Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth acknowledged that the United States has launched attacks on “key facilities” in Iran as part of ongoing negotiations toward a permanent ceasefire.
Hegseth spoke to reporters in Tampa, Florida, on Wednesday as he left the headquarters of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the military agency that oversees operations in the Middle East and parts of Asia.
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His comments echoed the escalating rhetoric of Republican President Donald Trump, who earlier warned that Iran “will have to pay a price” for taking too long to negotiate.
“CENTCOM (Central Command) is going to be busy tonight because President Trump said he’s going to hit Iran hard, and we will too,” Hegseth said.
He explained that he had just reviewed plans for Wednesday night’s attack with Adm. Bradley Cooper, commander of CENTCOM.
“The attacks that are going to happen tonight will be powerful. They will be obvious,” Hegseth said, before hinting that the attacks could continue into a second day. “If it has to happen tomorrow night, they’ll be strong and they’ll clear up.”
CENTCOM responded to Hegseth’s comments with a social media post announcing “additional self-defense strikes” at 5:15 p.m. ET (9:00 GMT).
“This attack is a response to Iran’s unjust and continued aggression,” the newspaper said.
Within minutes of these comments, Iran’s IRNA media reported that there had been explosions in Bandar Abbas, Qeshm, Gorgan and Hengham. Air defense was also activated in the Fars region.
Wednesday’s attack marks the second consecutive day of U.S. attacks on Iran and threatens to disrupt a fragile cease-fire signed on April 8.
The United States has been at war with Iran since February 28, when the Trump administration joined Israel in an unprovoked attack against Iran.
Israel and the United States say the attack was necessary to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but Tehran has long denied pursuing nuclear weapons.
But the Trump administration has offered contradictory rationales for the war in the months since it began.
At one point, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that the US may have acted “preemptively” because it “knew Israeli action would occur” and wanted to avoid retaliation. Mr. Rubio later recanted those comments.
Hegseth on Wednesday attributed future attacks to dissatisfaction with Iran’s negotiating tactics.
“As President Trump said, they’ve been tap-tap-tap. You can see someone trying to tap-tap-tap an agreement,” he said. “Instead, they are going to drop bombs from the United States on key Iranian facilities.”
Since a temporary ceasefire was announced on April 8, much of the heaviest fighting between the United States and Iran has been suspended.
But this week’s escalation began with the downing of an AH-64 Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday night.
President Trump on Tuesday blamed Iran for the helicopter crash. No U.S. service members were injured, but he said the United States “inevitably must respond to this attack.”
In announcing the second strike, Hegseth denied that the United States was aiming to resume full-scale fighting. Rather, he framed the attack as a means to begin stalled negotiations with Iran, providing a shifting rationale for resuming fighting.
“It’s not because we want to reopen something that doesn’t need to be reopened,” Hegseth said of Wednesday night’s attack. “That’s because the Department of the Army is willing to set conditions to ensure we get the kind of agreement that President Trump expects.”
The two countries are divided over issues such as the fate of Iran’s nuclear program and whether Iran should receive sanctions relief.
President Trump has repeatedly threatened to attack Iranian bridges and energy infrastructure, and once warned that “an entire civilization would be destroyed” as a result of a U.S. attack.
These comments raised human rights concerns. Intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure can be considered a war crime, and critics have likened Trump’s threats against Iranian “civilization” to genocidal rhetoric.
On Wednesday, reporters echoed those concerns to Hegseth.
“You said earlier that you were going to hit them hard tonight,” one reporter asked. “If attacking bridges and power infrastructure is a response, how can potentially targeting civilian infrastructure not be a war crime?”
Hegseth dismissed the question as “disingenuous” and accused the reporter of “blaming the motives” of the U.S. military. But he did not rule out the possibility that civilian infrastructure could be attacked as part of Wednesday’s attack.
Iran has signaled it is not ready to back down and has responded with its own attacks on U.S. military bases in Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain since the first wave of U.S. strikes this week.
Many political commentators pointed to Mr. Hegseth’s comments in Tampa as a sign of a return to “gunboat diplomacy,” the use of military force to pursue political objectives.
“If we have to negotiate with bombs, we will negotiate with bombs,” Hegseth said.
Al Jazeera correspondent Alan Fisher noted that these words marked an important turning point for the Trump administration.
“Many would argue that what happened overnight was certainly more than just a helicopter shootdown,” he says. “Now we seem to have moved into a new phase of what one Republican called the ‘fire of peace.'”
He stressed that the Trump administration has no intention of saying the April 8 ceasefire is over. But he said the administration appears to be trying to use the military strike as leverage to “create the diplomatic space for the deal that President Donald Trump wants.”
