The United States will begin "direct" negotiations with Iran regarding its nuclear program this weekend, President Donald Trump said on Monday.
"We're having direct talks with Iran," the president said. "They’ve started — they’ll go on Saturday, we’ll have a very big meeting. We’ll see what can happen. I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious. And the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with or frankly that Israel wants to be involved with if they can avoid it."
The president announced the meeting but did not specify who would be involved during public comments in the Oval Office alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday afternoon. Trump said the officials involved will be from a "very high level ... almost the highest level."
The Iranians have not yet publicly confirmed the talks.
“I think if the talks aren’t successful with Iran, I think Iran is going to be in great danger and I hate to say it, great danger because they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Trump added. “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That’s all there is.”
Trump said last month that he wrote a letter to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei expressing openness to a new nuclear agreement seven years after he pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 agreement during his first term in office.
"I said, 'I hope you're going to negotiate' because it's going to be a lot better for Iran, and I think they want to get that letter," Trump said at the time. "The other alternative is we have to do something because you can't let them have a nuclear weapon."
The president has exerted a "maximum pressure" campaign against Tehran.
Last week, Trump said Iran would face “bombing the likes of which they have never seen before” if Tehran did not reach an agreement, while Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said he had rejected direct negotiations.
As the administration has pursued negotiations with Tehran, the U.S. military has also deployed thousands of troops to the region.
US BOOSTS IRAN STRIKE OPTIONS WITH AIRCRAFT CARRIER AND BOMBER DEPLOYMENTS
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth directed the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group to remain in the Middle East and ordered the USS Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group to sail to the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility once it completes a scheduled exercise in the Indo-Pacific. The secretary also ordered the deployment of additional squadrons and other air assets to the region.
The U.S. appeared to have deployed half a dozen nuclear-capable stealth bombers on a tiny British island in the Indian Ocean within striking distance of Iran.
Trump has warned that additional attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis would also be seen as acts of Iranian aggression.
The U.S. military began an aerial campaign targeting the Houthis, which are based in Yemen, in mid-March.
“CENTCOM is conducting strikes across multiple locations of Iran-backed Houthi locations every day and night in Yemen,” a defense official told the Washington Examiner on Monday. “We have confirmed the death of several Houthi leaders. We have destroyed command and controlled facilities, air defense systems, weapons manufacturing facilities and advanced weapons storage locations.”
“While the Houthis still maintain capability, it is largely because of the nearly 10 years of support provided by Iran,” the official added.
"It's been a bad three weeks for the Houthis and it's about to get worse," Hegseth said on Monday. "It’s been a devastating campaign, whether its underground facilities, weapons manufacturing, bunkers, troops in the open, air defense assets, we are not going to relent, and it’s only going to get more unrelenting until the Houthis declare they will stop shooting at our ships."
"We’ve been very clear with the Iranians as well. They should not continue to provide support for the Houthis, and that message has been made very clear," he added.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the military had hit more than 200 targets.
The Houthis began targeting commercial vessels transiting the waterways off Yemen’s coasts in the aftermath of the start of the Israel-Hamas war. The drone and missile attacks prompted commercial shipping companies to reroute their vessels on the much longer voyage around the African continent.