President Trump has ordered a fresh attack on Iran aimed at getting Tehran to surrender that could begin as soon as this weekend and would last a few days, U.S. officials said.
Earlier on Friday, he told reporters that he planned to resume heavy military strikes to force the regime to come to the negotiating table. He predicted that if the U.S. hit Iran hard enough, the hard-line regime would eventually “peter out.”
“We will be hitting them very hard,” Trump said Friday at the televised cabinet meeting. “And you know at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”
His comments, made during a cabinet meeting at the Camp David presidential retreat, were in contrast to his insistence earlier this week that “very friendly negotiations” were under way, enabling a pause on military operations. Since then, Iran launched a surprise attack on troops in Jordan, triggering a U.S. retaliatory attack on Wednesday.
The official said that the Gaza agreement is a phased agreement which must be implemented by stages.
Gunmen stand guard at the funeral of Marwan Issa, a senior Hamas deputy military commander who was killed in an Israeli airstrike during the conflict between Israel and Hamas, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in the central Gaza Strip, February 7, 2025.(photo credit: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed)
ByREUTERSJULY 31, 2026 10:51
Updated: JULY 31, 2026 11:06
If Israel does not approve and endorse the Board of Peace’s disarmament deal with Hamas, the terror group will refuse to implement it, a Hamas official told Reuters on Friday.
The official said that the Gaza agreement is a phased agreement which must be implemented by stages.
Once both sides approve the agreement text, the official said, Israel must begin implementing the first phase, including withdrawing its forces from Gaza.
The official also told Reuters that the Palestinian National Committee and International Task Force must enter Gaza, and that Hamas would hand over its weapons to it dependent on Israel endorsing the agreement.
A United States Air Force F-16 fighter jet patrols the skies over the Middle East, July 2026. Credit: U.S. Central Command.
(July 30, 2026 / JNS)
The U.S. military launched what it described as a “heavy wave of strikes” against Iranian targets on Wednesday, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump warned Washington would be “hitting them hard” in response to Tehran’s recent attacks on American forces.
U.S. Central Command said the “powerful response,” which lasted for some two hours, hit dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sites across the Islamic Republic. According to CENTCOM, it struck military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites, as well as maritime capabilities. The military said the strikes were intended to further reduce threats posed by the Islamic regime and its regional proxies to U.S. forces, commercial shipping and neighboring Gulf states.
The operation followed what CENTCOM described as an “attempted surprise attack” on July 28, when the IRGC fired multiple ballistic missiles at U.S. forces across the region.
All the Iranian missiles were intercepted and no casualties or damage was reported.
Earlier on Wednesday, Trump on threatened further military action against Iran in response to the renewed attacks.
“We’re going to beat the f***ing sh** out of them,” Trump said in a phone interview with Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst. “We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating,” the president added.
The IRGC threatened on Thursday morning that “the aggressor will be punished today,” adding that any country assisting the U.S. militarily would face a “harsh response,” according to Iran’s state-run IRNA outlet.
Earlier on Thursday, the Islamic Republic launched missile and drone strikes on Jordan and Kuwait, the two countries said. The assault targeting Kuwait hit a building belonging to a Chinese company in northern Kuwait, the country’s defense ministry said in a post on X. The attack killed a worker at the facility and inflicted “significant” damage, the post added.
In Jordan, air defenses intercepted five Iranian ballistic missiles on Thursday, a military source told the Hashemite Kingdom’s official Petra News Agency. The missiles were shot down “efficiently and professionally, resulting in the thwarting of the attempted targeting of the kingdom’s territory, without any human casualties being recorded,” the source said.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian government said on Thursday that an initial investigation found that a drone caused a fire aboard two ships at Damietta Port in northern Egypt a day earlier. No party has claimed responsibility, but Iranian sources have told The New York Times that the attack was “designed to show that global shipping and energy supplies could be more deeply disrupted if Iran chose to escalate.”
Tehran is widely presumed to be behind the drone strike.
