Iranian president also defied U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand for an unconditional surrender.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a direct apology to his country’s neighbors on Saturday as Israeli fighter jets unleashed a massive overnight bombardment on the Iranian capital.
In a prerecorded address broadcast on state television, Pezeshkian said that he would seek to to deescalate tensions with Iran’s neighbors following a week of cross-border missile and drone exchanges.
Pezeshkian also said that a demand by U.S. President Donald Trump for an unconditional surrender is a “dream that they should take to their grave.”
The Iranian president said that the country’s interim leaderhip council, appointed after the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last Saturday, had approved a new directive on responding to military threats, according to a copy of the remarks published by state-controlled broadcaster Press TV.
Under the new policy, Iranian forces are prohibited from targeting neighboring states unless an attack against Iran is launched directly from that country’s territory.
The comments came as intense Iranian fire targeted the Gulf Arab states early Saturday as Israel and the United States kept up their airstrikes targeting the Islamic Republic, the Associated Press reported. There were repeated attacks Saturday morning on Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to the AP report.
After days of mixed signals from the White House on the justifications and aims of the war on Iran, Trump on Friday said his administration’s ultimate goal is “unconditional surrender” by the Islamic Republic’s leaders. Trump later said that “surrender” could be a complete defeat of Iran’s military forces.
“Unconditional surrender could be” an announcement by the Iranian regime, Trump said. “But it could also be when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with,” he told Axios in an interview.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), meanwhile, escalated their bombing campaign of the Iranian capital early Saturday. In a statement, the IDF said that more than 80 fighter jets had completed a “broad-scale” wave of strikes across Tehran and central Iran targeting a military training academy and underground ballistic missile storage sites.