Live Updates: Trump Says He’ll Decide on Iran Attack ‘Within the Next Two Weeks’

Cluster munitions have warheads that burst and scatter numerous bomblets, and are known for causing indiscriminate harm to civilians. More than 100 countries have signed on to a 2008 agreement to prohibit them — but Israel and Iran have not adopted the ban, nor have major powers like the United States, Russia, China and India.

Videos and photographs verified by The New York Times show an unexploded bomblet on the patio of an apartment building in Or Yehuda after an Iranian missile barrage on Thursday.

The object, which resembles a narrow artillery shell or rocket warhead, is most likely a submunition similar to those that have armed some Iranian ballistic missiles since 2014, according to Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank.

“The chances of hitting something increase when you have a missile that might not be as pinpoint-accurate as you would like it to be,” Mr. Hinz said in an interview. “Sometimes you might not need that much destructive force — imagine you want to hit an air-defense or a missile-defense system. These things are not armored, they are pretty soft targets, so just having a geographical spread of the attack could be worth it even if the explosive force and penetrative power is less.”

Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, seconded Mr. Hinz’s identification of the item as a submunition from a cluster weapon. Surveillance footage showing an object striking a sidewalk in Or Yehuda appears consistent with a submunition explosion, he said.

The Times also verified photographs and videos showing three small craters in the same area consistent with explosions of submunitions from cluster warheads. The craters are in a sidewalk, a backyard, and the parking lot of a hospital.

The Home Front Command, the Israeli military unit responsible for emergency response and civilian guidance, said in a statement that “a missile containing submunitions struck and dispersed over a relatively wide area,” and warned the public that some of the unexploded submunitions may still detonate and are therefore dangerous. It urged anyone who finds such an object to report it immediately to the authorities.

The command said it had found at least 10 sites in central Israel that may have been struck by submunitions from a cluster weapon.

The Times was not able to independently verify all of those sites, or verify that the submunitions came from a warhead that would be illegal under the 2008 international agreement, the Convention on Cluster Munitions. It prohibits warheads containing ten or more submunitions that each weigh less than four kilograms.

Israel has used cluster munitions in past wars, most recently in 2006 in Lebanon. Russia and Ukraine have used them in the war underway between them since 2022.

Experts say there is very limited publicly available information about the different warheads used on Iran’s expansive arsenal of ballistic missiles. If Iran used missiles carrying cluster warheads, it suggests that it is digging deep into its arsenal and not holding back from using a controversial weapon.

Israel and Iran have been exchanging fire since Israeli forces began an aerial attack on Iran last Friday, targeting its nuclear infrastructure and top military commanders.

Since then, Iran has launched more than 400 missiles at Israel. Most have been shot down by Israeli air defense systems but some have hit military facilities, residential buildings and, on Thursday, a hospital. Those attacks have killed at least 24 people, according to the Israeli authorities.

Israeli warplanes have conducted strikes in both rural and urban areas. As of Thursday, 224 people in Iran have been killed, according to the Iranian health ministry. Israeli strikes have killed at least 10 senior Iranian military leaders.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu answered “yes” when he was asked in a televised interview with Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster, if Iranian missile with a “fragmenting warhead” had hit Israel.

“There are smaller bombs that if you touch them they explode,” he said. He did not explicitly refer to the missile on Thursday as a cluster munition.

Mr. Hinz, who has studied Iranian ballistic missiles extensively, said that the submunition seen in the images from Israel can be carried by at least two Iranian missiles — the Qiam, which is an Iranian-made version of a Soviet SCUD missile, and the much larger Khorramshahr, which can carry up to 80 submunitions.

Cluster munitions, first used by the German Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War, have long been controversial.

“Cluster munitions cannot distinguish between soldiers and civilians because they spread their submunitions over a wide area and leave behind unexploded submunitions that endanger civilians, like land mines, for months or years to come,” said Bonnie Docherty, a senior arms adviser at Human Rights Watch.

Since the adoption of the 2008 convention, 99 percent of global stockpiles have been destroyed, according to the Cluster Munition Coalition.

The Israeli military circulated a digital flyer with a photo of what looks to be an unexploded projectile and a warning that “it may explode upon touch or movement.”

