Trump Says U.S. and Iran to Meet; White House Disputes Damage Report

Israelis were heading back to their offices after days of absences when the military had ordered nonessential workers to stay home, while residents of Tehran, who had fled intense Israeli bombardments on the Iranian capital, began returning home.

In Iran, fears swirled over whether the war would be followed by a harsh government crackdown on critics in an effort to reassert control over the country.

“My family and I fear both the war and the cease-fire equally,” said Maryam, 35. The reason, she said: “We know that after a cease-fire, we’ll be left with humiliated, vengeful mullahs seeking retribution.”

Maryam, speaking from her Caspian Sea hometown, Bandar Anzali, said it was still crowded there with those who had fled the bombings in Tehran. She and other Iranians who spoke to The New York Times on Wednesday asked to be identified by their first names to avoid drawing the attention of the authorities.

Israel and Iran have each declared victory, though doubts hung over their claims.

Israel killed a number of Iranian security chiefs and, joined by the United States, inflicted damage on a string of nuclear sites. More than 600 people were killed in the Israeli attacks and thousands wounded, according to the Iranian health ministry.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, hailed the Israeli offensive as “a great victory in the campaign against the enemy who sought our destruction.” But for Israel and its American allies, questions were already emerging whether the war had dealt a decisive blow to Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon, or only set it back a short time.

Asal, a 21-year-old Iranian woman who works in marketing, said some aspects of life were reverting back to prewar rhythms. Traffic clogs the roads as many return to work. But, she said, even the sound of a motorcycle now makes her flinch, reminding her of missiles.

“We’re left wondering what happens next to us,” Asal said. The regime, she said, has suffered a blow not only to its nuclear program but to its credibility, and reputation.

“Their reckless pride has set us back a century,” she said.

In Jerusalem, Israelis were trickling back to restaurants on Wednesday, and some who had fled their homes were making their way back. Some had left apartments in major cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa — which were hit by frequent Iranian missile barrages — for friends and relatives’ homes.

Many in Israel supported the war with Iran, which they viewed as a justifiable pre-emptive attack to prevent an enemy from developing nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, they were still shaken by the nightly missile barrages.

Ido Emanuel, 30, who owns a coffee shop on Jerusalem’s normally bustling Azza Street, recalled shepherding customers to bomb shelters after receiving alerts warning of incoming Iranian fire. Those attacks ended on Tuesday, but some of his employees were still anxious about coming to work, waiting to see whether the cease-fire would hold, he said.

“People can enter the mind-set of a state of emergency much more easily than they leave it,” Mr. Emanuel said.

At least 28 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured during Iranian counterattacks since the Israeli operation began on Jun. 13, according to the Israeli government. Roughly 15,000 people were evacuated from homes damaged or destroyed in the missile barrages, the military said.

Though the war with Iran may be over, the protracted conflict in Gaza — which has continued for more than 20 months with no end in sight — still hangs over the country. On Wednesday morning, Israelis awoke to the news that seven Israeli soldiers had been killed in Gaza.

“If anyone was in euphoria over the war, and the Israeli victory — if it could be called that — we got a real slap in the face,” said Mr. Emanuel. “There’s no euphoria to be had.”

Some Israelis were picking up the pieces.

Eldad Albow said he was still displaced, along with his wife and daughters, after an Iranian missile damaged his apartment in the central city of Bat Yam.

Mr. Albow said neither of his children went to their school on Wednesday; it was damaged during the war. The authorities have put the family up in a hotel for the next few weeks while they look for new housing.

“We aren’t yet in that situation of freedom that everyone else is already back to,” he said.

Vivian Yee contributed reporting from Berlin.

But Mr. Trump seemed to downplay the importance of a diplomatic agreement with Tehran over its nuclear program, expressing complete confidence that Iran will not pursue a nuclear weapon after the U.S. attacks.

“We may sign an agreement,” he said at a news conference at the conclusion of the NATO summit. “I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary. I mean they had a war they fought. Now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States was seeking direct talks between the countries.

