doctrine, responses are set before threats materialize. Iran’s #Missile_Capability and defense are not containable or permission-based. Any aggression will face an immediate #Harsh_Response beyond its planners’ imagination,” he wrote on X.
This post has been updated with reaction from Iran.