Senior U.S. intelligence officials said that Iranian leaders were likely to shift toward producing a bomb if the American military attacked the Iranian uranium enrichment site Fordo or if Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader.

The question of whether Iran has decided to complete the work of building a bomb is irrelevant in the eyes of many Iran hawks in the United States and Israel, who say Tehran is close enough to represent an existential danger to Israel. But it has long been a flashpoint in the debate over policy toward Iran and has flared again as President Trump weighs whether to bomb Fordo.

White House officials held an intelligence briefing on Thursday and announced that Mr. Trump would make his decision within the next two weeks.

At the White House meeting, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, told officials that Iran was very close to having a nuclear weapon.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, said later at a news briefing that Iran had the material it needed to make a bomb.

“Let’s be very clear: Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon,” she said. “All they need is a decision from the supreme leader to do that and it would take a couple weeks to complete the production of that weapon.”

Some American officials said those new assessments echoed material provided by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, which believes that Iran can achieve a nuclear weapon in 15 days.

While some American officials find the Israeli estimate credible, others emphasized that the U.S. intelligence assessment remained unchanged, and American spy agencies believe that it could take several months, and up to a year, for Iran to make a weapon.

Intelligence assessments are often drafted in a way that allows policymakers to draw different conclusions. And many intelligence officials believe that the reason Iran has accumulated such a large arsenal of uranium is to have the ability to move toward making a bomb quickly.

Some officials believe Israeli assessments have been colored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to gain American support for his military campaign against Iran.

Mr. Netanyahu said on Thursday, however, that Israel could achieve its goals alone when it came to Iran’s nuclear facilities.

None of the new assessments on the timeline to get a bomb are based on newly collected intelligence, according to multiple officials.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a religious ruling, or fatwa, in 2003 that has prevented the country from developing nuclear weapons. That is “right now holding,” a senior intelligence official said, adding that the Israeli assessment that Iran was 15 days away was alarmist.

Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly warned over the years that Iran is close to a nuclear weapon. And since Israel began its attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israeli officials have warned that Iran was weeks away from having the components for a bomb. Mr. Netanyahu has not been specific on the time frame.

“In recent months, Iran has taken steps that it has never taken before, steps to weaponize this enriched uranium, and if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “It could be a year. It could be within a few months, less than a year. This is a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.”

Still, American officials acknowledge that the large stockpile poses a threat.

Testifying before Congress on June 10, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the head of Central Command, said Iran’s nuclear stockpile and available centrifuges could allow it to produce weapons-grade material in a week, and were enough to make 10 weapons in three weeks if the government decided “to sprint to a nuclear weapon.”

In testimony in March, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, noted that the Iranian stockpile was at a high, a level that she said was unprecedented for a nonnuclear state. Officials said Ms. Gabbard’s comments remained accurate and were in line with the idea that Iran is gathering the components of a weapon.

Iran’s stockpile is enriched to 60 percent. To make a bomb, it would need to be enriched further, to 90 percent. Enriching uranium means reducing the percentage of naturally occurring uranium, U-238, and increasing the percentage of a lighter isotope, U-235, that can sustain a nuclear reaction.

But producing a weapon requires more than uranium. Iran would also have to make a bomb, and potentially miniaturize it to place on a warhead. While the United States and Israel believe that Iran has the expertise to build a bomb, there is no intelligence that it has set out to do that.

U.S. intelligence believes that Iran could potentially shorten the timeline if it pursued a cruder weapon that might not be able to be miniaturized and put on a missile. Such a cruder weapon might be more akin to the bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, which was nearly 10,000 pounds and 10 feet long and had to be dropped from a plane, rather than delivered on a missile.

Senior officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have said that new information has come in since the U.S. intelligence position was made public in March. But officials said that information from Israel and other sources was not new intelligence about the program or Iranian intent to build a bomb, but rather new analysis of existing work.

As almost everyone in Washington is by now aware, “two weeks” is one of Mr. Trump’s favorite units of time.

Asked eight weeks ago if he could trust Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump replied, “I’ll let you know in about two weeks.”

Tax plans, health care policies, evidence of conspiracy theories he claimed were true, the fight against ISIS, the opening of some coal mines, infrastructure plans — all were at one point or another riddles he promised to solve for the public in about two weeks.

