(NewsNation) — U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday that U.S. military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities were a success that obliterated Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
The U.S. strikes included 14 bunker-buster bombs, more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles and over 125 military aircraft, in an operation the top U.S. general, General Dan Caine, said was named “Operation Midnight Hammer.”
The operation pushes the Middle East to the brink of a major new conflagration in a region already aflame for more than 20 months with wars in Gaza and Lebanon and a toppled dictator in Syria.
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“Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been obliterated,” Hegseth told reporters in a briefing, adding that said the strikes did not target Iranian troops or people.
A Pentagon-provided map of the flight path taken by B-2 stealth bombers indicates that their approach to Iran took them over the Mediterranean and then over Israel, Jordan and Iraq.
It is not immediately clear when those three countries were made aware of the flights. Israel has said the U.S. strikes were carried out in coordination with its military. The U.S. said the strikes did not involve Israeli jets.
The Pentagon released the map to journalists as it gave details of the mission, which it described as causing “extremely severe damage and destruction” to three Iranian nuclear sites.
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Hours after Iran’s top diplomat disclosed that the line of communication between Washington and Tehran remains open, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed his remarks in a press conference.
“I can only confirm that there are both public and private messages being directly delivered to the Iranians in multiple channels, giving them every opportunity to come to the table,” Hegseth said.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the time for diplomacy had passed and that his country had the right to defend itself, saying the U.S. had “crossed a very big red line.”
“The warmongering, a lawless administration in Washington is solely and fully responsible for the dangerous consequences and far reaching implications of its act of aggression,” he said at a news briefing at a conference in Turkey in the first comments by a high-ranking Iranian official since the strikes.
Araghchi also said that “there is no red line” that the U.S. has not crossed — and that “the most dangerous one was what happened only last night when they crossed a very big red line by attacking nuclear facilities only.”
