Live Updates: U.S. Moves B-2 Bombers as Iran and Israel Exchange Strikes

“It feels like we’re in a dark cave,” said Arta, an Iranian who fled Tehran on Tuesday and was able to briefly send a few messages over Instagram late Friday.

Like many others who have exchanged messages with The New York Times over the last week, he asked to be identified only by his first name to avoid scrutiny by the authorities.

“Even SMS texts don’t go through sometimes,” he said.

Many Iranians rely on virtual private networks, or VPNs, to evade government restrictions on the internet, but many of those services have been disrupted since Israel’s attacks began. On Saturday, as some connection returned, providers urged their users to act cautiously.

“For your own sake, don’t spread the link, the server will disconnect, and our work will only get harder,” one organizer wrote on a VPN provider’s Telegram channel. The organizer warned that reports of disconnection were increasing again, and asked subscribers to not share their product link because their server was overwhelmed.

Since at least Wednesday, the Iranian government has significantly restricted internet access across the country, with a government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, saying on Friday that the measures were taken because of “cyberattacks and security” reasons.

For Iranians abroad with loved ones in the country, the blackout has multiplied anxieties that were already high as news reports about Israeli evacuation orders and airstrikes rolled in.

Incoming international calls have also been blocked, forcing people in Iran to call their family and friends abroad directly. But making international calls from Iran means very high fees, which many in the country can’t afford.

Still, Iranians have sought creative ways around the restrictions.

On Thursday, during the height of the blackout, a group of Iranians managed to get online and speak with people outside the country through Clubhouse, an audio app that is popular in Iran. At one point, nearly 1,700 Iranians joined the call, hoping for help in reaching their loved ones.

For hours, Iranians abroad took turns sharing the names and numbers of their friends and relatives so that people inside Iran could connect them through Clubhouse.

“Dad? Can you hear me? Do you have insulin?” asked a woman who managed to get a hold of her elderly father when the organizers on Clubhouse dialed his number. “I went and bought it, don’t worry,” her father tried to reassure her.

“When you speak to Sanaz, tell her happy birthday for us,” another woman told her niece, who was in Canada. “Don’t cry, don’t worry about us,” the woman said, echoing what many Iranians in the country kept repeating to their nervous family members.

As Iranians abroad have tried to reach relatives, those inside the country have made a show of public solidarity since Israel’s attacks began last week.

Hotels and hostels have advertised free shelter. People in line for bread at a bakery shared what little of it remained, and others said they were feeding the stray cats still wandering Tehran. A father and daughter handed out drinks to people waiting in a long line for gas. Others delivered water to those stranded on the roads after their GPS-guided maps stopped working in the blackout.

A woman named Niloofar, who lives in a residential district of Tehran that Israel warned should be evacuated on Monday, said that many Iranians, despite their fears, had also expressed a determination to keep living as they always had.

“My sister and I tried so hard to get our parents to evacuate,” she said in a message on Telegram. But her mother was cooking olovieh, a classic Persian dish, “while my dad watched soccer,” she added. “At the end, they both refused to leave.”

The B-2 flights were initially tracked on social media just before 1 a.m. on Saturday. Some flight trackers said that the destination of the aircraft is Guam, the U.S. territory, which has several military installations, although that could not be independently confirmed. The bombers appeared to be accompanied by refueling tankers for portions of the journey, the flight tracking data showed.

Additional Air Force F-22, F-16 and F-35 fighter jets have crossed Europe and are now at bases in the Middle East, or are arriving there, a U.S. official said on Saturday. The jets could escort B-2 bombers that could target Fordo, or protect U.S. bases and troops in the region in the event of Iranian retaliatory strikes.

Moving planes does not mean a final decision has been made about whether to strike. It is not unusual to shift military assets into position to provide options to the president and military commanders even if they are not ultimately deployed.

The White House schedule for the weekend said that Mr. Trump would return from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and would meet with his national security team at 6 p.m. on Saturday and again on Sunday. Mr. Trump typically spends both weekend days out of town at one of his properties.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment.

Mr. Trump has made clear he is weighing whether to have the U.S. join Israel’s effort to curtail Iran’s ability to acquire a nuclear weapon, a line he has drawn repeatedly over the years.

But he also gave himself extra time to say what he intends to do. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday that the president would make a decision within the next two weeks as he gives Iran another chance to engage in talks.

The president has been seeking a deal with Iran for months, but became frustrated at the refusal of Iranian officials to agree to a proposal to end uranium enrichment on Iranian soil. At the same time, the U.S. intelligence community came to the conclusion in early June that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel planned to move forward with strikes against Iran, with or without U.S. help.