“We’d love to have peaceful relations with any country in the world, and so obviously that will depend on Iran’s willingness not just to engage in peace, but to negotiate directly with the United States, not through some third-country or fourth-country process,” Mr. Rubio said.

Before the United States attacked Iran, the two countries were engaged in diplomatic efforts over limiting Iran’s nuclear program after Mr. Trump withdrew from a previous agreement that had been negotiated during the Obama administration.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, and Oman, which acted as a mediator in the talks that began in April, had been working with Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, as part of those negotiations. Iran had rejected an American proposal, which would have seen Tehran join a consortium with the United States and Arab nations to produce nuclear fuel for power plants. But under that proposal, Iran would be barred from doing any production inside its territory.

On Wednesday, administration officials repeatedly made the case that the American strikes had crippled Iran’s nuclear program, disputing the conclusions of a preliminary U.S. defense intelligence assessment.

Mr. Trump suggested that the U.S. strikes brought about the end of the conflict between Iran and Israel, comparing it to the Americans’ dropping two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II.

“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima,” he said. “I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki. But that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war. This ended the war. If we didn’t take that out, they would have been, they’d be fighting right now.”

Amid simmering tensions with the agency, which some Iranian officials accuse of helping Israel justify its attacks, Iran’s parliament, dominated by hard-liners, voted on Wednesday to “suspend” cooperation with the agency and bar its inspectors from the country, according to state news media. Though the move was so far no more than symbolic — the legislation would need approval from a higher Iranian authority before taking effect — its passage is another show of defiance from Iran.

It may, perhaps, be a signal that Iran will renew its nuclear ambitions despite the U.S. and Israeli strikes on its facilities. The vote could also simply be a tactic to gain leverage in any new negotiations with the Trump administration over its nuclear program.

One of the I.A.E.A.’s main purposes is to monitor nuclear activity in Iran and other countries, including all those who have signed on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The goal is to keep them from building nuclear weapons. Iran is a party to the treaty, while Israel is not. The I.A.E.A. still has some oversight in Israel, which has not confirmed or denied having nuclear weapons, but is widely believed to have them.

Under its agreement with Iran, the I.A.E.A. is supposed to inspect the nuclear facilities Iran has publicly declared, including those at Natanz and Fordo that the United States bombed over the weekend. Israeli officials say there may be other, secret nuclear sites that Iran has not told the watchdog about.

Rafael Grossi, the director general of the I.A.E.A., told reporters in Vienna on Wednesday morning that he had requested that Iran allow his inspectors back into the sites, but he did not respond to the Iranian parliament’s vote. The watchdog’s inspectors stayed in Iran throughout the war and were ready to return to the sites to verify how much nuclear material Iran had left. The inspectors last checked on the sites a few days before Israeli airstrikes began, the agency said on Tuesday.

But the I.A.E.A.’s relationship with Iran appears to be at a low point. Only a day before Israel began its attack, the agency formally declared that Iran was not complying with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations. It said Iran consistently failed to provide information about undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple locations.

Iranian officials repeatedly criticized Mr. Grossi during the war, saying that his comments that there was no evidence of a systematic Iranian effort to build nuclear weapons came too late to prevent Israel from seizing on the I.A.E.A. report as it began its attacks.

The watchdog’s access to Iran was at its best after the 2015 deal between Iran and the United States and other Western powers that restricted Iran’s nuclear enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief. As part of the agreement, the agency gained oversight over new parts of Iran’s nuclear program. It was also given the power to carry out snap inspections, visiting sites on short notice, including places that Iran had not said were nuclear facilities.

But Iran gradually rolled back that extra access after President Trump unilaterally pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018 during his first term, and reimposed heavy sanctions. That prompted Iran not only to restrict I.A.E.A. monitoring of its nuclear activities but also to start enriching uranium past the limits set by the agreement.

The watchdog said in a report in late May that Iran was still cooperating with it and that it was able to mount a “large verification effort,” though it outlined several ways in which it said that cooperation was “less than satisfactory.”

The I.A.E.A. noted in the report that Iran has repeatedly said that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the agency said that it could not confirm that assertion unless Iran gave it more information and allowed it to monitor more of its activities.

