US President Donald Trump has claimed that Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility “is gone” following fresh American strikes on Tehran.

In a post on Truth Social early Sunday, Trump said the US had targeted three nuclear sites in Iran — Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan,” Trump said in a post on social media. “All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home.”

Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he added.

Some of the most vocal Republican members of Congress said on social media platform X they support President Trump’s decision to bomb three nuclear sites in Iran.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said, “Good. This was the right call. The regime deserves it.”

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said the attack was necessary. “The prospect of the Iranian regime acquiring nuclear weapons represents the most acute immediate threat to America and our allies,” he said.

Cruz continued: “Tonight’s actions have gone far in foreclosing that possibility.”

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, said, “Americans and the world can thank President Trump for his courage to lead,” while Texas Sen. John Cornyn called Trump’s actions “courageous and correct” and Florida Sen. Rick Scott said the president’s actions show “what peace through strength looks like.”

In the House, intelligence chairman Rick Crawford of Arkansas said he regrets Iran was allowed to become a threat, and welcomes Trump’s action.

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Wary of assassination, Iran’s supreme leader mostly speaks with his commanders through a trusted aide now, suspending electronic communications to make it harder to find him, three Iranian officials familiar with his emergency war plans say.

Ensconced in a bunker, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has picked an array of replacements down his chain of miliary command in case more of his valued lieutenants are killed.

And in a remarkable move, the officials add, Ayatollah Khamenei has even named three senior clerics as candidates to succeed him should he be killed, as well — perhaps the most telling illustration of the precarious moment he and his three-decade rule are facing.

Ayatollah Khamenei has taken an extraordinary series of steps to preserve the Islamic Republic ever since Israel launched a series of surprise attacks last Friday.

Though only a week old, the Israeli strikes are the biggest military assault on Iran since its war with Iraq in the 1980s, and the effect on the nation’s capital, Tehran, has been particularly fierce. In only a few days, the Israeli attacks have been more intense and have caused more damage in Tehran than Saddam Hussein did in his entire eight-year war against Iran.

Iran appears to have overcome its initial shock, reorganizing enough to launch daily counterstrikes of its own on Israel, hitting a hospital, the Haifa oil refinery, religious buildings and homes.

Image The aftermath of an Iranian missile strike in Haifa, Israel, on Friday. Credit… Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

Iran’s top officials are also quietly making preparations for a wide range of outcomes as the war intensifies and as President Trump considers whether to enter the fight, according to the Iranian officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the ayatollah’s plans.

Peering inside Iran’s closely guarded leadership can be difficult, but its chain of command still seems to be functioning, despite being hit hard, and there are no obvious signs of dissent in the political ranks, according to the officials and to diplomats in Iran.

Ayatollah Khamenei, 86, is aware that either Israel or the United States could try to assassinate him, an end he would view as martyrdom, the officials said. Given the possibility, the ayatollah has made the unusual decision to instruct his nation’s Assembly of Experts, the clerical body responsible for appointing the supreme leader, to choose his successor swiftly from the three names he has provided.

Normally, the process of appointing a new supreme leader could take months, with clerics picking and choosing from their own lists of names. But with the nation now at war, the officials said, the ayatollah wants to ensure a quick, orderly transition and to preserve his legacy.

“The top priority is the preservation of the state,” said Vali Nasr, an Iran expert and professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. “It is all calculative and pragmatic.”

Succession has long been an exceedingly delicate and thorny topic, seldom discussed publicly beyond speculations and rumors in political and religious circles. The supreme leader has enormous powers: He is the commander in chief of the Iran Armed Forces, as well as the head of the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch. He is also a Vali Faqih, meaning the most senior guardian of the Shiite faith.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, also a cleric and close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who was rumored to be a front-runner, is not among the candidates, the officials said. Iran’s former conservative president, Ibrahim Raisi, was also considered a front-runner before he was killed in a helicopter crash in 2024.

Image Ayatollah Khamenei delivering a public message on Wednesday. His retreat into a bunker shows how furiously Tehran has been struck. Credit… Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Since the war started, Ayatollah Khamenei has delivered to the public two recorded video messages, against a backdrop of brown curtains and next to the Iranian flag. “The people of Iran will stand against a forced war,” he said, vowing not to surrender.

In normal times, Ayatollah Khamenei lives and works in a highly secure compound in central Tehran called the “beit rahbari” — or leader’s house — and he seldom leaves the premises, except for special occasions like delivering a sermon. Senior officials and military commanders come to him for weekly meetings, and speeches for the public are staged from the compound.

His retreat to a bunker shows how furiously Tehran has been struck in a war with Israel that Iranian officials say is unfolding on two fronts.

One is being waged from the air, with Israeli airstrikes on military bases, nuclear facilities, critical energy infrastructure, commanders and nuclear scientists in their apartment buildings in tightly packed residential neighborhoods. Some of Iran’s top commanders were summarily wiped out.

Hundreds of people have also been killed and thousands of others injured, with civilians slain across Iran, human rights groups inside and outside the country say.