Those strikes began on June 12 and have continued since, killing multiple members of Iran’s military leadership and drawing retaliatory strikes from Iran against Israel.

Mr. Trump has been torn between the opportunity to carry out what could be a devastating blow against Iran’s nuclear facilities at a moment when Iran’s defenses have been greatly weakened and the concern that doing so would risk the kind of protracted U.S. military engagement in the region that he campaigned against in 2016 and 2024. That debate has also split his supporters.

On Friday, Mr. Trump reiterated his time frame for a decision on military action “within two weeks,” saying the thinking behind it was “just time to see whether or not people come to their senses.”

Mr. Izadi was one of the few people who knew in advance about Hamas’s plan to launch the surprise attack, The New York Times reported last year.

Israeli officials said Mr. Izadi led the Palestinian affairs branch in the Quds Force, the arm of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps responsible for foreign operations. Israel said it had struck an apartment where Mr. Izadi was staying in central Iran overnight between Friday and Saturday.

There was no immediate comment from Iran.

A second commander Israel said it killed was identified as Behnam Shahriyari, another Quds Force commander who oversaw weapons transfers to Iran-backed paramilitary forces in the region.

Mr. Shahriyari had been sanctioned by the U.S. government since 2011 on accusations of transferring weapons on behalf of the Revolutionary Guards to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group.

Effie Defrin, a spokesman for the Israeli military, accused Mr. Shahriyari of being behind financial transfers to allied militant groups in the region.

“Izadi and Shahriyari were at the forefront of Iran’s project to export war into Israeli territory,” Mr. Defrin said in a statement. “In this operation, we have brought the war to them — we eliminated them inside Iran.”

Iran has long backed a network of militias across the Middle East in an attempt to extend its power and influence across the region and menace its enemy, Israel. They include Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, who control parts of Yemen.

In 2019, the United States imposed sanctions on Mr. Izadi, saying he had provided millions of dollars to Hamas. Britain did the same four years later to counter what it called “unprecedented threats from the Iranian regime.”

The Times reported that in August 2023, Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas leader in Gaza, said in a closed-door meeting of the group’s leadership that he had spoken to Mr. Izadi the previous month to outline its plan to launch a huge assault on Israel, according to internal minutes of the group’s leadership meetings.

Mr. al-Hayya said he had told Mr. Izadi that Hamas would need help with striking sensitive sites during “the first hour” of the attack. According to the documents, Mr. Izadi said that Hezbollah and Iran welcomed the plan in principle, but that they needed time “to prepare the environment.”

After the war in Gaza began, Mr. Izadi remained in direct contact with Hamas’s top leadership and sought to aid them by transferring equipment and funds into the territory, according to two Israeli defense officials. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Last year, as Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon intensified, Mr. Izadi left his longtime base in that country for Iran.

He eventually wound up in a safe house belonging to the Revolutionary Guards in the Iranian city of Qum, the two officials said — the same apartment where he was killed overnight.

Israel’s military on Saturday also released video of a missile strike on a car, which it said showed the Israeli strike that killed Mr. Shahriyari as his vehicle drove through western Iran.

Mr. Defrin said Israeli forces had also killed a Revolutionary Guard commander of drone operations identified as Aminpour Joudaki. He said Mr. Joudaki had coordinated strikes on Israel launched from southwestern Iran.

“We are constantly afraid, and the psychological toll has been heavy,” said Rawan Muhaidat, 28, a mother of two in the town of Kafr Asad in northern Jordan.

The sight of Iranian missiles overhead, and the booms of air defenses shooting them down before they reach Israel, have terrified her children, who cower between her and her husband as they worry that their home could be struck.

“Every time a rocket passes and explodes, we think, ‘This is the one,’” Ms. Muhaidat said.

Adding to many people’s fears is the possibility that President Trump will grant Israel’s request that the United States intervene by dropping 30,000-pound bombs on an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility buried deep underground.

Such a move, experts say, could push Iran to retaliate against American military bases or allies across the Middle East, or to activate proxy forces, like the Houthis in Yemen, to snarl trade routes or damage oil infrastructure, harming the global economy.

“We’re opening a Pandora’s box,” said Narges Bajoghli, an associate professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University. “Iran is not going to raise the white flag of surrender.”

The war highlights how significantly the power structure across the Middle East has shifted in recent years.