It is a slippery thing, this two weeks — not a measurement of time so much as a placeholder. Two weeks for Mr. Trump can mean something, or nothing at all. It is both a yes and a no. It is delaying while at the same time scheduling. It is not an objective unit of time, it is a subjective unit of time. It is completely divorced from any sense of chronology. It simply means later. But later can also mean never. Sometimes.

Is the United States going to bomb Iran? We don’t know. Will we actually find out the answer to that question within two weeks? We don’t know that either.

A reporter in the briefing room tried to bring Mr. Trump’s timeline into our shared space time continuum but the White House didn’t seem ready for that voyage.

“President Trump has said previously, in regard to Russia, he’s used the phrase ‘about two weeks’ several times, in terms of, like, ‘We expect a two week deadline,’ and then he’ll give another two week deadline,” the reporter said to Ms. Leavitt. “How can we be sure he’s going to stick to this one on making a decision on Iran?”

Ms. Leavitt basically replied that one thing can’t be compared with another.

This was really a question of metaphysics more than anything else.

The site had been one of Iran’s key nuclear facilities, once thought to produce weapons-grade plutonium. But as part of the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the site was retired and concrete poured into the core of the reactor.

Before the strike, the Israel Defense Forces issued an evacuation order on X for an area around the site.

Iranian state media reported that there had been no serious damage, no casualties and no radiation leak as a result of the strike at Arak.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, confirmed that there were no radiological effects from the attack.

“The matter of changing the regime or the fall of this regime is first and foremost a matter for the Iranian people,” he added.

Though the United States has not struck Iran, Mr. Netanyahu said, it was already helping Israel a lot with its defense.

“American pilots are intercepting drones alongside our pilots,” he said. He added that almost none of the thousand or so drones launched by Iran and its proxies over the past week of fighting had penetrated Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu also mentioned the THAAD advanced missile defense system that the United States sent to Israel last October and the deployment of U.S. destroyers equipped with the Navy’s Aegis combat system.

Mr. Trump has not ruled out the possibility that the United States might join Israel’s war against Iran, saying on Thursday that he would decide “within the next two weeks.”

Israel has struck several Iranian nuclear sites over the past week but a crucial facility, Fordo, is deep inside a mountain. While Israel could probably inflict some damage on Fordo, according to experts, it does not possess either the heavy bunker-busting bombs that might destroy it or the warplanes needed to deliver them. The United States has both.

Mr. Netanyahu said he had been prepared to launch the attack on Iran with or without a green light from President Trump, because the rapid advancement of Iran’s nuclear weapons program had left Israel no choice. But he said Mr. Trump “didn’t try to stop” the operation from taking place.

Almost a week into the assault, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel was ahead of schedule, in terms of both “timing and results.”

On Monday, when asked in an ABC News interview about possibly killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mr. Netanyahu said: “It’s not going to escalate the conflict. It’s going to end the conflict.”

Asked by Kan on Thursday about the implied threats that his defense minister, Israel Katz, made earlier in the day against Mr. Khamenei, after a ballistic missile hit a major hospital in southern Israel, Mr. Netanyahu said he had given instructions that “nobody in Iran should be immune.”

Mr. Katz compared Mr. Khamenei to a “modern Hitler” and said that he “cannot continue to exist.”

Mr. Netanyahu said, “Actions should speak louder than words.”

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.

Here’s a look at why Israelis have long viewed the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat.

The language of destruction

Since the early 1960s, before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, hostile rhetoric from some quarters has been on Israel’s radar. Israeli diplomats in Tehran sent back reports about anti-Israeli broadsheets distributed by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then a leader in the city of Qom, according to Israel’s state archives.

The verbal attacks against Israel have not abated. In October 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then Iran’s new conservative president, was quoted as saying that Israel should be “wiped off the map” during a speech to students at a program called, “The World Without Zionism.”

The White House said at the time that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statement underlined U.S. concerns about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Scholars debated for months whether Mr. Ahmadinejad’s words had been translated and interpreted correctly. Some argued that he was not actively threatening to destroy Israel but was merely quoting a prediction, or aspiration, of Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader from 1979 to his death in 1989, that the power occupying Jerusalem “must vanish from the page of time.”

But Mr. Ahmadinejad appeared to stand by the translation of his remarks.