But Iranian officials say that they are fighting on a second front, as well, with covert Israeli operatives and collaborators scattered on the ground across Iran’s vast terrain, launching drones at critical energy and military structures. The fear of Israeli infiltration among the top ranks of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus has rattled the Iranian power structure, even Ayatollah Khamenei, officials say.

Image Smoke north of Tehran after Israeli airstrikes on Monday. Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands of others injured, officials say. Credit… Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

“It is clear that we had a massive security and intelligence breach; there is no denying this,” said Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Iran’s speaker of Parliament, Gen. Mohammad Ghalibaf, in an audio recording analyzing the war. “Our senior commanders were all assassinated within one hour.”

Iran’s “biggest failure was not discovering” the months of planning Israeli operatives had conducted to bring missiles and drone parts into the country to prepare for the attack, he added.

The country’s leadership has been preoccupied with three central concerns, officials say: an assassination attempt against Ayatollah Khamenei; the United States’ entering the war; and more debilitating attacks against Iran’s critical infrastructure, like power plants, oil and gas refineries and dams.

Should the United States join the fight, the stakes would multiply significantly. Israel says that it wants to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, but experts say that only the United States has the bomber — and the enormous 30,000-pound bomb — that might be capable of penetrating the mountain where Iran has built its most critical nuclear enrichment facilities, Fordo.

Iran has threatened to retaliate by attacking American targets in the region, but that would only risk a wider, and possibly more devastating, conflict for Iran and its adversaries.

The fear of assassination and infiltration within Iran’s ranks is so widespread that the Ministry of Intelligence announced a series of security protocols, telling officials to stop using cellphones or any electronic devices to communicate. It has also ordered all senior government officials and military commanders to remain below ground, according to two Iranian officials.

Almost every day, the Ministry of Intelligence or the Armed Forces issue directives for the public to report suspicious individuals and vehicle movements, and to refrain from taking photographs and videos of attacks on sensitive sites.

Image A demonstration in Tehran last week. Israel’s attacks have set off a resurgence of nationalism among many Iranians. Credit… Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

The country has also been in a communication blackout with the outside world. The internet has been nearly shut down, and incoming international calls have been blocked. The Ministry of Telecommunications said in a statement that these measures were to find enemy operatives on the ground and to disable their ability to launch attacks.

“The security apparatus has concluded that, in this critical time, the internet is being abused to harm the lives and livelihoods of civilians,” said Ali Ahmadinia, the communications director for President Masoud Pezeshkian. “We are safeguarding the security of our country by shutting down the internet.”

On Friday, the Supreme National Security Council took it a step further, announcing that anyone working with the enemy must turn themselves into the authorities by the end of the day on Sunday, hand over their military equipment and “return to the arms of the people.” It warned that anyone discovered to be working with the enemy after Sunday would face execution.

Tehran has largely emptied out after orders by Israel to evacuate several highly populated districts. Videos of the city show highways and desolate streets that are typically clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic. In interviews, residents of Tehran who remained in the city said security forces had set up checkpoints on every highway, on smaller roads and at entry points in and out of the city to conduct ad hoc searches.

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist politician and a former vice president, said in a telephone interview from Tehran that Israel had miscalculated Iranians’ reaction to the war. Mr. Abtahi said that the deep political factions that are typically in sharp disagreement with one another had rallied behind the supreme leader and focused the country on defending itself from an external threat.

Image Checking for updates on a rooftop in Tehran on Thursday as the war raged on. Credit… Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

The war has “softened the divisions we had, both among each other and with the general public,” Mr. Abtahi said.

Israel’s attacks have set off a resurgence of nationalism among many Iranians, inside and outside the country, including many critical of the government. That sense of common cause has emerged in a torrent of social media posts and statements by prominent human rights and political activists, physicians, national athletes, artists and celebrities. “Like family, we may not always agree but Iran’s soil is our red line,” wrote Saeid Ezzatollahi, a player with Iran’s national soccer squad, Team Melli, on social media.

Hotels, guesthouses and wedding halls have opened their doors free of charge to shelter displaced people fleeing Tehran, according to Iranian news media and videos on social media. Psychologists are offering free virtual therapy sessions in posts on their social media pages. Supermarkets are giving discounts, and at bakeries, customers are limiting their own purchases of fresh bread to one loaf so that everyone standing in line can have bread, according to videos shared on social media. Volunteers are offering services, like running errands to checking on disabled and older residents.

“We are seeing a beautiful unity among our people,” said Reza, 42, a businessman, in a telephone interview near the Caspian Sea, where he is taking shelter with his family. Using only one name to avoid scrutiny by the government, he added: “It’s hard to explain the mood. We are scared, but we are also giving each other solidarity, love and kindness. We are in it together. This is an attack on our country, on Iran.”

Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the country’s most prominent human rights activist, has spent decades in and out of jail, pushing for democratic change in Iran. But even she warned against the attacks on her country, telling the BBC this past week that “Democracy cannot come through violence and war.”

