President Donald Trump ripped into Iran and Israel for violating a ceasefire deal within hours of his triumphant announcement.
“You basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f--- they’re doing! Do you understand that?” he told reporters Tuesday morning on his way to the NATO summit in The Hague.
The president had announced early Tuesday morning that a ceasefire was in effect between the two countries after they had spent nearly two weeks trading air and missile fire.
But soon after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Tuesday morning that Israel had accepted Trump’s plan, the Israeli military said it had identified a missile launched from Iran toward its territory—and vowed to launch new strikes in response.
Iran denied firing a missile after the ceasefire began but warned that it would give a “decisive and regretful response” if Israel resumed its attacks.
Outside the White House on Tuesday morning, a visibly angry Trump ranted against “gutless” and “loser” TV news networks and said he was unhappy with both Israel and Iran. His frustration, however, was especially directed at Israel, which he said needed to “calm down.”
“I’m really unhappy if Israel is going out this morning because [of] the one rocket that didn’t land, that was shot perhaps by mistake,” he said, adding that as soon as he was done speaking to the reporters he planned to “see if [he] could stop it.”
Less than a half-hour later, he seemed to consider the situation back under control.
“ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran,” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect!”
A White House source said Trump had spoken to Netanyahu by phone and was “exceptionally firm and direct” about what needed to happen to maintain the ceasefire, CNN reported.
Netanyahu’s office told the network that Israel had struck a radar site north of Tehran on Tuesday but refrained from conducting further strikes after the prime minister spoke with Trump.
Trump had previously warned Israel in a separate Truth Social post, “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!”
Earlier Tuesday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had said that he’d instructed his armed forces to “respond forcefully to Iran’s violation of the ceasefire with high-intensity strikes against regime targets in the heart of Tehran,” Reuters reported.
Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir, chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces, had also vowed in a post on X that Israel would “strike with force.”
The marked uncertainty surrounding the ceasefire just hours after it was announced stood in stark contrast to the triumphant tone that Trump had struck when he declared an end to the hostilities.
“I knew the time was NOW,” he wrote on Truth Social. “The World, and the Middle East, are the real WINNERS! Both Nations will see tremendous LOVE, PEACE, AND PROSPERITY in their futures.”
During interviews and social media posts, Trump suggested that his own strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend had brought about the agreement. The U.S. dropped massive “bunker buster” bombs that can penetrate deep underground—the only weapons capable of reaching Iran’s buried nuclear facilities.
In the aftermath of the attack, Trump said Iran’s nuclear program had been “totally obliterated.” Experts, however, fear that Iran may have moved hundreds of pounds of near-weapons-grade uranium away from the attack sites, The New York Times reported.
“Iran has made no secret that they have protected this material,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told CNN on Sunday.
Speaking to reporters about the ceasefire, Trump raged against the network news channels’ reporting—especially CNN and MSNBC—and personally attacked their leadership.
“These networks and these cable networks are real losers. You really are,” he said. “You’re gutless losers. I say that to CNN.”
Trump then claimed CNN and MSNBC—which he calls “MSDNC” in a reference to the Democratic National Committee—should apologize to the pilots of the B-2 bombers that hit Iran’s nuclear sites.
CNN declined to comment on the president’s remarks. The Daily Beast has also reached out to MSNBC.
“MSDNC—a guy name Brian Roberts, he heads it. He’s a disgrace. He’s a weak, pathetic disgrace,” Trump said.
Roberts is the CEO of Comcast, which owns MSNBC’s parent company, NBCUniversal. Despite his complaints about Roberts, one of Trump’s first calls after his strike on Iran was to Kristen Welker, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press.
Before the president had he even addressed the nation, he told Welker the strikes were “complete and total success,” Welker told viewers at the time.