Just over a half-decade ago, Israel largely focused on its conflict with the Palestinians while waging a shadow war with Iran through occasional assassinations and other covert attacks. But it avoided direct confrontation, partly for fear of retaliation from the network of militias that Iran supported in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

At that time, most Arab countries shunned Israel, a Jewish-majority democracy, for its treatment of the Palestinians, and many resented the predominantly Persian Iran for what they considered its destructive meddling in the Arab world. But a few Arab states began to see Israel as a potential partner in dealing with their own concerns about Iran and established formal diplomatic relations.

That picture has now changed.

The deadly surprise attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas in October 2023 heightened Israel’s sense of vulnerability, and the country has become increasingly aggressive in striking out against perceived threats far beyond its borders.

For Iran, the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and the ouster last year of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, decimated its regional proxy network and left it even more isolated.

Powerful Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, pursued their own diplomatic tracks with Tehran to decrease tensions. Now, they also hope to avoid a war in their neighborhood that could put them in the cross hairs because of their partnerships with the United States.

The current conflict began on June 13, at a bad time for the international institutions that were established to try to contain such hostilities.

Israel’s war in Gaza, which began after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, has killed more than 50,000 people and caused widespread destruction and hunger in Gaza.

Few seem to expect that the warring parties in the new conflict will be held accountable for killing civilians or striking hospitals, as Israel has done repeatedly in Gaza — sometimes because Hamas has built tunnels beneath them — and as Iran did in Israel on Thursday.

Expectations are low that action by the United Nations Security Council will stop the war, not least because the United States would almost certainly veto any measure that called for its end. And Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told senior European officials during talks in Geneva on Friday that Iran would not negotiate under fire.

Mr. Trump dismissed the European efforts anyway, saying: “Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us.”

He has said he will decide “within the next two weeks” whether the United States will bomb Iran.

That lack of international action to stop the war has left Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel free to proceed as they choose, Professor Bajoghli said.

“We’re entering a new international era, a new world order, and it seems to in some ways be an old world order of force and the law of the jungle, but with 21st-century technology and weaponry,” she said.

Israel initiated the war with a multipronged surprise attack that damaged Iranian military and nuclear sites, largely destroyed air defenses, and killed top nuclear scientists and military officials in their homes, as well as a number of civilians. Iran has responded by firing barrages of ballistic missiles at Israel, some of which have struck civilian apartment towers. At least 224 people have been killed in Iran and 24 in Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu has said that Israel launched the attack to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, which Israel would consider an existential threat. He has also suggested the more expansive goals of regional transformation and regime change.

“We are changing the face of the Middle East, and that can lead to radical changes inside Iran itself,” he said on Monday.

Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful, and United States intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran has not decided to seek a nuclear weapon, although that could change if the United States bombs Iran’s underground enrichment facility in Fordo or if Israel kills Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

For his part, Ayatollah Khamenei has threatened to retaliate if the United States strikes Iran.

“The harm the U.S. will suffer will definitely be irreparable if they enter this conflict militarily,” he said in a televised address on Wednesday.

The war is hugely unwelcome in the rest of the Middle East, where other governments would prefer to put the region’s conflicts behind them so they can rebuild what has been destroyed and focus on strengthening their economies.

There is little affinity for either of the warring parties. Most Arab states shun Israel, and even governments that have established diplomatic relations with it have condemned how it has fought in Gaza and its attack on Iran.

But that does not mean they support Iran. In a predominantly Sunni Muslim region, most Arab governments see Iran’s revolutionary Shiite theocracy as anathema, and many people in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere resent Iran’s interventions in their countries.

Many Middle East leaders have complicated reactions to the war, said Dina Esfandiary, the lead Middle East analyst at Bloomberg Economics, a research group.

“Officials in the region are quietly glad that Iran’s top brass is being taken out bit by bit, that Iranian proxies and their leaderships are being taken out bit by bit,” she said. “That, from their perspective, gets rid of one of the real threats in the region for them.”

But many also fear an expanded role in the Middle East for Israel, she added, given the tremendous military and diplomatic support it receives from the United States.

That leaves other countries wondering, she said, “Where is Israel going to go next?”

Rana F. Sweis contributed reporting from Amman, Jordan, and Falih Hassan from Baghdad.

And in a remarkable move, the officials add, Ayatollah Khamenei has even named three senior clerics as candidates to succeed him should he be killed, as well — perhaps the most telling illustration of the precarious moment he and his three-decade rule are facing.

Ayatollah Khamenei has taken an extraordinary series of steps to preserve the Islamic Republic ever since Israel launched a series of surprise attacks last Friday.