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.

The question of whether Iran could recover from the strike on Sunday morning dominated the meeting of the 32 NATO nations. It overshadowed a major accomplishment for Mr. Trump: an agreement among most of the allies, with the notable exception of Spain, to spend 5 percent of their gross domestic product on defense within a decade as they face down Russian military aggression. Mr. Trump had demanded the increase and celebrated the moment, telling reporters during an hourlong news conference, “I began pushing for additional commitments in 2017.”

But his anger over the disclosure of the intelligence report on the effects of the strike against Iran was palpable. Mr. Trump accused news organizations that questioned how much damage had been done to Iran’s program of betraying “these brave patriots, these incredible fliers” who streaked halfway across the globe from Missouri to bomb the prime target, an enrichment plant called Fordo buried deep in a mountain. He and other administration officials repeatedly argued that because the attack had been executed so flawlessly, it was offensive to even question the results.

Mr. Trump also announced on Wednesday the United States and Iran would hold talks next week, though he provided no details about the participants or the purpose of the engagement. Diplomats from both countries had met repeatedly in recent months to try to negotiate over the future of Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran canceled a round after Israel launched strikes against it on June 13, and the two sides have not met since.

Iran is also threatening to stop cooperating with international inspectors, which would limit visibility into the damage done.

Yet, the president also downplayed the importance of a diplomatic agreement with Tehran over its nuclear program, expressing confidence that Iran would not pursue a nuclear weapon after the U.S. attacks.

“We may sign an agreement,” he said. “I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary. I mean, they had a war they fought. Now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”

Iranian officials had indicated a day earlier that they were willing to re-engage in diplomacy.

But by the end of his trip to the Netherlands, Mr. Trump seemed as focused on proving he has “obliterated” Iran’s sites as he once was on proving he had the largest inauguration crowd. As part of his effort to counter the preliminary intelligence report from the Pentagon, Mr. Trump, during his news conference, read part of a statement from the Israel Atomic Energy Commission.

“The devastating U.S. strike on Fordo destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility totally inoperable,” the president said. The statement, which the White House had distributed earlier, did not contain the word “totally,” but Mr. Trump inserted it.

Administration officials also denied that Iran had moved its stockpile of 880 pounds of near-bomb-grade fuel from storage areas in the ancient city of Isfahan and at other plants in Iran. Some American intelligence officials say they believe it was moved, and Rafael Mariano Grossi, the secretary general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, part of the United Nations, said Iranian officials had told him the stockpile was going to be moved to avoid threats from Mr. Trump. On Wednesday, he said he did not know its whereabouts.

Moving the stockpile could have left Iran with a hidden supply that it could, with further enrichment, use for weapons.

Mr. Trump said he did know where the supply was. “We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move,” he told reporters, without citing any evidence. “It’s covered with granite, concrete and steel,” he said.

Near the end of his news conference, as Mr. Trump appeared to become increasingly fed up with questions about his own administration’s intelligence, he turned the lectern over to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose department’s intelligence agency had produced the assessment. After denouncing the news media, Mr. Hegseth did not dispute the accounts of the intelligence report that appeared in The New York Times and CNN, but emphasized that it had been produced with “low confidence.”

“So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel and go really deep because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” he said.

The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, also insisted on Wednesday that the president was correct in saying that Iran’s facilities had been destroyed. She cited “new intelligence” but gave no additional details. Like Mr. Hegseth, she complained about news reports describing the intelligence document.

Mr. Rubio was the only one who approached the question with specific reference to facilities that Israel and the United States hit, and which would cripple Iran’s ability to make a bomb even if it had sufficient highly enriched uranium secreted away. His argument centered on evidence that the conversion facility had been destroyed, along with a laboratory to make the fuel into uranium metal to make a warhead.

Israel reported hitting the facility and an associated laboratory for turning the fuel to metal, and The Times described the hit at the time. Independent analysts say they believe the plant was severely damaged.

“You can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility,” said Mr. Rubio, who serves simultaneously as interim national security adviser. “We can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,” he added, speaking of the conversion facility. “The whole thing is blackened out. It’s gone. It’s wiped out.”