Ten years later, in 2015, Mr. Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, predicted that Israel would not exist by 2040. He reiterated that message the next year, writing on Twitter, “As I’ve said before, if Muslims & Palestinians unite & all fight, the Zionist regime will not be in existence in 25 years.”

In 2017, anti-Israel protesters unveiled a digital countdown clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square, showing 8,411 days — almost 24 years — to what they said would be the “destruction of Israel.” The clock reportedly stopped working in 2021 amid widespread power cuts in the Iranian capital.

Just last month, in a televised speech after President Trump’s visit to the region, Mr. Khamenei described Israel as “the lethal cancerous tumor of the region,” adding, “It has to be uprooted, and it will be uprooted for certain.” The audience responded with a familiar chant: “Death to Israel! Death to Israel!”

Nuclear vulnerability

In territorial terms, Israel is only slightly larger than New Jersey. Half the country is sparsely populated desert. The majority of its population of 10 million people and most of its vital infrastructure and commercial life is concentrated along its narrow Mediterranean coastal plain.

So even though Israel is widely believed to possess its own nuclear arsenal, despite its policy of maintaining ambiguity on the issue, its population is vulnerable to attack and keenly aware that one Iranian nuclear bomb could have devastating consequences.

Iran, by contrast, covers a vast territory more than twice the size of Texas, with a population of more than 90 million.

The threat

Much of the world views Iran’s nuclear program with alarm, and experts say its stockpile of highly enriched uranium has grown fast.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, an arm of the United Nations, has estimated that Iran has more than 400 kilograms — about 900 pounds — of uranium enriched to a high level, that is short of the level needed for an atomic bomb, but well within reach. No other nation without nuclear weapons has such highly enriched uranium, the agency said.

A U.S. military assessment presented to Congress just days before the Israeli bombing campaign began said that if Iran wanted to raise that uranium to weapons grade, it could produce “enough for up to ten nuclear weapons in three weeks.”

If it generated that fuel, Iran would still need to build an atomic bomb, and possibly a missile capable of delivering it. Mr. Netanyahu has said it could be just a matter of months to develop a bomb.

How Iran’s capabilities stand after the Israeli bombardment is unclear. The attacks have damaged some of Iran’s key nuclear sites, but much of its nuclear program remains, at least for now, including an enrichment plant at Fordow that is buried deep under a mountain on an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base.

Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, has been warning of a nuclear Iran for decades. Critics have accused him in the past of fear mongering to remain in power.

In another indication of Iran’s hostile intentions, Israelis have also watched as Tehran funded and trained proxy forces such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad across Israel’s northern and southern borders, and more distant enemies, such as the Houthis in Yemen.

“They created a ring of fire around Israel,” said Jeremy Issacharoff, a former vice director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and a former Israeli ambassador to Germany.

“If you put together the rhetoric, the building of capabilities and the focused hostility toward Israel,” he said of the threat from Iran, “you take it seriously.”

An oil tanker, Adalynn, collided with another oil tanker, Front Eagle, causing “a small oil spill,” the Emirati government said Wednesday in a statement. Twenty-four members of the Adalynn’s crew were evacuated from the site of the collision, about 24 nautical miles off the Emirati coast, the Emirati National Guard said. No injuries were reported among either vessel’s crew.

Frontline, a shipping company based in Cyprus that owns the Front Eagle, said in a statement that a fire had broken out on the Front Eagle’s deck and that the incident was “a navigational incident and not related to the current regional conflict.”

But Iran and Israel have accused each other of endangering international maritime security and the global energy supply chain. About 1,000 vessels have been affected by GPS interference since the onset of increased tensions in the Middle East, according to Windward, a maritime analytics firm.

Around one-third of the volume of crude oil exported by sea and 20 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas, another vital commodity, flow through the Strait of Hormuz.

Jean-Charles Gordon, senior director of ship tracking at Kpler, a research firm, said hundreds, if not thousands, of vessels had experienced navigational interference since Friday, when Israel launched its surprise attack on Iran.

“The latitude and longitudes they’re receiving are completely false,” Mr. Gordon said, noting that marine traffic data showed ship positions that were abnormal and inaccurate. He said military-grade spoofers interfere with the location services of ships, leading their navigational systems to indicate that they are somewhere where they are not. This can increase the chance of collision, but ships also have other systems for navigation, he said.