Though only a week old, the Israeli strikes are the biggest military assault on Iran since its war with Iraq in the 1980s, and the effect on the nation’s capital, Tehran, has been particularly fierce. In only a few days, the Israeli attacks have been more intense and have caused more damage in Tehran than Saddam Hussein did in his entire eight-year war against Iran.

Iran appears to have overcome its initial shock, reorganizing enough to launch daily counterstrikes of its own on Israel, hitting a hospital, the Haifa oil refinery, religious buildings and homes.

Iran’s top officials are also quietly making preparations for a wide range of outcomes as the war intensifies and as President Trump considers whether to enter the fight, according to the Iranian officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the ayatollah’s plans.

Peering inside Iran’s closely guarded leadership can be difficult, but its chain of command still seems to be functioning, despite being hit hard, and there are no obvious signs of dissent in the political ranks, according to the officials and to diplomats in Iran.

Ayatollah Khamenei, 86, is aware that either Israel or the United States could try to assassinate him, an end he would view as martyrdom, the officials said. Given the possibility, the ayatollah has made the unusual decision to instruct his nation’s Assembly of Experts, the clerical body responsible for appointing the supreme leader, to choose his successor swiftly from the three names he has provided.

Normally, the process of appointing a new supreme leader could take months, with clerics picking and choosing from their own lists of names. But with the nation now at war, the officials said, the ayatollah wants to ensure a quick, orderly transition and to preserve his legacy.

“The top priority is the preservation of the state,” said Vali Nasr, an Iran expert and professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. “It is all calculative and pragmatic.”

Succession has long been an exceedingly delicate and thorny topic, seldom discussed publicly beyond speculations and rumors in political and religious circles. The supreme leader has enormous powers: He is the commander in chief of the Iran Armed Forces, as well as the head of the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch. He is also a Vali Faqih, meaning the most senior guardian of the Shiite faith.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, also a cleric and close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who was rumored to be a front-runner, is not among the candidates, the officials said. Iran’s former conservative president, Ibrahim Raisi, was also considered a front-runner before he was killed in a helicopter crash in 2024.

Since the war started, Ayatollah Khamenei has delivered to the public two recorded video messages, against a backdrop of brown curtains and next to the Iranian flag. “The people of Iran will stand against a forced war,” he said, vowing not to surrender.

In normal times, Ayatollah Khamenei lives and works in a highly secure compound in central Tehran called the “beit rahbari” — or leader’s house — and he seldom leaves the premises, except for special occasions like delivering a sermon. Senior officials and military commanders come to him for weekly meetings, and speeches for the public are staged from the compound.

His retreat to a bunker shows how furiously Tehran has been struck in a war with Israel that Iranian officials say is unfolding on two fronts.

One is being waged from the air, with Israeli airstrikes on military bases, nuclear facilities, critical energy infrastructure, commanders and nuclear scientists in their apartment buildings in tightly packed residential neighborhoods. Some of Iran’s top commanders were summarily wiped out.

Hundreds of people have also been killed and thousands of others injured, with civilians slain across Iran, human rights groups inside and outside the country say.

But Iranian officials say that they are fighting on a second front, as well, with covert Israeli operatives and collaborators scattered on the ground across Iran’s vast terrain, launching drones at critical energy and military structures. The fear of Israeli infiltration among the top ranks of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus has rattled the Iranian power structure, even Ayatollah Khamenei, officials say.

“It is clear that we had a massive security and intelligence breach; there is no denying this,” said Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Iran’s speaker of Parliament, Gen. Mohammad Ghalibaf, in an audio recording analyzing the war. “Our senior commanders were all assassinated within one hour.”

Iran’s “biggest failure was not discovering” the months of planning Israeli operatives had conducted to bring missiles and drone parts into the country to prepare for the attack, he added.

The country’s leadership has been preoccupied with three central concerns, officials say: an assassination attempt against Ayatollah Khamenei; the United States’ entering the war; and more debilitating attacks against Iran’s critical infrastructure, like power plants, oil and gas refineries and dams.

Should the United States join the fight, the stakes would multiply significantly. Israel says that it wants to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, but experts say that only the United States has the bomber — and the enormous 30,000-pound bomb — that might be capable of penetrating the mountain where Iran has built its most critical nuclear enrichment facilities, Fordo.

Iran has threatened to retaliate by attacking American targets in the region, but that would only risk a wider, and possibly more devastating, conflict for Iran and its adversaries.

