Iran War Live Updates: Trump Berates Allies While Signaling He Will Wind Down the War

Mr. Albanese — delivering the first such address since the pandemic — tried to reassure Australians that the country was prepared to weather the looming economic challenges from the Iran war.

The country now imports the vast majority of its fuel and the national average price for retail gasoline has risen about 40 percent, according to an industry group. Farmers in the country are also reeling from high fuel prices.

Mr. Albanese spoke for just under three-and-a-half minutes. He did not mention the United States, Israel or Iran by name.

Here are some highlights:

“The reality is, the economic shocks caused by this war will be with us for months.”

“You should go about your business and your life, as normal.”

“Enjoy your Easter. If you’re hitting the road, don’t take more fuel than you need — just fill up like you normally would. Think of others in your community, in the bush and in critical industries.”

“And over coming weeks, if you can switch to catching the train or bus or tram to work, do so. That builds our reserves and it saves fuel for people who have no choice but to drive.”

Mr. Albanese reiterated previously announced efforts to cut taxes on gasoline and diesel, and to ensure fuel supplies.

Reviewing the prime minister’s speech, Jill Sheppard, an associate professor in politics at the Australian National University, said, “I don’t know that it’s done much to assuage Australians concerns.”

It was unclear why Mr. Albanese chose to make an address on Wednesday. One reason, Ms. Sheppard said, could be that he wanted to ensure that people behave at the gas pump ahead of the Easter holiday.

A month into the war with Iran, millions of Israelis are still rushing into bomb shelters day and night. Schools and many businesses are shuttered. Israelis were wishing each other a “quiet” or “tranquil” holiday this week, though many said they expected it to be anything but. A barrage of missiles Wednesday morning injured 14 people in central Israel, including an 11-year-old girl who was severely wounded, according to medical officials.

A hotel at the Dead Sea, in an area of southern Israel that has largely been spared from incoming fire, was advertising itself as “a protected space for a quiet and pleasant stay.”

Synagogue services around the country were to be limited to a few dozen congregants because of a ban on large public gatherings.

Adding to the somber mood, the Israeli military announced on Tuesday that four of its soldiers had been killed during combat with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. That brought the March death toll for Israeli soldiers in that area to 10 as Israel expanded its ground invasion.

The Seder is traditionally a joyful gathering of family and friends. Together, they follow a ritual order of blessings over symbolic foods as they retell the biblical story of the ancient Israelites’ liberation from bondage in Egypt.

For traditional and observant Jews, the days leading up to Passover are generally a hectic whirl of spring cleaning, shopping for gifts and clearing the house of all traces of leavened goods, which are forbidden during the festival.

The atmosphere appeared more subdued this year, with people afraid to stray far from their homes and shelters.

“We are taking a more relaxed approach, partaking less in the usual carnival,” said Yifat Bonen, 47, who was shopping for a holiday gift on Tuesday in an eerily empty mall in Jerusalem.

“We are focusing more on the essence of the holiday,” she said, adding that she had two children serving in the army. “This year will be more intimate, and more about people than things.”

The prohibition on leavened goods is meant to commemorate the Israelites’ hasty exodus from Egypt. According to the Torah, their rapid departure left no time for their dough to rise.

Matzo, the unleavened wafers eaten on Passover in place of bread, must be made quickly — ideally within 18 minutes — before the dough of flour and water has a chance to rise.

In Kiryat Shmona, a city near Israel’s northern border with Lebanon that has come under intense rocket fire in recent weeks, an artisanal producer of handmade matzo told Israeli news media that he had had to throw away many batches that had been interrupted by rocket alerts and spells in a bomb shelter.

Typically, Passover is a major travel holiday, with many Israelis going abroad and tourists coming to Israel. This year, travel has been severely disrupted: Only one international airport in the country is operating, and its capacity is extremely limited by military needs and the risk from missile fire.

Instead, thousands of Israelis have been leaving by one of the few alternative routes — the land border into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. According to the Book of Exodus, it is on that desert peninsula that Israelites arrived to freedom after escaping slavery in ancient Egypt.

It was not immediately clear what message Mr. Trump intended to deliver in his national address, and he has left open the potential for escalating military action. But he and top aides have increasingly been suggesting that he sees justification for claiming to have achieved his main objectives and would like to extricate the United States from the conflict.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump would be providing “an important update” on the war.

Mr. Trump told reporters that he had attained his goal of dealing with Iran’s nuclear program and that gasoline prices in the United States would come down as soon as the United States ended the conflict, which he said would be soon. Dealing with the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, choking off the global energy trade, was a problem for other countries to deal with, Mr. Trump said.

In a video published on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to make the case that Mr. Trump had succeeded in his primary goal of keeping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon. But Mr. Rubio’s argument was built on the assertion that degrading Iran’s conventional weapons was enough to keep Tehran from building a bomb.