“It’s electronic warfare, essentially,” Mr. Gordon said. “If the conflict continues, we expect these interferences to continue as well.”The uncertainty in the region is troubling shipowners, said Jeff McGee, the managing director of Makai Marine Advisors. Across different sizes of vessel, he said, freight rates in the Persian Gulf have “pretty much doubled in the last few days.”

“They’re being hesitant about putting their ships in harm’s way,” he said.

Greenpeace, the environmental group, said satellite imagery showed a large amount of oil stretching up to 1,500 hectares, or nearly six square miles, from the site.

“This is just one of many dangerous incidents to take place in the past years,” said Farah Al Hattab, a campaigner at Greenpeace Middle East and North Africa, adding that oil spills endanger marine life and can lead to widespread environmental damage.

David McCabe contributed reporting and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Israel says it is attacking now to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. In 1953, it was oil that motivated outside powers to intervene.

Here is a look at the 1953 coup, which had a major impact on the Middle East and beyond that still resonates with Iranians today:

Who was Dr. Mossadegh?

Many Iranians consider Dr. Mossadegh to be a 20th century nationalist hero and someone who in effect sacrificed himself for his country.

He was born in 1882 to a prominent political family at a time when Iran, also known as Persia, was ruled by the Qajar dynasty. He studied at Sciences Po in Paris and earned a Ph.D in law in Switzerland before returning to Iran and serving as a minister and governor in the 1920s.

In 1925, Reza Pahlavi, a military leader and politician, deposed the Qajar dynasty and became shah, or king. Dr. Mossadegh opposed Reza Shah’s accession, fearing among other things that it would weaken the country’s fragile rule of law, and was imprisoned.

In 1941, during World War II, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran and forced Reza Shah from power in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Dr. Mossadegh became a member of Parliament, and was hailed as a hero by many in Iran for his speeches on the evils of British control of Iran’s oil industry.

In 1951, when the Iranian Parliament voted to nationalize the industry, the shah appointed Dr. Mossadegh as prime minister. He was, however, unable to reach an oil compromise and, as Britain negotiated with Iran, it also won the support of the major oil companies in imposing an effective global boycott on Iranian oil.

Why did oil matter so much in Iran?

Iran was a significant oil producer in the first half of the 20th century, decades before other Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia.

That oil became particularly crucial for Britain’s empire, especially during the world wars, and securing Middle East oil resource became a top priority for Western governments. The British government gained a controlling stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil company, which later became British Petroleum and is now the energy giant BP.

During World War II, Britain accused Reza Shah of being pro-German, potentially threatening access to Iranian oil.

After the war, however, the question of who should control Iran’s oil resources and how its revenue should be shared increasingly fueled Iranian nationalism.

What happened during the coup?

Events surrounding the coup that overthrew Dr. Mossadegh took place over several weeks in August 1953. Initially, The New York Times presented it as an action taken by the army to restore the shah, who had fled into exile weeks earlier.

But C.I.A. documents have since confirmed that U.S. and British intelligence planned and funded the coup under the U.S. code name Operation Ajax, fearful that Iran and its oil fields could fall into Communist hands.

What is the legacy of the coup?

After the coup, British and American oil companies resumed their operations. Dr. Mossadegh was sentenced to prison and then held under house arrest until his death in 1967.

The coup returned the shah to power and he ruled as a pro-Western monarch and autocrat, relatively friendly to Israel, heading a regime that became associated with brutal repression.

The 1979 Iranian revolution forced the shah into exile and ushered in a bitterly anti-United States, anti-Israel theocracy.

The events of 1953 also fomented deep-seated suspicion in Iran and beyond about Western interference. At the same time, Dr. Mossadegh became an important figure for anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia.

Pentagon officials are considering all of the ways Iran could retaliate, as President Trump cryptically hints at what he might do, saying on Wednesday that he had not made a final decision.

In several days of attacks, Israel has targeted Iranian military sites and state-sponsored entities, as well as high-ranking generals. It has taken out many of Iran’s ballistic missiles, though Iran still has hundreds of them, U.S. defense officials said.

