The commander of the Aerospace Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Thursday mocked threats wielded by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Trump as "Hollywood illusions," and warned that any effort to destroy Iran would result in the deaths of more American forces.

Re-posting a short message that Hegseth shared Wednesday on X, in which the defense chief repeated Mr. Trump's threat to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" if it doesn't capitulate to end the 33-day war, Chief Brigadier General Seyed Majid Moosavi said, "Hollywood illusions have infected your thinking so much that with a meager 250-year history, you are threatening a civilization that is over 6,000 years old."

"It is you who are taking your soldiers to the grave, not Iran, who you want to return to the Stone Age," he said.

The United Arab Emirates Ministry of Defense said the country's air defenses intercepted 19 Iranian missiles and 26 drones on Thursday, following President Trump's remarks the previous night in which he again claimed Iran's ability to launch missiles and drones had been "dramatically curtailed" by a month of U.S.-Israeli strikes.

The Jordanian Armed Forces intercepted an Iranian missile, also, the kingdom's government said Thursday.

The UAE and Jordan said all of Iran's latest attacks were intercepted, and they reported no new casualties from falling debris.

Israel's military said Thursday that it had struck "dozens of headquarters, weapons storage facilities, launch sites, and anti-tank missile positions" belonging to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group in Lebanon over the last 24 hours. 

The IDF said it would continue to "operate decisively against the Hezbollah terror organization" in Lebanon "to remove the threat posed to Israeli civilians."

Israel rapidly stepped up its operations in Lebanon in parallel with its joint strikes with the U.S. against Iran, as Hezbollah joined Iran in launching retaliatory missile and drone attacks at Israel. 

Israeli forces had launched raids into southern Lebanon for years, during the war against Hamas in Gaza, and then as the current Iran war began, but the operations have expanded significantly in recent weeks.

Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz said Tuesday that the IDF would establish a security zone inside Lebanon after the Iran war "and will maintain security control over the entire area up to the Litani," referring to a river that runs east-west about 20 miles north of the Israeli-Lebanese border.

Katz said hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians ordered by Israel's military to evacuate northward over the last month from the area would be "completely prevented" from returning to their homes until the security of northern Israeli residents is guaranteed. 

He added that "all the houses in the villages adjacent to the border in Lebanon will be demolished," mirroring actions by Israel in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

As of Wednesday, the Lebanese Ministry of Health said at least 1,318 people had been killed by Israel's operations in the country since the Iran war began, including 125 children and 91 women.

Iran's army claimed Thursday to have "intercepted and successfully destroyed" two U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones, a day after U.S. officials told CBS News the American military had lost a total of 16 of the aircraft during the war.

"In the last few hours, two enemy American-Zionist MQ-9 drones were intercepted and successfully destroyed by the Army's air defense systems in Shiraz," the army said in a post on its Telegram channel, which included a photo showing purported drone wreckage.

Two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told CBS News on Wednesday that the U.S. military had lost two more MQ-9 Reaper drones near Isfahan, in central Iran, bringing the total to 16 lost since the U.S. and Israel launched their war on Iran. The officials did not say exactly when the two drones were lost.

Isfahan is about 200 miles north of Shiraz, but it was not immediately clear if the U.S. officials may have been referring to the same two drones Iran claimed to have shot down on Thursday, though Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a separate claim on Monday to have "intercepted and destroyed" an MQ-9 over Isfahan.

Depending on the variant, a single Reaper can cost upwards of $30 million. 

President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have said repeatedly that Iran's air defenses and missile launch capabilities have been virtually wiped out during a month of relentless U.S.-Israeli strikes.

The Iranian army said in its post Thursday that it had shot down a total of 154 U.S. and Israeli drones since the war began.

Pakistan's government is still actively pursuing "diplomatic efforts for cessation of hostilities in the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and Iran," the country's foreign ministry said Thursday.

Ministry spokesman Tahir Andrabi said the country, which has been acting as an intermediary between the Trump administration and leaders in Iran, had the "full support" of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Kuwait "on prospects of potential U.S.-Iran talks in Islamabad."

Andrabi said those nations and Pakistan had reaffirmed their "unity to contain the situation, reduce the risk of military escalations, and create conditions and structures for negotiations between relevant parties," calling diplomacy "the only viable pathway to prevent conflicts and promote harmony."

Andrabi said Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had spoken on the phone with his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian and briefed him on Pakistan's peace initiative "stressed the need to build trust in order to facilitate talks and mediation."

President Trump claimed Wednesday, before his evening address to the nation, that Iran's president had asked for a ceasefire, but Tehran quickly denied it. Both the Trump administration and Tehran have expressed a desire for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, but their respective demands appear far apart, and Iran denies any direct negotiations have taken place.

China said Thursday that ongoing U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran were the "root cause" of the Strait of Hormuz blockage, after President Trump called on affected countries to seize the key shipping lane and blamed Iran for its de facto closure.

"The root cause of interruptions to navigation through the Strait of Hormuz is the United States and Israel's illegal military operations against Iran," Beijing's foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a news conference, when asked about Mr. Trump's comments.

The U.S. president said Wednesday night that countries that receive oil through the strait "must take care of that passage," urging them to "just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves."

Iran has, through relentless missile and drone attacks across the Persian Gulf in retaliation for the war the U.S. and Israel launched on Feb. 28, paralyzed commercial maritime traffic through the strait, which links the oil exporting nations of the Gulf with the Arabian sea and the lucrative Asian energy markets beyond.

Tehran says the strait is open to vessels not linked to the U.S. or Israel, but it has begun charging steep fees to ships for passage, and a recent analysis shows the majority of tankers transiting the waterway over the last month have been Iranian or Iranian-linked.

