WASHINGTON/TEL AVIV/ISTANBUL (Reuters) – The ceasefire brokered by US President Donald Trump between Iran and Israel appeared to be holding on Wednesday a day after both countries signalled that their air war had ended, at least for now.
Each side claimed victory on Tuesday after 12 days of war, which the US joined with airstrikes in support of Israel to take out Iran's uranium-enrichment facilities.
On Tuesday, explosions rang out in Tehran from Israeli airstrikes despite President Trump saying Israel had called off strikes at his command to preserve an hours-old ceasefire.
Two witnesses reached by telephone in the Iranian capital said they heard two loud explosions.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office acknowledged that Israel had struck a radar site near Tehran in what it said was retaliation for Iranian missiles fired three-and-a-half hours after the ceasefire had been due to begin.
It said Israel had decided to refrain from further attacks following a call between Netanyahu and Trump but did not explicitly say whether the strike on the radar site took place before or after they spoke.
Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, said late on Tuesday that talks between the United States and Iran were "promising" and that Washington was hopeful for a long-term peace deal.
"We are already talking to each other, not just directly but also through interlocutors. I think that the conversations are promising. We are hopeful that we can have a long-term peace agreement that resurrects Iran," Witkoff said in an interview on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" show.
"Now it's for us to sit down with the Iranians and get to a comprehensive peace agreement, and I am very confident that we are going to achieve that," he added.
Trump, en route to a NATO summit in the Netherlands, had rebuked Israel with an obscenity in an extraordinary outburst at an ally whose military campaign he had joined two days earlier.
"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!" Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
That followed a post in which he had said: "Israel. Do not drop those bombs. If you do it it is a major violation. Bring your pilots home, now!"
Before departing the White House, Trump told reporters he was unhappy with both sides for violating the ceasefire, but particularly unhappy with Israel, which he said had "unloaded" shortly after agreeing on the deal.
"I've got to get Israel to calm down now," Trump said. Iran and Israel had been fighting "so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing."
Trump said over the weekend that US stealth bombers had "obliterated" Iran's programme to develop nuclear weapons. Iran says its enrichment activities are for civilian purposes only.
But Trump's claim appeared to be contradicted by an initial report by one of his administration's intelligence agencies, according to three people familiar with the matter.
One of the sources said Iran's enriched uranium stocks had not been eliminated, and the country's nuclear programme, much of which is buried deep underground, may have been set back only a month or two.
The White House said the intelligence assessment was "flat out wrong."
According to the report, which was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities, but did not collapse underground buildings, said one of the people familiar with its findings.
Some centrifuges remained intact, the Washington Post said, citing an unnamed person familiar with the report.
Trump's administration told the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday that its weekend strikes had "degraded" Iran's nuclear programme, short of Trump's assertion that the facilities had been "obliterated."
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said on Tuesday that the attack had removed the nuclear threat against Israel and he was determined to thwart any attempt by Tehran to revive its weapons programme.
"We have removed two immediate existential threats to us: the threat of nuclear annihilation and the threat of annihilation by 20,000 ballistic missiles," he said.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said his country had successfully ended the war in what he called a "great victory," according to Iranian media.
Pezeshkian also told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Tehran was ready to resolve differences with the US, according to official news agency IRNA.
Israel launched the surprise air war on June 13, attacking Iranian nuclear facilities and killing top military commanders in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran, which denies trying to build nuclear weapons, retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites and cities.
Iran has arrested 700 people accused of ties with Israel during the 12-day conflict, the state-affiliated Nournews reported on Wednesday and Iran executed three men on Wednesday, convicted of collaborating with Israel's Mossad spy agency and smuggling equipment used in an unnamed assassination, the Iranian judiciary's Mizan news agency reported.
RESTRICTIONS LIFTED
Israel's military lifted restrictions on activity across the country at 8 pm local time (1700 GMT) on Tuesday, and officials said Ben Gurion Airport, the country's main airport near Tel Aviv, had reopened. Iran's airspace likewise will be reopened, state-affiliated Nournews reported.
Oil prices edged higher on Wednesday, finding some respite after plummeting in the last two sessions, as investors assessed the stability of the ceasefire and the diminished prospect of an Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
The truce appeared fragile: Both Israel and Iran took hours to acknowledge they had accepted the ceasefire and accused each other of violating it.
Trump scolded both sides but aimed especially stinging criticism at Israel, telling the close US ally to "calm down now." He later said Israel called off further attacks at his command.
Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, said he told his US counterpart, Pete Hegseth, that his country would respect the ceasefire unless Iran violated it. Pezeshkian likewise said Iran would honour the ceasefire as long as Israel did, according to Iranian media.
Israeli armed forces chief of staff Eyal Zamir said a "significant chapter" of the conflict had concluded but the campaign against Iran was not over. He said the military would refocus on its war against Iran-backed Hamas militants in Gaza.
Iranian authorities said 610 people were killed in their country by Israeli strikes and 4,746 injured. Iran's retaliatory bombardment killed 28 people in Israel, the first time its air defences were penetrated by large numbers of Iranian missiles.
VIOLATIONS?
A reporter for Axios said Netanyahu had told Trump that Israel would scale back the bombing mission rather than cancel it.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz had said earlier on Tuesday that he had ordered the military to mount major strikes on targets in Tehran in response to what he said were Iranian missiles fired in a "blatant violation" of the ceasefire.
Iran denied launching any missiles and said Israel's attacks had continued for an hour-and-a-half beyond the time the ceasefire was meant to start.
Despite the initial reports of violations, in both countries there was a palpable sense of relief that a path out of war had been charted, 12 days after Israel launched it with a surprise attack, and two days after Trump joined in with strikes on Iranian nuclear targets.
"We’re happy, very happy. Who mediated or how it happened doesn’t matter. The war is over. It never should have started in the first place," said Reza Sharifi, 38, heading back to Tehran from Rasht on the Caspian Sea where he had relocated with his family to escape strikes.
Arik Daimant, a software engineer in Tel Aviv, said: "Regrettably, it’s a bit too late for me and my family because our house back here was destroyed in the recent bombings last Sunday. But as they say: 'better late than never', and I hope this ceasefire is a new beginning."
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One, Trump said he did not want to see Iran's ruling system toppled.
"I don't want it. I'd like to see everything calm down as quickly as possible. Regime change takes chaos and ideally, we don't want to see so much chaos," he said.
"Iran's not going to have a nuclear weapon, by the way, I think it's the last thing on their mind right now," he said.
In the hours before the ceasefire took effect, four people were killed by Iranian missiles that struck a residential building in Beersheba in southern Israel, according to the Israeli ambulance service. Iranian officials said nine people were killed by a strike on a residential building in northern Iran.