Donald Trump said the US struck three nuclear sites in Iran, joining Israel’s attacks on the country and drawing America into another war in the Middle East.

The president said US planes dropped bombs on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan in an effort to disable the Islamic republic’s nuclear enrichment capability and set back its alleged pursuit of an atomic weapon.

“Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” Trump said in a late-night address to the nation.

Trump said Iran now needed to “make peace” and threatened more intense attacks on the Islamic republic if it did not.

“Future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier,” Trump said.

“This cannot continue. There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left.”

Trump’s decision to strike Iran escalates the conflict in the Middle East, which has been in turmoil since Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023. It comes just over a week after Israel launched missiles at Iran and Tehran hit back by striking targets in Israel.

The attack brings the risk of Iranian retaliation against the US, especially on military bases and ships in the region, along with potential disruption to oil supplies from the world’s most important energy producing region.

Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said on Sunday that the US had “crossed a very big red line”, adding that Tehran was not currently open to finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

“The door for diplomacy should be always kept open,” Araghchi said. “But this is not the case right now.” He added that Iran “reserves all options to defend its sovereignty . . . for as long as necessary”.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heaped praise on Trump’s “bold decision”, saying the US strikes against Iran would “change history”.

“In tonight’s action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, America has been truly unsurpassed. It has done what no other country on Earth could do,” he said.

But Israeli authorities also took defensive measures, completely shutting down the airspace and putting the home front on “essential” activity, in a sign that Iranian retaliation was expected. Both restrictions had been partially lifted in recent days.

The US attacks mark a major turning point for Trump, who campaigned for his second term on a pledge to be a peacemaker who ended “forever wars”.

It is a political gamble for the president, whose Maga base is divided between hawks and those who believe the US should stay out of foreign conflicts.

Announcing the attacks earlier on Saturday on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the planes had dropped “a full payload of BOMBS” on Fordow, and were all safely on their way home.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat, responded to the US strikes by affirming that Iran must not develop nuclear arms but urged “all sides” to begin negotiations.

“I urge all sides to step back, return to the negotiating table and prevent further escalation,” she said, adding that the EU’s 27 foreign ministers would discuss the situation at a previously arranged meeting.

European capitals are still waiting for an independent assessment of the impact caused by the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, two senior officials told the FT, amid uncertainty over the extent of the damage.

One cautioned that it could take some time to assess the true result of the US attack, given the depth of the nuclear facilities and the difficulty in accessing areas that theoretically could have withstood the bombs.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer also called on Iran to return to the negotiating table and reach a diplomatic solution to “end this crisis”.

Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the UK had been informed by the US ahead of time of its plans to launch a military attack on Iran, but “no request was made” for the UK to support the action.

American “bunker-buster” bombs carried by the B-2 were considered the best chance of destroying Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, which is buried deep under a mountain.

The bombing raid comes after two decades of debate in the US about whether to attack Iran, and seven years after Trump pulled his country out of a nuclear pact with Tehran agreed by President Barack Obama.

Trump said on Saturday that he had discussed the attacks with Netanyahu, who has urged the US to attack Iran’s nuclear sites for years.

“We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before, and we’ve gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel,” Trump said.

An adviser to the speaker of Iran’s parliament said Tehran had been anticipating an attack on Fordow.

“From Iran’s perspective, nothing too strange has happened,” Mahdi Mohammadi wrote on X.

“For several nights, Iran has been waiting for an attack on Fordow. The site has been evacuated for a while now and has not faced irreversible damage from the attack.”

After initially appearing to distance himself from the conflict, Trump deliberated in recent days over whether to involve the US military in Israel’s effort to dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme.

On Thursday he had appeared to offer Iran a two-week window to reach a diplomatic solution.

Joseph Votel, a retired general who led US Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, said Trump and his team had engaged in an effort to conceal the timing of the attack, including the president’s two-week timeline.

“It is pretty clear that there has been a deception plan in place,” said Votel who served as Centcom commander for two years of Trump’s first term.

Republican foreign policy hawks in Congress cheered the president’s military move. US senator Lindsey Graham said “this was the right call” while Senator Jim Risch, chair of the influential Senate foreign relations committee, backed Trump’s “decisive action” to assist Israel.

But some critics of the president said he had stepped beyond his constitutional authority.

Additional reporting by Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv

Until now, the fighting had mostly involved Iran and Israel, which launched airstrikes on the Islamic republic last week. President Donald Trump’s decision to send bombers and cruise missiles into Iran dramatically escalates the conflict and moves the U.S. into offensive operations, not just a defensive posture to protect Israel and American troops in the region.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on social media that Iran “reserves all options” in defending itself.

While Trump threatened more attacks unless Iran seeks peace, Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a top Iran expert, said it’s unlikely the country’s leadership will go that route. But its response could also prove to be catastrophic.

“Many of Iran’s retaliatory options are the strategic equivalent of a suicide bombing,” he said in a series of posts on X. “They can strike US embassies and bases, attack oil facilities in the Persian Gulf, mine the Strait of Hormuz, or rain missiles on Israel—but the regime may not survive the blowback.”

Energy markets are poised to suffer a major jolt as investors digest the implications of the U.S. bombing Iran, a top oil exporter.

Crude prices had already surged in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s airstrikes, and could soar even higher, depending on how Iran responds.