The fear of assassination and infiltration within Iran’s ranks is so widespread that the Ministry of Intelligence announced a series of security protocols, telling officials to stop using cellphones or any electronic devices to communicate. It has also ordered all senior government officials and military commanders to remain below ground, according to two Iranian officials.

Almost every day, the Ministry of Intelligence or the Armed Forces issue directives for the public to report suspicious individuals and vehicle movements, and to refrain from taking photographs and videos of attacks on sensitive sites.

The country has also been in a communication blackout with the outside world. The internet has been nearly shut down, and incoming international calls have been blocked. The Ministry of Telecommunications said in a statement that these measures were to find enemy operatives on the ground and to disable their ability to launch attacks.

“The security apparatus has concluded that, in this critical time, the internet is being abused to harm the lives and livelihoods of civilians,” said Ali Ahmadinia, the communications director for President Masoud Pezeshkian. “We are safeguarding the security of our country by shutting down the internet.”

On Friday, the Supreme National Security Council took it a step further, announcing that anyone working with the enemy must turn themselves into the authorities by the end of the day on Sunday, hand over their military equipment and “return to the arms of the people.” It warned that anyone discovered to be working with the enemy after Sunday would face execution.

Tehran has largely emptied out after orders by Israel to evacuate several highly populated districts. Videos of the city show highways and desolate streets that are typically clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic. In interviews, residents of Tehran who remained in the city said security forces had set up checkpoints on every highway, on smaller roads and at entry points in and out of the city to conduct ad hoc searches.

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist politician and a former vice president, said in a telephone interview from Tehran that Israel had miscalculated Iranians’ reaction to the war. Mr. Abtahi said that the deep political factions that are typically in sharp disagreement with one another had rallied behind the supreme leader and focused the country on defending itself from an external threat.

The war has “softened the divisions we had, both among each other and with the general public,” Mr. Abtahi said.

Israel’s attacks have set off a resurgence of nationalism among many Iranians, inside and outside the country, including many critical of the government. That sense of common cause has emerged in a torrent of social media posts and statements by prominent human rights and political activists, physicians, national athletes, artists and celebrities. “Like family, we may not always agree but Iran’s soil is our red line,” wrote Saeid Ezzatollahi, a player with Iran’s national soccer squad, Team Melli, on social media.

Hotels, guesthouses and wedding halls have opened their doors free of charge to shelter displaced people fleeing Tehran, according to Iranian news media and videos on social media. Psychologists are offering free virtual therapy sessions in posts on their social media pages. Supermarkets are giving discounts, and at bakeries, customers are limiting their own purchases of fresh bread to one loaf so that everyone standing in line can have bread, according to videos shared on social media. Volunteers are offering services, like running errands to checking on disabled and older residents.

“We are seeing a beautiful unity among our people,” said Reza, 42, a businessman, in a telephone interview near the Caspian Sea, where he is taking shelter with his family. Using only one name to avoid scrutiny by the government, he added: “It’s hard to explain the mood. We are scared, but we are also giving each other solidarity, love and kindness. We are in it together. This is an attack on our country, on Iran.”

Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the country’s most prominent human rights activist, has spent decades in and out of jail, pushing for democratic change in Iran. But even she warned against the attacks on her country, telling the BBC this past week that “Democracy cannot come through violence and war.”

Not much, the veterans of such negotiations warn. But then again, the environment is very different this time.

Ayatollah Khamenei is the final word in all foreign policy issues — but he is also most likely in hiding, American intelligence officials say.

Iran’s foreign minister and lead negotiator, Abbas Araghchi, says he is open to placing limitations on Iran’s nuclear output similar to what he and his colleagues negotiated with the United States a decade ago.

But on Friday, he told his European counterparts in Geneva that Iran would never negotiate as long as Israel was dropping missiles on its military bases and nuclear facilities, and carrying out targeted killings of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps officers and nuclear scientists.

Mr. Trump, for his part, made clear to reporters on Friday that he is interested largely in the coercive part of coercive diplomacy. Iran, he insisted, had only minutes left on the clock. “I’m giving them a period of time, and I would say two weeks would be the maximum,” he said.

And he dismissed the idea that the meeting in Europe would do anything but slow things down. “Iran didn’t want to speak to Europe,” he said. “They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help.”

Whether Mr. Trump is serious about negotiations or just buying time to better prepare for a military assault and its aftermath remains unclear.