“That is the goal of this operation, to destroy their conventional missiles and their drone program so they can’t hide behind it,” Mr. Rubio said.

But even as the administration sent signals of de-escalation, Mr. Trump has left open the possibility of military escalation as U.S. forces continue to reach the region.

While Mr. Trump has touted that the military has hit more than 11,000 targets, Iran still has near-bomb-grade nuclear material at the Isfahan site. The president is weighing whether to approve a risky operation to seize or destroy the material.

Mr. Trump has also floated the idea of invading or attacking Kharg Island, the heart of Iran’s oil export capacity in the Persian Gulf, or seizing other islands in the gulf to help restore the flow of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has used as a choke point for Middle East oil shipments.

At the same time, Mr. Trump continues to suggest that a negotiated settlement with Tehran is possible, though not necessary for the United States to step back from the war that it has been waging alongside Israel for the last month.

But Mr. Trump has yet to fully achieve many of the goals he set out when he entered the conflict, including ousting the theocratic government in Iran and ensuring that it could never achieve a nuclear weapon. Nor has he resolved problems created by the war, including the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the increased regional instability caused by Iran’s missile attacks on neighboring countries.

Mr. Rubio on Monday stated four goals for the war in interviews with ABC News and Al Jazeera. An official State Department account posted on social media a video clip from one of the interviews and a bullet-point list of the goals, saying: “You should write them down.”

The goals were the destruction of Iran’s air force, the destruction of its navy, the “severe diminishing” of its capability to launch missiles, and the destruction of its factories.

Absent from the list are some of the goals that Mr. Trump has stated recently: “regime change,” seizing Iran’s oil, forcing the Iranian military to allow ships through the Strait of Hormuz and completely eradicating Iran’s nuclear program, which includes stockpiles of highly enriched uranium buried in underground sites that were struck by American bombs last summer.

Mr. Rubio’s list of four goals — all conventional and relatively modest — was similar to a list of three objectives he put out on March 9, in the second week of the war, with two notable differences: the addition of the destruction of Iran’s air force, and also a walking back of an earlier stated goal to “destroy their ability to launch missiles.” The new phrase, “severe diminishing” of that capability, indicates that U.S. officials no longer think it is feasible to completely destroy Iran’s missile program.

In laying out the four goals, Mr. Rubio appeared to be giving Mr. Trump an off-ramp that the president could decide to take. Mr. Trump could say the United States had achieved the goals and end U.S. combat operations, even if Israel, Saudi Arabia and some other Arab nations in the region are pressing him to continue the conflict until the violence forces a deeper structural change to Iran’s government and leadership.

“We will achieve those objectives,” Mr. Rubio said on Al Jazeera about the four goals. “We are well on our way or ahead of schedule. We will achieve them in weeks, not months.”

But White House officials, including Ms. Leavitt, the press secretary, have reiterated the president’s more expansive goals of dismantling Iran’s missile and drone production infrastructure, weakening their proxies and preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the United States had already accomplished “regime change,” even though a theocratic leadership that is authoritarian and anti-American remains in place.

“We’ve knocked out one regime, then we knocked out the second regime,” Mr. Trump said. “Now we have a group of people that are very different, they are much more reasonable, I think, much less radicalized. We have had regime change.”

If Mr. Trump does follow through on his threat to end the military campaign without reopening the Strait, he will leave the global economy in disarray. Oil prices have skyrocketed around the world, including in the United States, and European officials are urging countries to cut back on energy use.

But Mr. Trump, who said on Tuesday that “all I have to do is leave Iran” for oil prices to drop, has put the onus on other countries, including NATO allies, to reopen the strait.

“Build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT,” he wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday morning. “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!”

Several of Mr. Trump’s top aides, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have joined him in narrowing the war objectives in recent days, presumably to give the president space to declare victory and pull back from the conflict. When Mr. Rubio this week sketched out four major objectives — telling an interviewer to “write them down” — he made no mention at all of halting Iran’s nuclear program. (The State Department on Tuesday issued a video in which Mr. Rubio celebrated the smashing of the “shield” of missiles and drones that had protected the country’s nuclear infrastructure.)

But the country’s nuclear ambitions were the central argument for going to war when Mr. Trump announced the commencement of the military operation on Feb 28. In a speech to the nation that morning, Mr. Trump said he initiated “major combat operations” in part because Iran had “attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland.”

Dropping the elimination of the nuclear program from the administration’s list of strategic goals, or declaring the problem solved when Iran retains control over its nuclear fuel, now poses a factual, political and rhetorical challenge.

