Iran will not submit to ‘unlawful aggression’ Saudi source refutes New York Times report that it would encourage protracted war.
DUBAI/ GENEVA/ TEHRAN/ WASHINGTON:
President Donald Trump on Monday asked U.S. allies to join efforts to secure the Strait of Hormuz, as European powers ruled out a NATO mission to reopen the vital waterway closed by Iran during the Middle East war.
Trump criticized the lukewarm response to his call for world powers to send warships to escort oil tankers through the strait, which normally carries a fifth of the world’s crude oil, demanding a more enthusiastic response.
Trump said he believed Britain and France would get involved – but only reluctantly.
“We strongly encourage other nations to get involved with us and to get involved quickly and with great enthusiasm,” Trump told reporters at a White House event.
“Enthusiasm level matters to me.”
NATO allies and other Western countries earlier rebuffed Trump’s call, made over the weekend, regarding military hardware.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said London was working with its allies to develop a “viable” plan to reopen the strait, but ruled out a NATO mission, while Berlin also said it “has always been clear that this war is not about NATO.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that “the question of how Germany could contribute militarily does not arise. We will not do it.”
Japan, Australia, Poland, Spain, Greece and Sweden have also distanced themselves from any military involvement in the Strait of Hormuz.
EU foreign ministers discussed the war in Brussels on Monday but showed “no appetite” to extend their naval mission in the Red Sea to help reopen Hormuz, the EU’s top diplomat said.
Trump told the Financial Times on Sunday that it would be “very bad for the future of NATO” if they refused to help him, and he threatened to delay a planned summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Explosions hit the Iranian capital on Monday while air defense systems were activated, an AFP journalist noted. Israel said it had also targeted the cities of Shiraz and Tabriz, but Tehran’s foreign minister struck a defiant tone.
“Now they have…understood what kind of nation they are dealing with, a nation that does not hesitate to defend itself and is ready to continue the war wherever it can take it and take it as far as necessary,” Abbas Araghchi told reporters in Tehran.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have threatened to target US businesses in the region, warning their employees to evacuate, after Iran’s foreign minister issued a warning of defiance to Washington.
A drone started a fire in a fuel tank near Dubai airport, disrupting travel, while a missile killed a civilian in his car in Abu Dhabi, and another drone started a fire in an area housing oil infrastructure in the eastern emirate of Fujairah.
“It has been a difficult few weeks hearing explosions regularly, but the Iranian attacks followed me in my last hours before I could return home,” a witness at Dubai airport told AFP.
The UAE’s state-owned energy giant ADNOC halted the loading of oil into storage tanks in Fujairah, but oil prices retreated as the International Energy Agency said more strategic oil stocks could be released.
Call from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates
The war has engulfed much of the region, with Iran striking at least 10 countries that host U.S. forces. Its Revolutionary Guards claim to have fired some 700 missiles and 3,600 drones.
Saudi Arabia intercepted more than 60 drones overnight, its Defense Ministry said Monday, and Iraqi authorities said rockets injured five people the day before at Baghdad airport, which houses a U.S. diplomatic facility.
Despite the violence and 17 days of internet blackouts, some Iranians have sought to return to a sense of normalcy, with cafes and restaurants reopening and the popular Tajrish Bazaar busy over the weekend in the run-up to the Persian New Year.
There are few signs of a popular uprising in Iran, where security forces killed thousands during January protests.
The head of the judiciary, Gholam Hossein Mohseni, said there should be no leniency in issuing “final verdicts” against opponents of the regime during the war.
More than 1,200 Iranians have been killed by US and Israeli strikes, according to the latest report from the Iranian Health Ministry on March 8, which could not be independently verified.
The United Nations refugee agency says up to 3.2 million people have been displaced in Iran.
The United Nations
Iran pledged to the United Nations on Monday that it would not submit to “unlawful aggression,” saying 90 million citizens were in “grave danger” from U.S. and Israeli strikes.
At the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, where countries were discussing the rights situation in Iran, U.N. experts highlighted Tehran’s deadly crackdown on protesters in recent months and warned that the repression was likely to get worse amid the Middle East war.
Iranian Ambassador Ali Bahreini responded, insisting that the focus should instead be on the aggression against his country, “led by some of the most lawless and unscrupulous actors on the international scene.”
“The most urgent and fundamental human rights issue regarding Iran is the imminent threat to the lives of 90 million people whose lives are in immediate and grave danger due to irresponsible military aggression,” he told the Council.
Bahraini said that if such “reckless militarism” was met with indifference, “Iran would certainly not be the last country to suffer such treatment.”
New York Times report
A Saudi source on Monday dismissed an alleged New York Times report that the kingdom’s leaders are encouraging the United States to wage a protracted war with Iran, Al Arabiya reported.
The New York Times claimed in a report a day ago that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman advised US President Donald Trump to “keep hitting the Iranians hard.”
However, Al Arabiya reported that a “Saudi source” told the outlet today that the New York Times report was “false.”
Exit from the United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates’ daily oil output fell by more than half as the Iranian conflict and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz forced state oil giant ADNOC to implement widespread production shutdowns, two sources told Reuters.