But there was no public evidence yet that the contacts between Mr. Araghchi and Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy, could lead to a meeting, much less a deal that would satisfy Mr. Trump. Or even that such a deal would be enough to hold back Israel’s determination to wipe out Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Mr. Araghchi knows every inch of the Iranian nuclear complex, and was a central player in negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal, which Mr. Trump exited three years later. But even today American officials do not know how much sway he holds with the ayatollah.

Mr. Witkoff is the mirror opposite: He knew virtually nothing about the Iranian program and has spent the past few months cramming on the details of nuclear enrichment and Iranian negotiating history. But he has a tight relationship with Mr. Trump that goes back to their New York real estate days, and holds considerable sway over what constitutes an acceptable deal.

If the two men were able to come to the kind of agreement that has eluded them through two and a half months of negotiations, they would still have to sell it back home.

“These are not normal times,” said Richard Haass, who oversaw Iran policy for President George H.W. Bush and was a senior State Department official for President George W. Bush. “The pressure on Iran, since they are losing, is more intense than it has ever been. And the pressure on Trump to use military force if it looks like the Iranians are trying to buy time rather than reach an agreement will be huge.”

Success may depend on exactly what Mr. Trump demands: the “unconditional surrender” that he keeps talking about, or a narrower, face-saving halt in remaining nuclear enrichment, with the understanding that while Iran may retain what it views as its “right” to produce nuclear fuel, it will never again exercise that right.

“Two weeks may be enough time for an unconditional capitulation. A day suffices for that,” said Robert Malley, who participated in the negotiations that led to the 2015 agreement and then led the failed Biden-era effort to reconstitute some version of that deal.

But, Mr. Malley added, “that may be what President Trump wants, but it is almost certainly not what he will get. As the Islamic Republic sees it, it’s tantamount to being offered the choice between committing suicide and taking their chances at being killed. History suggests they will take their chances.”

Mr. Malley noted that there might be room for a diplomatic off-ramp, one in which “Iran agrees to ‘voluntarily’ and ‘temporarily’ stop enriching uranium, which is much easier now that its enrichment capacity is a shadow of its former self.” That, he added, could “give space for U.S.-Iranian negotiations and halt the mad dash to a U.S. war.”

It is the kind of creative approach that, when missiles were not flying, might be wordsmithed over weeks or months in Vienna, then taken back to Tehran and Washington for formal sign-off. Clearly, no one has time for that process now. As he emerged from the talks in Geneva on Friday, Mr. Araghchi did not sound in the mood for even starting down that road, any more than Mr. Trump sounded very interested in negotiating.

The Iranian foreign minister suggested that, in retrospect, perhaps his talks with Mr. Witkoff had been an elaborate American-engineered shadow play, a cover for the Israelis as they prepared for war.

“So they had perhaps this plan in their mind, and they just needed negotiations perhaps to cover it up,” Mr. Araghchi told Andrea Mitchell of NBC. “We don’t know how we can trust them anymore. What they did was in fact a betrayal to diplomacy.”

Iran, he said, would never entirely stop making nuclear fuel. “Zero enrichment is impossible,” he said. “This is an achievement of our own scientists. It is a question of national pride.”

The Iranian ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani, denounced “the so-called pre-emptive attacks and existential threat claims used by this terrorist regime and its allies to justify aggression,” and described Israel as a nation that “kills innocent people and violates the territorial integrity of the states.” He held up photos of children he said were killed by Israeli strikes.

The Israeli ambassador, Danny Danon, in turn, accused Iran of “playing the victim,” and demanded of Mr. Iravani, “How dare you ask the international community to protect you from the consequences of your own genocidal agenda?”

The meeting — riddled with personal attacks and finger-pointing among the members — came as talks in Geneva between Iran and European countries adjourned without a breakthrough, and Iran’s foreign minister said serious negotiations were not possible until Israel stopped bombing.

Security Council members largely agreed on the need to end the fighting and seek diplomacy, but their session devolved into arguing over who was to blame.

Dorothy Camille Shea, the interim U.S. representative, denounced Iran as the “principal source of instability and terror in the Middle East” with the capabilities to produce a nuclear weapon, and said the United States continues to support Israel. Other Western nations like Britain and France struck a more cautious tone with a greater emphasis on de-escalation and negotiation.

Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s ambassador, slammed the United States, Britain, France and Germany for spreading a “groundless fabrication” that Iran had plans to possess nuclear weapons, calling the Western powers “complicit” in the Israeli attacks and “just as dangerous as the deadliest weaponry.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, declared on June 12 that Iran was in breach of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the first time the agency has passed a resolution against the country in 20 years.