The Israeli military said it carried out strikes on several Iranian military targets at a range of sites across the country Saturday.

The Israel Defense Forces said it had struck drone storage facilities and a weapons facility in the area of Bandar Abbas, in southwestern Iran.

The Israeli Air Force also struck three F-14 fighter jets belonging to the Iranian military in the “heart of Iran” earlier on Saturday, the IDF said. Black and white thermal imaging video of the strikes released by the military appeared to show the F-14s being blown up as they sat parked at an air base it said was in central Iran.

Iran’s air force has American-made F-14 Tomcats that were acquired under the Shah’s regime, which ended in 1979. Iran is the only country still operating the aircraft, which was retired by the US in 2006.

Israel also targeted military radar detection systems and air defense batteries in western Iran Saturday “as part of a broader effort to achieve aerial superiority throughout Iranian airspace,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Ephraim Defrin said in an evening news conference.

“This air superiority has enabled us to strike missile command centers, (drone) infrastructure, and to destroy military storage facilities and launch tunnels for rockets and missiles — as well as close the loop on launchers that had fired at Israeli territory,” Defrin said.

President Donald Trump returns to the White House in Washington, on June 21, 2025. U.S. warplanes dropped bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday. (Anna Rose Layden/The New York Times)

The United States has entered Israel’s war against Iran.

American warplanes dropped bombs on three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday, President Donald Trump announced, bringing the U.S. military directly into the war after days of uncertainty about whether he would intervene.

“All planes are now outside of Iran air space,” he said in a post on social media, adding that a “full payload” of bombs had been dropped on Fordo, the heavily fortified underground facility in Iran that is critical to its nuclear program. “All planes are safely on their way home.”

The three sites that Trump said were hit Saturday night included Iran’s two major uranium enrichment centers: the mountain facility at Fordo and a larger enrichment plant at Natanz, which Israel struck several days ago with smaller weapons. The third site, near the ancient city of Isfahan, is where Iran is believed to keep its near-bomb-grade enriched uranium, which inspectors saw just two weeks ago.

After a week of mixed signals, Trump, who has long vowed to steer America clear of overseas “forever wars,” authorized U.S. forces to strike Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear installation, deep underground. The goal, U.S. and Israeli officials have said, is to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb.

A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the information, said that multiple B-2 bombers carried out the strikes.

Smoke rises from IsraelÕs attack in an oil refinery in Tehran, Iran, on Sunday, June 15, 2025. International law experts are divided over whether IsraelÕs latest attack on IranÕs military and nuclear facilities is legal. (Arash Khamooshi/The New York Times)

Three senior Iranian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that they believed U.S. forces had bombed Fordo and Natanz around 2.30 a.m. in Iran.

For days, Trump had been weighing whether to provide Israel the powerful munitions needed to destroy the facility at Fordo. Only American bombs known as bunker busters are believed up to the job, and only American aircraft can deliver them.

Israel and Iran, sworn enemies for decades, have been exchanging attacks since June 13, when the Israelis launched a surprise assault that targeted Iranian infrastructure, including nuclear installations, and military leaders. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his nation had no choice but to act if it wanted to stave off a nuclear “holocaust.”

Iran responded with missile barrages of its own, as well as offers to resume negotiations over its nuclear development program.

Just days ago, the Trump administration appeared intent on distancing itself from the conflict. “We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared.

But Trump, when he was not urging peace talks, began sounding increasingly belligerent.

On Tuesday, he went so far as to make a direct threat against Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying that “we know exactly where” he is and calling him “an easy target.” He said, “We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least for now.” But he warned, “Our patience is growing thin.”

Trump called for Iran’s “complete surrender.”

In what was considered a sign that the U.S. government was nearing a decision, Trump cut short his attendance Monday at the Group of 7 summit in Alberta, Canada, and flew back to Washington — surprising U.S. allies assembled for the meetings.

“Much was accomplished, but because of what’s going on in the Middle East, President Trump will be leaving tonight after dinner with Heads of State,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Here is what else to know:

— What’s next? Now that Trump has sent American bombers to help Israel destroy a uranium enrichment facility in Iran, it will most likely initiate a more dangerous phase in the war.

— Saturday strikes: Israel launched a wave of airstrikes against missile sites, a nuclear facility and munitions storage sites in Iran, while Iran fired a barrage of ballistic missiles and launched drones into Israel.

— Commanders killed: Israel’s military said it killed Mohammed Said Izadi, Behnam Shahriyari and Aminpour Joudaki, commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Izadi and Shahriyari were both senior officials in the Quds Force, which oversees and supports proxy militias around the Middle East, according to Israel’s Defense Ministry. The deaths were not immediately confirmed by Iran.

— Evacuations: The U.S. State Department has begun evacuating Americans from Israel, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee said. In a post on social media, he encouraged Americans in Israel and the West Bank to fill out a form requesting evacuation, which could be by cruise ship, commercial flight, charter flight or a flight operated by the U.S. government.Yoda