Trump demands Iran's 'unconditional surrender' as U.S.-Israel strikes intensify across region

A week into the most intense military campaign the Middle East has seen in years, the region is convulsing. The United States and Israel have struck more than three thousand targets across Iran. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled Iran for thirty-four years, is dead—killed in the opening salvo of strikes that began last Saturday. In his absence, a power vacuum has opened that no one in Tehran has faced in decades. And President Trump, watching from Washington, has made clear he intends to fill it.

The scale of the operation is staggering. Over nine hundred and forty Iranians have been killed by American and Israeli strikes, according to Iranian state media. One hundred and twenty-three people have died in Lebanon from Israeli bombardment. Eleven Israelis have been killed by Iranian retaliation. Six American service members—all from an Army Reserve unit based in Iowa—have lost their lives. In Lebanon alone, approximately three hundred thousand people have been displaced by evacuation orders and strikes. At a school in the southern Iranian town of Minab, at least one hundred and sixty-eight people, many of them children, were killed in what preliminary U.S. investigations suggest was a strike by an American munition. A ten-year-old girl who survived the attack, identified only as Nila, described hearing what sounded like strong wind before everything went dark. When she regained consciousness, a large stone lay across her back. Her eleven-year-old brother and her mother, a teacher at the school, did not survive.

Trump has been explicit about what comes next. There will be no ceasefire, no negotiation, no deal of any kind unless Iran surrenders unconditionally. He has told NBC News that he wants Iran to have a "good leader"—and that he has names in mind. When asked whether he plans to ensure those candidates survive the war, he said simply: "We are watching them." The president has also suggested that a ground invasion would be a waste of time, though he has not ruled out other forms of pressure. He has encouraged Iranian military officers, police, and Revolutionary Guard members to defect, promising them immunity. He has hinted that Kurdish opposition groups in northern Iraq might be armed to launch attacks inside Iran. And he has suggested, almost casually, that Cuba could be next.

Iran, for its part, has not asked for a ceasefire. Its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told NBC News that the country is ready for any ground invasion the United States might attempt. Iran has continued to fire missiles and drones across the Persian Gulf, striking targets in Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Russia, according to four sources with knowledge of the matter, has begun providing Iran with intelligence on the location of American forces—satellite data and other information that could help Iranian missiles find their targets, though there is no indication yet that Moscow is directing the strikes themselves. At least eleven ships have been attacked in the Gulf in the past week. A U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka, killing more than eighty sailors. Sri Lanka, which has declared itself neutral, has taken custody of two damaged Iranian vessels and rescued survivors.

The human toll extends far beyond the battlefield. Nearly twenty thousand American citizens have managed to return to the United States since the war began, but thousands remain stranded across the Middle East. A venture capitalist named Sasha Hoffman, who was in Dubai when the strikes started, paid thirteen hundred dollars for a private car to drive herself and two friends across the border into Oman. Flights out of the region are costing thousands of dollars—coach tickets to London, Cairo, or Istanbul that would normally cost a few hundred dollars now run two thousand or more. Hoffman has criticized the U.S. government for having no organized evacuation plan. The State Department, she said, "acted like thousands of people have made their way back to the U.S." They have, she added, but they did it themselves. The government did not pay for it.

The economic reverberations are already global. Oil prices have spiked to their highest levels since October 2023, with U.S. crude breaking ninety dollars a barrel. Brent crude has crossed ninety dollars for the first time since April 2024. Gas prices in America have jumped thirty-four cents in a single week—the largest weekly increase since March 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The stock market opened sharply lower, with the Dow down nearly two percent. Qatar, which produces about one-fifth of the world's liquefied natural gas, has invoked force majeure and paused production, citing military attacks on its facilities. Other Gulf energy producers are expected to do the same. The European Union's defense commissioner has warned that the United States will not be able to produce enough air-defense and anti-ballistic missiles to supply both Gulf states and Ukraine simultaneously. The U.N. secretary-general has called for an immediate ceasefire and a return to diplomacy, warning that "the situation could spiral beyond anyone's control."

Meanwhile, Iran's clerical leadership is preparing to introduce a new supreme leader. The Assembly of Experts, the body tasked with selecting Iran's highest authority, has begun making plans, though no timeline has been announced. Before his death, Khamenei declined to name a successor, despite being pressed to do so. Trump has made clear that he expects to have a voice in the selection. Israel has threatened to kill anyone appointed to the role. And across the region, from the streets of Tehran to the suburbs of Beirut, ordinary people are trying to survive a war that has no clear end in sight.