Satellite photographs show extensive destruction, but not until international nuclear inspectors are allowed on the site will it be possible to know what it would take to rebuild, on the site or elsewhere.

The intelligence report focused largely on the state of the Fordo plant, which produced the near-bomb-grade fuel that would, ultimately, feed a conversion facility.

The United States used powerful “bunker buster” bombs to hit that plant. Officials familiar with the intelligence report said that early findings concluded that the strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by months. Officials said the strikes sealed off Fordo’s entrances, but had not led to a collapse, leaving open the possibility that Iran could eventually dig it out.

But the reason Iran most likely could still race to a bomb relatively quickly, officials said, is that it most likely retains much of its enriched uranium and most likely has secret nuclear facilities in which to process it further.

International inspectors and nuclear experts agree that the extensive damage to the conversion facility created a key bottleneck in the weapons-making process, and agreed that rebuilding it would most likely take years. But that assumes that Iran did not build another conversion plant in secret, as part of an insurance policy against the destruction of its declared facilities, which are inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The American attacks in Iran were focused on two elements of the nuclear program. The first was the two centers where enrichment was done, Natanz and Fordo. The second set of attacks was focused on facilities that could be used to turn the nuclear material into a weapon. Most of those were centered in Isfahan, including the conversion facility and the lab that produces uranium metal, which can be used in manufacturing a warhead.

The U.S. objective appeared to be to take out both parts of the production chain in the hopes of setting the Iranians back as far as possible.

In a separate assessment, David Albright and Spencer Faragasso of the nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit organization that follows the state of the Iranian program in depth, wrote on Wednesday that “Israel’s and U.S. attacks have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program.” They concluded that “it will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack.”

But their report noted that stocks of near-bomb-grade uranium and lesser-enriched materials remained, along with centrifuges that had been manufactured, but not yet installed. The same report noted that the conversion facility had been “severely damaged.”

Mr. Trump argued on Wednesday that Iran had essentially given up its nuclear ambitions, saying it is not “even thinking” about nuclear enrichment anymore, though he did not provide any evidence.

Mr. Rubio was more careful. “Now anything in the world can be rebuilt," he said, “but now we know where it is, and if they try to rebuild it, we’ll have an option there, as well.”

The statement, however, provided official Israeli backing to President Trump in the wake of uncertainty about the result of the U.S. strikes on Fordo. The White House shared the same statement with reporters about an hour before the Israeli prime minister’s office, and Mr. Trump read most of the statement aloud at a news conference at a NATO summit in the Netherlands.

According to the commission’s statement, “the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that preliminary Israeli damage assessments had raised questions about the effectiveness of the U.S. strikes on the Fordo site, which is south of Tehran. Israeli defense officials said that they had collected evidence that the underground facilities at Fordo had not been destroyed.

The Times also reported that a classified preliminary assessment by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said that the bombings set back Iran’s nuclear program by less than six months. Officials cautioned that the report was only an initial assessment and that others would follow as more information was collected and as Iran examined the three sites. Iranian state news outlets, which tend to amplify any foreign news developments that appear to support Iranian positions, widely reported on that assessment.

On Wednesday morning, however, Israel’s military said that Iran’s nuclear program had been significantly delayed.

“The assessment is that we caused significant damage to the nuclear program,” Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, chief spokesman for the Israeli military, said in a video statement, adding, “I can also say that we pushed it back years.”

The Israeli military, General Defrin noted, was still investigating the results of its strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Mr. Netanyahu has insisted that the war sent Iran’s nuclear program “into oblivion.” And President Trump, who on Wednesday pushed back on the classified preliminary U.S. intelligence, has claimed that the American strikes “obliterated” three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, and the Natanz and Isfahan facilities.

On June 13, Israel launched a wide-scale attack on Iran, targeting the country’s nuclear facilities, nuclear scientists and senior military commanders. Iran retaliated by firing barrages of missiles at Israel.

After more than a week of war, the U.S. military joined in and attacked the three Iranian nuclear sites. On Tuesday, Israel and Iran agreed to a cease-fire.