Unless something changes over the next two weeks — the target Mr. Trump set to begin withdrawing from the conflict — he will have left the Iranians with 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough for 10 to a dozen bombs. The country will retain control over an even larger inventory of medium-enriched uranium that, with further enrichment, could be turned into bomb fuel, if the Iranians can rebuild that capacity after a month of steady bombing.

Mr. Trump’s statement to reporters on Tuesday could of course be strategic deception. The United States and Israel have both been planning and rehearsing raids on Iranian sites at Isfahan and Natanz, the two locations where most of Iran’s near-bomb-grade stockpiles are believed to be buried. They were both hit in U.S. air attacks last June. And while there is evidence that the Iranians regained access to the Isfahan site, where international inspectors believed the vast majority of the fuel to be stored, there is no indication that any of it has been removed.

“We have seen no evidence” that the material left the site before or after the June attack, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said during a visit to Washington two weeks ago. Mr. Grossi visited the Isfahan site in 2024, but has not been able to inspect it since the June bombing.

“One cannot deny that this has really rolled back the program significantly,” he told CBS News in an interview broadcast earlier this month. “But my impression is that once the military effort comes to an end, we will still inherit a number of major issues that have been at the center of all this.”

Mr. Grossi added that while some nuclear sites had been struck in the latest wave of attacks, they had been “relatively marginal” to the overall Israeli and U.S. effort.

Just a few weeks ago, the administration was actively debating sending in Special Operations forces to seize the material, stored in 30 to 50 canisters. But the operation would be among the riskiest of commando raids. Isfahan is hundreds of miles inland, and presumed to be guarded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or I.R.G.C., which runs Iran’s covert nuclear efforts.

While officials said last week that the president had still made no decision about the operation, they acknowledged that the risk of many U.S. and Israeli casualties had caused officials to reconsider their earlier enthusiasm for seizing the material or seeking to destroy it.

And, if real negotiations begin, the United States may convince Iran to give up the material. That is what happened in 2015, when the Obama administration negotiated a deal in which Iran shipped about 97 percent of its nuclear stockpile to Russia. That left the country with so little material that intelligence estimates concluded Iran would require at least a year to make the fuel for a weapon, and months or years longer for the device itself.

Mr. Trump exited that accord in 2018, calling it one of the worst in history. But if he leaves Iran without getting the uranium out of the country, he will open himself to the criticism that he accomplished less than Mr. Obama did.

Mr. Trump’s statement on Tuesday afternoon suggested, for the first time, that he was ready to live with the status quo, and leave it to one of his successors to deal with.

“In a fairly short period of time we’ll be finished,” he said. “They will not be able to do a nuclear weapon for years, and when they are ready, maybe in a long time from now, able to do a nuclear weapon, you’ll have a president that will be like me, and that he will go there and he’ll knock the hell out of them again.”

It was the latest example of how Mr. Trump dials up and dials down the nuclear threat to fit his immediate agenda. A few weeks ago, he overstated how quickly the material stored underground could be turned into a weapon, telling reporters that Iran had been “within one month” of being able to make a nuclear weapon before he ordered the bombing last June. (Experts note that while Iran could have enriched that fuel to bomb grade within a month, it would have taken months, maybe a year, to make a crude weapon.)

In fact, before the war broke out on Feb. 28 with the combined U.S. and Israeli attack, most intelligence officials said they saw little imminent risk that Iran could race for a bomb. Now, Mr. Trump seems to be saying that they are years away, and that it will be another president’s problem.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Tuesday that Israel was “openly and unashamedly bombing pharmaceutical companies.”

The Israeli military said in a statement late in the day that it had struck the Tofigh Daru factory, claiming the facility was secretly supplying a potentially deadly drug to the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research of Iran, which Israel says is responsible for developing chemical weapons.

The Israeli military said that the factory, “presented itself as a civilian company” but that it was a false front.

Iranian officials offered a different account.

Dr. Mahdi Pirsalehi, deputy minister of health and president of the Food and Drug Administration, described the strike to Iranian state media as “an attempt to disrupt the country’s health care system.”

Mr. Pirsalehi said the company was “one of the most important producers of raw materials for hospital medications and drugs used in operating rooms,” and that raw materials for some cancer medications were also produced there.

Israel claimed the drug being provided to the chemical weapons unit was the anesthetic fentanyl, which is deadly at high doses.

Tofigh Daru is owned by Iran’s largest pension fund. “The company in question belongs to the nation’s retirees,” Mr. Pirsalehi said, “and this action has targeted the health and lives of people.”

For years, U.S. sanctions on Iran have made it nearly impossible for foreign pharmaceutical companies to continue working in the country, forcing the majority of medicine production to be done domestically.

Under international humanitarian law, commanders must distinguish between military and civilian targets.

Experts say that even if a company could be considered “dual use,” working on both civilian and military projects, there is still an obligation to weigh proportionality. That means commanders must consider whether the potential damage to civilian property or harm to people would outweigh any anticipated military gain. The military must also work to mitigate civilian harm and minimize damage if the attack does proceed.

