Gulf on cusp of new war as Trump hints at 'imminent' Iran action

US President Donald Trump said Washington was not negotiating with Iran, adding that "something one way or the other" would happen "fairly soon."

"Most people seem to think it's after the election, and we're going to see what happens," Trump told reporters on Wednesday as he returned from a rally in South Carolina.

Earlier, during his remarks at the rally, Trump said the United States could end its war with Iran immediately but wanted to ensure the outcome would be lasting.

He also claimed that Washington had defeated Iran militarily and financially, insisting that Tehran would "never have a nuclear weapon."

The New York Times reported earlier this week that the US and Israeli militaries had drawn up plans for renewed strikes on Iran after the US midterm elections, citing US officials and others briefed on the discussions.

However, it remained unclear whether Trump would approve the strikes. The newspaper noted that he had repeatedly rejected plans to resume major combat operations this year.

Meanwhile, Iran will strike oil facilities, undersea cables, datacentres and AI facilities across as many as seven countries in the Gulf in the event of a fresh US-Israeli attack, Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran's supreme national security council, has said.

Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Mohammad Ghalibaf, the hardliner who led Iran's negotiations with the US to end the conflict between the two countries, said Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed in principle on an attack, but could not guarantee a successful outcome. He added: "We see the next conflict as an existential threat. The third war in two years means a threat to existence. Our strategy is 'zero red lines'."

Mohammadi said: "We break the temporal and spatial dimensions of the conflict. The war will continue longer and in a wider geographical area than the enemy anticipates."

Iranian media reported that Rezaei had declared: "In the event of a war, cables, datacentres and artificial intelligence facilities could also be targeted. If the conflict breaks out again, we will have a broader plan.

"There can be no arrangement in which Iran's economic lifelines come under attack while the economic architecture enabling those attacks is considered untouched and immune."

According to recent reports in US media, US military advisers have drawn up a detailed list of targets for a fresh joint US-Israel assault on Iran to be implemented after the US midterm elections on 3 November.