Vivian Yee and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting to this article.

When pressed on Wednesday at the NATO summit in the Netherlands about whether the intelligence report was incorrect, Mr. Trump — who has often questioned the findings of America's own intelligence agencies — said it was “very inconclusive” and that officials at the agency “really don’t know.” There was no reason to worry about Iran rebuilding its nuclear program, he said, reiterating his claims about “obliteration.”

“It’s gone for years, years,” he said. “Very tough to rebuild because the whole thing has collapsed. In other words, inside, it’s all collapsed. Nobody can get in to see it because it’s collapsed.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose agency conducted the classified preliminary report, also questioned its accuracy, arguing that the U.S. strikes were “flawless.”

“Any assessment that tells you something otherwise is speculating with other motives, and we know that because when you actually look at the report — by the way, it was a top secret report — it was preliminary, it was low confidence,” he said at the NATO summit, adding that the Pentagon was working with the F.B.I. to conduct a leak investigation.

The report also said that much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes. Israeli officials and the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have also suggested the same.

But on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he did not believe Iran had time to move materials, including uranium, out of the facilities.

“I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out because we acted fast,” he said. “If it would have taken two weeks, maybe, but it’s very hard to remove that kind of material, very hard and very dangerous for them to remove it.”

Later in the day, the Israeli atomic energy commission said that U.S. strikes had made a key nuclear enrichment site in Iran inoperable, appearing to contradict initial private assessments by Israel that raised questions about the effectiveness of the attacks.

The office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement on behalf of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, but did not clarify how the commission had reached its conclusion about the enrichment site, the heavily fortified Fordo nuclear facility.

The statement, however, provided official Israeli backing to Mr. Trump in the wake of uncertainty about the result of the U.S. strikes on Fordo. The White House shared the same statement with reporters about an hour before the Israeli prime minister’s office, and Mr. Trump read most of the statement aloud at a news conference at a NATO summit in the Netherlands.

Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the chief spokesman of the Israeli military, said the soldiers, members of a combat engineering battalion, were killed after an explosive device was placed near them in the southern city of Khan Younis on Tuesday afternoon.

“This is a difficult and painful morning for all of the people of Israel,” he said.

General Defrin described the deaths as part of a “complex” incident that was still being investigated. He added the battalion which the soldiers belonged to has been locating and demolishing tunnels and killing militants.

The Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, posted on Telegram that its operatives had targeted Israeli forces in Khan Younis on Tuesday, but it was unclear if it was referring to the seven soldiers who were killed.

The war in Gaza began after the deadly attack on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas on Israel, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and roughly 250 others were taken hostage. The Israeli military campaign has devastated Gaza, and more than 50,000 people have been killed in the enclave, according to the Palestinian health authorities.

The deadliest day for the Israeli military since the start of the war was in January 2024, when 24 soldiers were killed, including 20 in a single explosion.

While Israel and Hamas have engaged in indirect negotiations for a new cease-fire and release of hostages, they have repeatedly failed to reach an agreement.

The talks have stalled over the permanence of a new cease-fire. Hamas has insisted on a total end to the war in Gaza, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has rejected that demand, saying the dismantling of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities must be achieved first.

Palestinians in Gaza have struggled to find food, fuel and medicines amid Israeli restrictions on the entry of goods into the territory. Israel blocked aid from entering Gaza for nearly three months earlier this year. But since mid-May, it has allowed some supplies to enter through a new Israeli-backed distribution system as well as trucks hired by the United Nations and other international organizations.

The rollout of the new mechanism, which Israeli officials contend enables Palestinians to access food without Hamas benefiting, has been marred by chaos, with scores of Palestinians killed as they approach distribution sites.

Fifty hostages abducted during Hamas October 2023 are still believed to be in Gaza. About 20 of them are thought to be living, while the rest are presumed dead, according to the Israeli authorities. The hostages remain in perilous conditions, their families have said, urging their swift and safe return.

Both Palestinian civilians and families of hostages in Israel have expressed hope that the cease-fire between Israel and Iran on Tuesday will redirect attention to the negotiations on Gaza.