CBS/AFP

Oil prices were sharply higher following Mr. Trump's Wednesday evening remarks. Brent crude, the international standard, jumped 6.9% to $108.15 per barrel before early Thursday. 

Benchmark U.S. crude rose 6.4% to $106.55 a barrel.

While renewed optimism earlier Wednesday for a possible end to the Iran war had pushed world stocks higher, after Mr. Trump's Wednesday night address, Asian markets were down sharply on Thursday along with U.S. futures.

Tokyo's Nikkei 225 fell 2.4% to 52,463.27. South Korea's Kospi lost 4.5% to 5,234.05. Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 1.3% to 24,965.07, and the Shanghai Composite index was down 0.9% to 3,913.88. Taiwan's Taiex was trading 1.8% lower, while India's Sensex lost 1.9%.

Australia's S&P/ASX 200 dropped 1.1% to 8,579.50.

U.S. futures were down more than 1.2% ahead of Thursday trading.

"The market has shown disappointment because the speech President Trump made was far less than what the market expected," said Takashi Hiroki, chief strategist at Monex in Tokyo. "There were no concrete details about the end of the hostilities with Iran."

"What the market wants is a clear outline for the ceasefire," he said.

CBS/AP

Hours before Mr. Trump delivered his address on Wednesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian posted an open letter in English on his X account appealing directly to Americans and stressing that his country had tried to negotiate before the U.S. halted diplomacy and launched the ongoing war. 

"Attacking Iran's vital infrastructure — including energy and industrial facilities — directly targets the Iranian people," Pezeshkian said. "Beyond constituting a war crime, such actions carry consequences that extend far beyond Iran's borders."

They sow "instability, increase human and economic costs," and plant "seeds of resentment that will endure for years," he continued.

"Exactly which of the American people's interests are truly being served by this war?"

Casting the conflict as costly for both sides, Pezeshkian asked if there had been "any objective threat from Iran to justify such behavior," as Israel and the Trump administration have insisted, and he questioned whether Washington entered the war "as a proxy for Israel, influenced and manipulated by that regime."

"Is 'America First' truly among the priorities of the U.S. government today?" Pezeshkian asked.

In remarks he later walked back, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 2, three days into the war, that the Trump administration "knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an [Iranian] attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher [number of] those killed, and then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn't act."

CBS/AFP

At least two people were wounded Thursday as Iran and its regional proxy forces launched another wave of missiles at northern Israel, medics said.

A spokesperson for the national Magen David Adom rescue agency said paramedics were providing treatment and transporting to a local hospital two men with relatively minor shrapnel wounds in the country's far north, not far from the border of Lebanon, from where Iranian-backed Hezbollah has launched repeated rocket attacks.

Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Defense said the kingdom's air defenses intercepted at least four Iranian drones Thursday morning, as Iran continued its attacks on Israel and America's Persian Gulf allies after President Trump repeated his assertion that the Islamic Republic "has been eviscerated." 

Iran's combined military command dismissed President Trump's assessment of the Islamic Republic's remaining capabilities as "incomplete," vowing Thursday to continue fighting against the U.S. and Israel to inflict "permanent regret and surrender."

A spokesman for Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya central military headquarters was quoted by Iran's Tasnim news agency as saying the regime would deliver "more crushing, broader and more destructive" attacks.

Spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaqari's remarks matched rhetoric used by President Trump in his Wednesday night prime-time address, when the U.S. leader vowed Iran would be hit "extremely hard" over the coming weeks, but insisted that its military capacity was "essentially decimated" and the U.S. was on track to achieve its objectives in the war.

In a post on the Telegram messaging app, Zolfaqari reiterated his claim that U.S. "information about our military power, capabilities, and equipment is incomplete," adding a warning not to "be under the illusion that you have destroyed our centers for producing strategic missiles, long-range attack drones, modern air defense and electronic warfare systems, and special equipment, because with such a notion, you will only deepen the quagmire in which you have trapped yourselves."

The U.S. embassy in Baghdad warned Thursday that pro-Iran armed groups in Iraq may attack the city in the coming one or two days.

"Iraqi terrorist militia groups aligned with Iran may intend to conduct attacks in central Baghdad in the next 24-48 hours," the embassy said in a statement posted on social media, again urging Americans in the country to leave immediately.

The warning came two days after American journalist Shelly Kittleson was kidnapped in broad daylight in the Iraqi capital. Two sources familiar with the matter confirmed her abduction to CBS News, as well as an Iraqi official.

Alex Plitsas, Kittleson's designated point of contact in the U.S. and a CNN national security analyst, said Kittleson was kidnapped after being warned by the U.S. government about a specific threat against her by the Iranian-backed paramilitary group Kata'ib Hezbollah, which was allegedly looking to kidnap or kill female journalists. 

Dylan Johnson, an assistant secretary of state for global public affairs, confirmed in a post on X that a suspect taken into custody by Iraqi authorities in connection with Kittleson's abduction had ties to Kata'ib Hezbollah. 

President Trump said in a prime-time address Wednesday night that the U.S. would achieve its military objectives in Iran "very shortly," adding that U.S. forces have already achieved "overwhelming victories," but he did not offer a definitive timeline as questions swirl about when and how the war could wrap up.

The president, in his roughly 19-minute address from the White House, said the U.S. will hit Iran "extremely hard" over the next two to three weeks. He also renewed his threat to obliterate Iran's electric power plants and target its oil infrastructure if the country's leaders don't make a deal to end the war. 

"I've made clear from the beginning of Operation Epic Fury that we will continue until our objectives are fully achieved," the president said. "Thanks to the progress we've made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America's military objectives shortly, very shortly. We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong."

Read more here.