Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei addresses the Iranian people on state television on Thursday. Photo by Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Thursday declared an Iranian victory over the United States, claiming Washington’s direct intervention to save Israel from annihilation had been a total failure and warning of a “heavy price” for any further U.S. aggression.
“My congratulations on our dear Iran’s victory over the U.S. regime. The U.S. regime entered the war directly because it felt that if it didn’t, the Zionist regime would be completely destroyed. It entered the war in an effort to save that regime but achieved nothing,” he wrote in a post on X.
“The Islamic Republic delivered a heavy slap to the U.S.’s face. It attacked and inflicted damage on the Al-Udeid Air Base [in Qatar], which is one of the key U.S. bases in the region,” said Khamenei.
“The fact that the Islamic Republic has access to key U.S. centers in the region and can take action whenever it deems necessary is a significant matter. Such an action can be repeated in the future too. Should any aggression occur, the enemy will definitely pay a heavy price.”
Shortly afterward, Khamenei, who has not been seen or heard from for more than a week, appeared in a video address broadcast by state television on Thursday afternoon local time, delivering broadly the same message of defiance, adding that the nuclear sites struck in Saturday’s airstrikes had sustained no “significant” damage.
Khamenei made no mention of the impending talks next week with the United States, announced by U.S. President Donald Trump as he departed a NATO summit in The Hague on Wednesday.
Khamenei’s comments came as the Trump administration reiterated that the nuclear sites struck by Washington had been “completely obliterated” with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth telling a press briefing at the Pentagon early Thursday that the strikes were “an historically successful attack” that should be applauded by Americans.
Hegseth pushed back on a widely quoted preliminary defense intelligence assessment, leaked from the Pentagon, that indicated that the strikes had only set back Iran’s nuclear program by a few months.
He cited a series of alternate assessments from different agencies on the damage caused, from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “enormous damage” to Israel’s atomic body saying Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities were “inoperable,” to the analysis of the CIA that Iran’s nuclear program “has been severely damaged”.
Hegseth berated the press, accusing them of ignoring all the evidence in favor of one unfavorable report that he said was preliminary and on a “low confidence” basis because they were bent on trying to negate or minimize the success of the strikes.
Handing the floor to Gen. Dan Caine, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a detailed account of Operation Midnight Hammer which he said the military had been working toward for 15 years.
He described how the B-2 Spirit bombers tackled the key Fordow facility by dropping so-called GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs into two ventilation shafts that had been capped with concrete in an effort to protect them from attack.
These shields were destroyed in an initial strike, paving the way for five additional bombs to penetrate down into the main subterranean complex and “explode in the mission space”.
However, Caine qualified his presentation by stressing that an actual battle damage assessment could only be provided by intelligence teams and that the military didn’t “mark our own homework.”
He added that the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency had been studying Fordo for 15 years and that the ordnance deployed the strikes were custom-developed bunker-busting bombs specifically “designed, planned and delivered” to take out the Fordow nuclear site.
Caine also addressed Iran’s retaliatory attack on Al-Udeid Air Base on Monday saying that the United States had advance warning and on the orders of Trump adopted a “minimum force” posture” that involved evacuating the base, leaving in place a skeleton force of just 44 troops.
The men, all in their 20s, with the younger ones quite inexperienced, were “responsible for defending the entire base,” he said.
