Donald Trump has reacted furiously after an Israel-Iran ceasefire he had brokered and taken credit for was violated within a few hours, ordering Israel to turn its warplanes around midair and abort their planned bombing sorties, which he warned would be a “major violation”.
Israel claimed Iran had been the first to break the truce, saying it had shot down two ballistic missiles heading for northern Israel at about 10.30am, about two and a half hours after the ceasefire was announced.
Nevertheless, on waking in Washington to the news that his truce had been broken so soon, Trump reserved his greatest rancour for Israel, for the scale of its planned retaliation, but also for the amount of bombs Israeli planes had dropped between agreeing the ceasefire on Monday night and it coming into force at 5am GMT on Tuesday.
“Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I’ve never seen before, the biggest load that we’ve seen,” he said, in the strongest-worded public rebuke of Israel of any US president in history. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” Trump said.
Read the full report from The Guardian.
