Trump open to talks with Iran as conflict deepens in Middle East
By The Guardian, March 2, 2026Donald Trump said on Sunday, March 1, 2026, he was prepared to talk to what was left of the Iranian leadership after the killing of the country’s supreme leader by US-Israeli airstrikes aimed at overthrowing the regime.
Trump was speaking on the second day of intense bombing of Iranian cities, and Tehran’s missile counterattacks sent tremors across the region and through the global economy.
On Monday, March 2, 2026, the conflict spread to Lebanon as Israel began striking Hezbollah targets, after the group launched missiles and drones towards Israel’s north in retaliation for the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran’s top security official, Ali Larijani, who was also an adviser to the country’s former supreme leader, said on Monday that Tehran would not negotiate with the US, and denied reports that officials had sought to initiate talks with the Trump administration.
Amir-Saeid Iravani, the Iranian ambassador to the UN, told an emergency Security Council meeting on Saturday that hundreds of civilians had been killed or injured in the US-Israeli strikes. He said they had deliberately targeted civilian neighbourhoods in multiple cities.
The death toll is expected to climb after a second day of bombing. Iranian state media said that 165 people had been confirmed dead in a bomb attack on a girls’ primary school in the southern city of Minab on Saturday.
Among the dead was Khamenei, who had ruled as Iran’s supreme leader since 1989 and was the primary target of an initial Israeli strike on Saturday morning. According to several US reports, the CIA had been tracking Khamenei for months.
The New York Times reported that the CIA tipped off Israel when the leader convened a meeting of top defence aides at his compound in Tehran, triggering a decision to strike.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the Israeli army employed a ruse to put the Iranian leadership off its guard. On the morning of the operation, army officers were asked not to park their cars in their usual spaces to avoid detection by Iran’s spies. Misinformation was also leaked, suggesting that the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, had stayed at home.
The channel cited officials as saying the Israeli air force killed 30 high-ranking Iranian officials within the first 30 seconds of the attack.
Trump told Fox News that 48 Iranian leaders had been killed in the first two days of bombing, and claimed in a social media post that nine Iranian warships had been sunk and the naval headquarters destroyed.
The ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl reported that the US had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack”.
“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates … It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead,” Trump said, according to Karl’s reports.
Nine Israelis have so far died in Iranian missile counterstrikes, and US forces confirmed their first casualties of the war: three dead and five injured by shrapnel.
The official announcement did not give details on where and how the casualties occurred.