US and Iranian leaders traded further threats on Saturday as the interim deal to end the war buckles under repeated crossfire in the Middle East.
President Donald Trump upped threats of further missile attacks against Iran in a string of comments on his Truth Social that came after senior US officials demanded that Iran make a public statement saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and that ships crossing the vital corridor won't be attacked.
Trump also made the comments after the funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saw open calls for the US leader's killing.
Later Saturday, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei vowed that Iranians would continue to avenge the killing of his father, Ali Khamenei, who was mourned in funeral events throughout Iran this week. He said in remarks carried by state television that such revenge “is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out.”
So far, Tehran has not submitted to US demands over the Strait of Hormuz, instead insisting that the route remain under its control and that it be allowed to charge ships moving through it.
There had been multiple days of US airstrikes targeting Iran, as well as Iranian retaliatory fire targeting nations across the Middle East. Those strikes had been sparked by Iran attacking three ships in the strait earlier this week.
On Truth Social on Friday, Trump declared the ceasefire over but said the US would continue negotiations. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to Oman for more talks on Saturday, a day after Qatari mediators separately traveled to Iran to meet with officials amid the regional strikes.
A thousand “missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat,” Trump wrote on his website.
The US president said he was responding to threats “to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate” him. During Khamenei's funeral, mourners repeatedly held posters or banners calling for him to be killed along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Iran war's opening moments on February 28 saw an airstrike that killed Khamenei, 86. Iran only buried Khamenei this week following a dayslong funeral ceremony that saw his body taken to cities in both Iran and Iraq.
Trump added in his post that the US military would “completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran — PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”
Trump, repeatedly during the war and its uneasy ceasefire, has invoked the name of God in Arabic, as well as threatened to destroy Iran's very civilisation. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a nationwide advocacy group, has in the past criticised Trump's “deranged mocking of Islam.”