Photo: Daniel Torok / The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
President Donald Trump said on Sunday that the United States will not strike Iran today, answering the question he deliberately left open a day earlier when he said an attack could come "maybe tomorrow."
"The answer is no," Trump told a press gaggle outside the White House on Sunday, according to the Times of Israel's live coverage. "There will not be a strike today."
The statement, also carried by Al Jazeera's live blog and The National, defused the most immediate version of a threat that has hung over the Gulf all weekend. It does not end the wider war, which began with United States and Israeli strikes on Iran in February, but it moves the question of an imminent American attack past Sunday.
From "maybe tomorrow" to "no"
The shift came barely a day after Trump raised the prospect of a strike himself. Asked on Saturday, after he cast his ballot early in Florida in the midterm elections, how close the United States was to attacking Iran, Trump replied: "Do you really think I'd tell you that? Maybe tomorrow... There's a possibility I will. There's also a possibility we'll have a nice, big, beautiful agreement. They want to make a deal, but the problem is, will they hold the deal?"
That remark, reported by the Associated Press and others, was the latest turn in a series of shifting signals from the president. He wrote on Truth Social that the United States would not attack Iran before the November 3 midterm elections, saying: "We will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the midterm elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd." Then, at a rally in Florida on Friday, he said Washington "may do another little Epic Fury," using the US military's name for its war against Iran, Reuters reported. On Saturday came the "maybe tomorrow" warning. On Sunday came the denial.
The whiplash is part of a pattern that has defined the eight-month conflict: threats of escalation followed by sudden openings for diplomacy, with neither side's intentions ever fully clear until events overtake the rhetoric.
Diplomacy still moving
Even as the strike question dominated the weekend, the diplomatic track kept moving. Al Jazeera's live coverage on Sunday also reported Qatari mediators in Tehran, a sign that the intermediaries who have tried to broker an end to the war remain active.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, in comments aired on state television, said Iran's supreme leader had instructed Iranian officials to "go and finish it (the deal)," while accusing Washington of disrupting negotiations, the Associated Press reported. The two sides remain far apart on sequencing: Washington has pressed for limits on Iran's nuclear programme, while Tehran has prioritised reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which much of the world's oil travels.
A weekend of attacks elsewhere in the region
Sunday's statement came against a violent weekend across the region. Saudi air defences intercepted a Houthi ballistic missile aimed at Riyadh on Sunday morning and later brought down a cruise missile aimed at Khamis Mushait, after a heavy exchange on Saturday in which the Houthis said they carried out seven missile and drone operations against targets inside Saudi Arabia. Washington earlier ordered non-essential government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia, and the US mission in Riyadh updated its travel advisories to reflect an increased risk of attacks by the Iranian-supported Houthis.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran may try to disrupt Tuesday's Israeli election, telling Tehran "don't test us," according to the Times of Israel. Anxiety has been growing in both Israel and the United States that the war could escalate again before or just after the two countries' elections.
What happens next
With Sunday now ruled out by the president himself, attention turns to whether the diplomatic track produces anything concrete, whether Israel acts independently, and how oil markets react when trading resumes on Monday. None of those questions has an answer yet, and Trump's own record in this war counsels against treating any single day's statement as final.
For now, though, the immediate crisis that his Saturday remarks created has passed without a strike — the outcome the region's mediators, and the Americans and Europeans urging restraint, had been hoping for.
Sources: Al Jazeera, Times of Israel, The National, Associated Press, Reuters