In a note last week, George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, estimated that the worst-case scenario of a complete disruption to Iranian oil supplies and a closure of the Strait of Hormuz could send oil prices above $120 per barrel.

That’s because the Strait of Hormuz is a critical choke point in the global energy trade, as the equivalent of 21% of global petroleum liquids consumption, or about 21 million barrels per day, flows through the narrow waterway.

Iran’s ability to use proxies and allies in the region to retaliate on its behalf has also been severely weakened as earlier Israeli attacks have crippled Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

Meanwhile, Sadjadpour noted that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are a substantial force of 190,000 troops, but not monolithic.

“Do they continue to defer to the 86-year-old Khamenei as their commander in chief, though his regional and nuclear ambitions have now ended in colossal failure?” he asked.

Other analysts also warned of the potential for Iran to retaliate by taking Americans as hostages or launching cyberattacks. And Iran-allied Houthi rebels in Yemen said before Saturday that any U.S. attack on Iran would trigger attacks on U.S. vessels in the region.

But retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who previously served as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told CNN that he doesn’t think Iran will resort to a maximum response like blocking the Strait of Hormuz.

Instead, it may launch some missiles at U.S. bases in the region or direct pro-Tehran militias in Iraq to attack U.S. forces.

“I don’t see a major response,” he predicted. “This Iranian regime calculates. It’s very careful to understand where it wants to go.”

There are about 50,000 U.S. troops in the region, mostly spread out across Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

For now, it’s not clear yet that the U.S. attacks on Iran will prove to be decisive. Sadjadpour noted that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei believes caving in to pressure projects weakness and invites more pressure.

But he also said Khamenei is not a “reckless gambler,” creating tension between his survival instincts and his defiant instincts.

“This is an unprecedented moment in Iranian history,” Sadjadpour added. “It could entrench the regime—or hasten its demise. It could prevent a nuclear Iran—or accelerate one. Military attacks/humiliations have both strengthened dictatorships (Iran 1980) and weakened them (Argentina, Milosevic).”

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The UK government’s promise of an extra £1bn to help disabled people into work is not matched by new money from the Treasury, casting doubt on ministers’ ability to deliver divisive welfare reforms while still tackling other priorities such as youth unemployment. 

Ministers have framed unpopular cuts to sickness and disability benefits as a “moral mission” to help people into fulfilling work rather than consigning them to a life on benefits. 

They say that by 2029-30, there will be £1bn of new funding per year to guarantee support for all benefits claimants with a health condition who want help to enter or return to work. 

But just £400mn of this will come on stream by 2028-29 — the last year covered by departmental budgets set out in the Spending Review earlier this month. Spending is then supposed to jump to reach the promised £1bn in the final year of the parliament.

“Our goal is to combine this new investment with existing capacity to establish a big, clear and simple offer of work, health and skills support to disabled people and people with a health condition,” the Department for Work and Pensions said in its impact assessment of the government’s welfare reforms, published last week. 

But DWP’s overall budget for the day-to-day running of the welfare system will rise just 0.4 per cent a year in real terms in the three years in which it aims to roll out this extra support — and will not grow at all on a per capita basis after factoring in growth in the UK population.

“The revolution in employment support . . . promised to sweeten sharp disability benefit cuts will now have to be funded out of essentially frozen day-to-day per person budgets,” analysts at the Resolution Foundation think-tank noted.

On Thursday, Vicky Foxcroft MP resigned as a Labour whip in protest against the government’s plans to cut disability benefits. She said tackling the rising welfare bill “could and should be done by supporting more disabled people into work” rather than cutting benefits.

More than 100 Labour MPs have expressed concerns about the reforms, although it is not clear how many will vote against the bill next month.

DWP has not yet set out what form its new job support will take. By the autumn, it hopes to persuade the Office for Budget Responsibility that the new support will lead to big gains in employment, yielding billions in welfare savings and wider benefits to society. 

OBR officials are sceptical about the potential for big pay-offs from back to work programmes and said in March they could not cost the proposals without more detail. 

“Past experience is that it is quite difficult to get really big results from employment support programmes,” Tom Josephs, a member of the OBR’s budget responsibility committee, told MPs earlier this year.

Meanwhile analysts say the commitment to extra support for those with health conditions will limit DWP’s ability to tackle other priorities — in particular its “Youth Guarantee” of help for 18 to 21-year-olds to access apprenticeships, training and job support. 

“I do think other things are going to get squeezed,” said Stephen Evans, chief executive at the Learning & Work Institute think-tank, adding that support for the long-term unemployed and funding for the Youth Guarantee could be at risk.

The DWP declined to say whether other services would be cut in order to meet the £1bn commitment. It said efficiency gains would allow it to “prioritise funding towards employment support”. 

The department currently spends £275mn a year on job support for the sick and disabled. A £1bn increase would consume a tenth of its overall day-to-day spending on service delivery and almost a third of its spending on employment support — which is set to rise to £3.5bn by 2028-29. 

DWP declined to say how much it spends on employment support at present, or whether support for other groups would be cut in order to meet the £1bn commitment. It said efficiency gains would allow it to “prioritise funding towards employment support” and that eight local pilots of the Youth Guarantee, funded with £45mn in their first year, would continue.

The DWP said it was “determined to create a welfare system that supports people into work and out of poverty”.