The agency reported that Iran had accelerated its enrichment of uranium, an element that can be used to make an atomic bomb, to a high level. It noted that all of the other nations that possess such highly enriched uranium also have nuclear weapons, but stopped short of saying that Iran was building one.

Mr. Nebenzya called the I.A.E.A. report “biased” and “baseless,” while Fu Cong, China’s representative, took a milder stance on Friday. He condemned Israel’s attacks and called for an immediate cease-fire, but refrained from criticizing the I.A.E.A. or the United States.

U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran is not trying to build a bomb, though it might be able to do so within a year. When asked about that on Friday, President Trump said, “Well, then my intelligence community is wrong.”

The secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, acknowledged Iran’s longstanding denial about seeking nuclear weapons but pointed to a “trust gap.”

“The only way to bridge that gap is through diplomacy, to establish a credible, comprehensive and verifiable solution, including full access to the inspectors of the I.A.E.A.,” he said.

Mr. Guterres warned Israel and Iran to give peace a chance before the conflict escalates further. “We are not drifting toward a crisis. We are racing toward it.”

At least 224 people have been killed and more than 2,500 injured in Israeli strikes across Iran as of Thursday, according to Iran’s Ministry of Health. At least 29 people have been killed and about 900 injured in Iranian strikes across Israel, Mr. Danon said on Friday. Both countries said the majority of their casualties were civilians.

Speaking directly to the camera, Ms. Gabbard warned that the threat of nuclear war remained. “As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” she said, “political elites and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers.”

Mr. Trump berated Ms. Gabbard for the video, according to two people briefed on the conversation. He said that her discussion of nuclear annihilation would scare people and that officials should not talk about it.

Mr. Trump’s displeasure with the video laid bare months of his skepticism of Ms. Gabbard and frustrations with her. The president and some administration officials viewed her overseas travel, as the video exemplified, as being as much about self-promotion of her political career as it was about the business of government, multiple officials said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics of the administration.

But the tensions surrounding Ms. Gabbard are now in the open, as Mr. Trump considers mounting a military strike on Iran. Ms. Gabbard, a critic of overseas entanglements, has privately raised concerns of a wider war. And on Friday Mr. Trump said “she’s wrong” when he was asked about her testimony in March that Iran had not decided to build a nuclear weapon.

After the video was posted, the president also told Ms. Gabbard that he was disappointed in her, and wished she had used better judgment, according to one of the two people briefed on the conversation. He told Ms. Gabbard that he believed she was using her time working for him to set herself up for higher office. Mr. Trump told Ms. Gabbard that if she wanted to run for president, she should not be in the administration, one of the people briefed on the meeting said.

While Ms. Gabbard is a former Democrat, her credentials as a critic of America’s long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as a skeptic of foreign military interventions appeal to Mr. Trump’s base, and her views dovetail with those of some of his other advisers. Her supporters are openly advocating that the president keep her.

“The president needs someone who will give him the right intelligence information, whether he likes it or not,” said Daniel L. Davis, an analyst at the think tank Defense Priorities, which advocates a restrained foreign policy. “If you put someone else in there, they might only tell him what he wants to hear.”

Mr. Davis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, was Ms. Gabbard’s choice for a top intelligence role before criticism from Republicans over his skepticism of Israel’s war in Gaza forced her to rescind the appointment.

There is no question, officials said, that Ms. Gabbard’s standing has been weakened and that she is embattled. But few in the administration want to see her depart. Some say she has people who like her, while others worry about who might replace her. Two officials said that Mr. Trump’s anger over the video had faded and that they were back on better terms.

Ms. Gabbard continues to brief the president regularly and speaks often to John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, who held Ms. Gabbard’s job in the first Trump administration, according to multiple officials.

In a statement, the White House press office dismissed any notion she has been sidelined. Steven Cheung, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Trump had “full confidence” in his national security team. “D.N.I. Gabbard is an important member of the president’s team and her work continues to serve him and this country well,” Mr. Cheung said.

Ms. Gabbard was an aggressive supporter of Mr. Trump on the 2024 campaign trail. He and his top advisers valued her input, especially when Mr. Trump was preparing to debate Vice President Kamala Harris — whom Ms. Gabbard had memorably attacked in a Democratic primary debate in 2019.

After the election, Mr. Trump quickly decided to nominate her for director of national intelligence. But from the beginning he made clear to associates that he harbored some doubts. Mr. Trump, according to associates, saw her as overly interested in her own success.

