United States President Donald Trump has declared a “victory for everybody” as the ceasefire that ended 12 days of fighting between Iran and Israel continues to hold, despite uncertainty over the effectiveness of US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.
Trump, speaking in The Hague where he attended a NATO summit on Wednesday, said his decision to join Israel’s attacks by targeting Iranian nuclear sites with huge bunker-busting bombs had ended the war, calling it “a victory for everybody”.
He shrugged off an initial assessment by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that Iran’s path to building a nuclear weapon may have been set back only by months, saying the findings were “inconclusive” and he believed the sites had been destroyed.
“It was very severe. It was obliteration,” he said.
“The intelligence was … very inconclusive,” Trump told reporters while meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte before the summit.
“The intelligence says, ‘We don’t know, it could have been very severe.’ That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct, but I think we can take the ‘we don’t know’. It was very severe. It was obliteration,” Trump added.
An initial intelligence evaluation suggested that the US bombardment failed to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN reported on Tuesday, citing officials familiar with the military intelligence report from the DIA.
Two people familiar with the assessment had told CNN that Iran’s “enriched uranium was not destroyed” and the centrifuges were “largely intact”.
Another source told the US broadcaster that, according to the assessment, enriched uranium had been moved before the US strikes on Sunday.
Trump has maintained that the US strikes destroyed nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.
He also said the US strikes were responsible for ending the war between Israel and Iran and compared them with the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, which brought an end to World War II in 1945.
“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war. This ended the war,” Trump said.
When reporters asked him about Iran rebuilding its nuclear programme on Tuesday, Trump said: “That place is under rock. That place is demolished.”
Trump, who arrived in the Netherlands late on Tuesday for NATO’s annual summit, was sitting beside Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who both also cast doubt on the reliability of the DIA assessment.
“When you actually look at the report – by the way, it was a top secret report – it was preliminary, it was low-confidence,” Hegseth said. “This is a political motive here.”
The White House also said the intelligence assessment was “flat-out wrong”.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement: “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, also dismissed the intelligence report.
“All three of those had most, if not all, the centrifuges damaged or destroyed in a way that it will be almost impossible for them to resurrect that programme,” Witkoff told Fox News on Monday night.
“In my view, and in many other experts’ views who have seen the raw data, it will take a period of years.”
Witkoff also called the leaking of the report “treasonous”.
“It ought to be investigated. And whoever did it, whoever is responsible for it, should be held accountable,” he added.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi said an information war is under way.
“There are clearly figures in Washington who are very keen to leak a very preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency bombing assessment,” he said.
He noted that White House reporters received a press statement, saying the “leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear programme”.
“This is the first moment we are seeing, post-bombing, of the information landscape and how this information will be used and what effect it might have on Donald Trump going forward,” Rattansi said.