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, head of an economic think tank, the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, which tracks the Iranian economy, said a dual-use argument would not hold up if an entire site was demolished.

“If you’re destroying a pharmaceutical facility,” he said, “even if you could identify that certain chemicals might be used for military purposes, it doesn’t really matter. Because it’s not even collateral damage. The primary damage is civilian. The collateral is military.”

The Israeli military in its statement said that it had taken “precautionary measures” to minimize possible harm to civilians “to the extent possible.”

“I’m extremely worried about her; she needs to be taken to the hospital immediately,” said Mr. Rahmani. “I want her to be free, but right now I’m worried about her life. The very least the government can do is allow her a proper treatment at a hospital in Tehran.”

Mr. Rahmani said the couple’s twins, Ali and Kianna, had not heard the news about their mother yet, and he worried how they would take it. They have not seen her since they left Iran as small children to live with their father, who is a prominent political activist.

The family learned of Ms. Mohammadi’s heart attack on Tuesday, he said, after her lawyer visited with her in prison two days earlier. The visit followed weeks of a communication breakdown with her because of the war and the denial of requests for an in-person visit. The legal team described her health as “critical” in a statement released by her foundation.

It took more than an hour for Ms. Mohammadi to regain consciousness after she collapsed, and her fellow inmates had wrapped her in a blanket because her body had turned cold, the statement said. In February, she went on a hunger strike to protest her unjust detention.

Mr. Rahmani said that before the heart attack, she had received threats to her life in prison from other inmates who supported the Islamic republic’s system.

Ms. Mohammadi, known for her bold and relentless advocacy for democracy, has spent much of her adult life in and out of prison in Iran’s authoritative theocracy. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of threatening national security for her decades-long work promoting human rights, women’s rights and democracy in Iran. In 2023, while she was imprisoned, the Nobel Committee awarded her the Peace Prize, saying it was in recognition of “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.”

Ms. Mohammadi was furloughed from Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in December 2024 after receiving surgery. But in early December last year, she was arrested in the city of Mashhad while attending the memorial service of a lawyer and rights activist. She delivered a fiery speech at the funeral while standing on the roof of a car before a crowd of hundreds of attendees gathered in the street.

“We swear by the blood of our comrades, we are standing until the end,” she said in her speech. The crowd chanted with her: “Standing until the end.”

The session before the House Armed Services Committee serves as the annual budget hearing for the Pentagon, according to a congressional aide with knowledge of it, a routine affair during which a cabinet secretary lays out his department’s budget needs for the upcoming year. But with Democrats in both chambers demanding public testimony on the war for weeks now and the G.O.P. so far declining to schedule any oversight hearings, lawmakers and aides expect it to center on the combat operations in the Middle East, whose costs are skyrocketing.

Democrats on the Armed Services Committee warned in recent days that failing to call Mr. Hegseth to testify on the war was unacceptable.

“Given the complexity and gravity of this conflict, it is imperative that it receive its own hearing, separate and apart” from the annual budget hearing, 27 Democrats wrote in a letter on Friday to Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the Republican chairman of the committee. They cited the “ever-shifting strategic and operational objectives of the conflict and lack of clarity” on whether the president would deploy ground troops.

Republicans have robustly supported the attacks as necessary and legal, but some have suggested they would expect the administration to seek congressional authorization if the war dragged past the 60-day mark.

For weeks, Republicans have ignored calls from their Democratic counterparts for senior members of the Trump administration to testify under oath on the combat operations. Democrats have accused Mr. Trump and his advisers of haphazard war planning and keeping lawmakers in the dark about the timeline and costs of the campaign, whether ground troops will be needed and what the plan is to draw the conflict to a close.

A handful of Republicans, including Mr. Rogers, signaled last week that they too are growing concerned with Congress being sidelined as the war dragged into its second month.

But Mr. Rogers, who as chairman has the authority to call Mr. Hegseth to testify at any time on the war, has not done so, nor has Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs his chamber’s Armed Services Committee.

Republican leaders have repeatedly said budget hearings would be the venue for Democrats to question members of the cabinet on the war, and shown no willingness to call Mr. Hegseth or Secretary of State Marco Rubio to testify any sooner or in any other format.

Mr. Trump has said he wants to raise the Pentagon’s budget by more than half in 2027, increasing military spending to $1.5 trillion. But members of Congress still have no clear understanding of how the war will impact that spending goal.

Some Republican lawmakers who visited the Pentagon last week to meet with department officials on their budget request and asked for an official accounting of how much money was being spent on the war each day said they could not obtain one.

“I wish I did,” Representative Jodey Arrington of Texas, the chairman of the Budget Committee, said in an interview. “I know it exists.”