Mr. Trump drew a contrast between Ms. Gabbard and the other former Democrat he named to his cabinet, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Bobby’s a star,” Mr. Trump told one associate. “Tulsi? Tulsi wants to be a star.” Mr. Trump’s implication was that unlike Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Gabbard did not have what it took to succeed in politics.

And soon after her swearing-in, he began to complain about her effectiveness.

At the same time, Mr. Trump — long mistrustful of the intelligence community — questioned whether there needed to be an Office of the Director of National Intelligence at all.

A senior intelligence official said Ms. Gabbard had overseen a 25 percent cut in the size of her office. And Ms. Gabbard has repeatedly told people in the White House that she is willing to be the last director of national intelligence, according to an official. The office, Ms. Gabbard said, could be reabsorbed into the C.I.A., or become something akin to the National Security Council, a bare-bones oversight group.

At least for a time, the kind of foreign policy restraint Ms. Gabbard favors appeared to gain traction this spring.

In White House discussions about Israel and Iran, Ms. Gabbard raised the range of possible consequences of an Israeli strike against Iran, saying it could trigger a wider conflict that brought in the United States. Vice President JD Vance, at times also a skeptic of military intervention, made similar arguments and was among those who supported Mr. Trump’s impulse to initially try to negotiate a deal with Iran.

As the C.I.A. delivered intelligence reports that Israel intended to strike Iran regardless, Mr. Trump and senior aides became more publicly supportive of the Israeli campaign.

Ms. Gabbard did not attend a key meeting at Camp David, where Mr. Ratcliffe presented assessments about Iran’s nuclear program. Ms. Gabbard, according to officials, was on Army Reserve duty. Other people with knowledge of the matter have said she was not invited. (Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Ms. Gabbard had met daily with Mr. Trump and his team.)

Then on Tuesday, Mr. Trump contradicted Ms. Gabbard in public. After the Israeli strikes began, a journalist on Air Force One asked Mr. Trump about Ms. Gabbard’s testimony in March that Iran had not decided to make a nuclear bomb.

“I don’t care what she said,” Mr. Trump said. “I think they were very close to having it.”

He made similar comments on Friday.

An official from Ms. Gabbard’s office said her position was not at odds with Mr. Trump’s. In her testimony, Ms. Gabbard reported the consensus opinion of the intelligence community: that Iran’s supreme leader had not authorized the country to build a nuclear weapon. But Ms. Gabbard had also noted Iran’s large stocks of enriched uranium and a shift in tone that was “likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus.”

But Mr. Trump’s Air Force One remark came off as a rebuke.

To a certain extent, some officials said, courting Mr. Trump’s displeasure is a hazard of any intelligence job in his administration.

Mr. Trump believes the intelligence community undermined him in his first term, and his long-held skepticism that it is part of a disloyal deep state continues. Ms. Gabbard, when briefing Mr. Trump, presents a range of options and assessments. But it is difficult to talk about the findings of spy agencies and not raise Mr. Trump’s ire, the official said.

Ms. Gabbard’s most important job as director of national intelligence is overseeing, and delivering, the president’s daily intelligence brief. But the brief is actually produced a few miles from her office at the C.I.A., and many of those working on the document are detailed from the agency. Ms. Gabbard announced internally last month that she would physically move the production of the brief to her headquarters, known as Liberty Crossing.

Within the administration, several senior officials saw it as a way to try to enhance her own relevance at a time when Mr. Trump was questioning the relevance of the office. Others said it was an expensive decision that would be logistically difficult to carry out.

Ultimately, the White House put the move on pause, according to multiple people briefed on the matter.

Ms. Gabbard has influential defenders inside and outside the government. Mr. Vance, seen as the most senior voice for a less hawkish, more restrained foreign policy, issued a long social media post defending the administration’s support of Israel’s attack on Iran. He added to that a message supporting Ms. Gabbard. He also released a statement calling her a “patriot.”

Her supporters insist that she remains relevant and that, over time, her skepticism of American intervention in Ukraine and caution on military action against Iran will once more prevail. The possible delay of any decision by Mr. Trump to strike Iran represents an opportunity for diplomacy and critics of American military intervention to make the case for restraint, some of Ms. Gabbard’s supporters said.

Olivia C. Coleman, a spokeswoman for Ms. Gabbard’s office, dismissed the reports of dissatisfaction or tensions with the White House as “lies made up by bored, irrelevant anonymous sources with nothing better to do than sow fake division.”

“The director,” Ms. Coleman said, “remains focused on her mission: providing accurate and actionable intelligence to the president, cleaning up the deep state and keeping the American people safe, secure and free.”