Middle East violence escalates as Trump rejects Iran's overture for dialogue

Israel and the United States stepped up their assaults on Iran on Tuesday, dispatching successive waves of strikes aimed at command centres, key government offices and missile launch installations, while Donald Trump announced he had dismissed what he described as Tehran’s bid to revive talks.

Iran answered with hundreds of missile and drone barrages directed at Israel and throughout the Gulf area, hitting U.S. military installations, diplomatic missions and civilian infrastructure.

Even amid heightened global alarm, prospects for calming the hostilities seemed slim as fighting and disorder spread across an expanding zone of the Middle East for a fourth consecutive day.

Casualties number in the hundreds, chiefly in Iran, where the Red Crescent reported 787 fatalities and thousands more wounded.

Damage worth billions of dollars has been inflicted on oil refineries, tankers, airports, upscale hotels and other assets, while the global economy faces a serious threat as energy prices climb.

“Their air defence, Air Force, Navy and leadership are gone. They want to talk. I said ‘Too Late!’,” the U.S. president posted on his Truth Social account, adding that America was ready “to go far longer” than a four‑ to five‑week conflict with Iran.

Speaking later at the White House with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, he remarked: “Almost everything has been knocked out.”

Trump rejected the claim that Israel had compelled him to start the war, though he admitted fearing a “worst‑case scenario” in Iran where “someone takes over who is as bad as the previous person.”

Iran’s envoy to the United Nations in Geneva denied on Tuesday that Tehran had sought negotiations with the United States.

Among the sites struck in fresh U.S. and Israeli air raids on Tehran and other major Iranian cities was a building used by the council of senior clerics tasked with selecting a successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose killing by Israeli aircraft on Saturday sparked the conflict.

It was unclear whether the structure was occupied at the moment of the attack.

“The American‑Zionist criminals hit the Assembly of Experts building in Qom,” south of Tehran, the state news agency Tasnim reported.

Iran’s foreign ministry asserted that the UN Security Council had an obligation to intervene to halt the war, while its armed forces remained openly defiant.

A Revolutionary Guard spokesperson warned that “the gates of hell will open more and more” against the United States and Israel.

The U.S. embassy in Riyadh, damaged and briefly set ablaze overnight by an Iranian drone strike, cautioned on Tuesday of an imminent assault on the eastern Saudi city of Dhahran, home to most of the kingdom’s oil and gas facilities along the Gulf coast.

Economic targets elsewhere in the Gulf also came under fire as Iran persisted in launching retaliatory drone and missile volleys at neighboring states.