But Israel has steered clear of Iranian naval assets. So while Iran’s ability to respond has been severely damaged, it has a robust navy and maintains operatives across the region, where the United States has more than 40,000 troops. Iran also has an array of mines that its navy could lay in the Strait of Hormuz.

The narrow 90-mile waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the open ocean is a key shipping route. A quarter of the world’s oil and 20 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas passes through it, so mining the choke point would cause gas prices to soar.

It could also isolate American minesweepers in the Persian Gulf on one side of the strait. Two defense officials indicated that the Navy was looking to disperse its ships in the gulf so that they would be less vulnerable. A Navy official declined to comment, citing operational security. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Iran has vowed that if attacked by American forces, it would respond forcefully, potentially setting off a cycle of escalation.

“Think about what happened in January 2020 after Trump killed Suleimani and times that by 100,” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said.

Qassim Suleimani, a powerful Iranian general, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad, during Mr. Trump’s first administration. Iran then launched the largest ever ballistic missile barrage at American bases in Iraq, leaving some 110 troops with traumatic brain injuries, and unintentionally hitting a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing all 176 people aboard.

“Iran is strategically weaker but operationally still lethal across the region,” Mr. Katulis said, “and Americans still have troops across that part of the world.”

Iran has mined the Strait of Hormuz before, including in 1988 during its war with Iraq, when Iran planted 150 mines in the strait. One of the mines struck an American guided missile frigate, the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, nearly sinking it.

Gen. Joseph Votel, a former leader of U.S. Central Command, and Vice Adm. Kevin M. Donegan, a former commander of U.S. naval forces in the Middle East, each said on Wednesday that Iran was capable of mining the strait, which they said could bring international pressure on Israel to end its bombing campaign.

But such an action would probably invite a massive American military response and further damage Iran’s already crippled economy, Admiral Donegan added.

“Mining also hurts Iran; they would lose income from oil they sell to China,” he said. “Now though, Iranian leadership is much more concerned with regime survival, which will drive their decisions.”

Military officials and analysts said missile and drone attacks remained the biggest retaliatory threat to U.S. bases and facilities in the region. “These would be shorter-range variants, not what they were launching against Israel,” Admiral Donegan said. “That Iranian capability remains intact.”

Admiral Donegan also expressed concerns about the possibility that the Quds Force, a shadowy arm of Iran’s military, could attack U.S. troops. “Our Arab partners have done well over the years to root most of that out of their countries, however, that Quds Force and militia threat still remains in Iraq, and to some extent in Syria and Jordan,” he said.

Iranian officials are seeking to remind Mr. Trump that, weakened or not, they still can still find ways to hurt American troops and interests in the region, said Vali Nasr, an Iran expert and a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Striking Iran, he said, “gets into such big unknowns.” He added, “There are a lot of things that could go wrong.”

Much is at stake for Iran if it decides to retaliate. “Many of Iran’s options are the strategic equivalent of a suicide bombing,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They can do enormous damage to others if they mine the Strait of Hormuz, destroy regional oil facilities and rain a missile barrage against Israel, but they may not survive the blowback.”

But Iran can make it hugely expensive, and dangerous, for the U.S. Navy to have to conduct what would most likely be a weekslong mine-clearing operation in the Strait of Hormuz, according to one former naval officer who was stationed on a minesweeper in the Persian Gulf. He and other Navy officers said that clearing the strait could also put American sailors directly in harm’s way.

Iran is believed to maintain a variety of naval mines. They include small limpet mines containing just a few pounds of explosives that swimmers place directly on a ship’s hull and typically detonate after a set amount of time. Iran also has larger moored mines that float just under the water’s surface, releasing a hundred pounds of explosive force or more when they come in contact with an unsuspecting ship.

More advanced “bottom” mines sit on the seafloor. They use a combination of sensors — such as magnetic, acoustic, pressure and seismic — to determine when a ship is nearby and explode with hundreds of pounds of explosive force.

The Navy has four minesweepers in the Persian Gulf, each with 100 sailors aboard who have been based in Bahrain and are trained in how to deal with underwater hazards.

Should Iran place mines in the Strait of Hormuz or other parts of the Persian Gulf, a small Navy contingent in Bahrain called Task Force 56 would respond.

Usually led by a senior explosive ordnance disposal officer, the task force would take advantage of technologies like autonomous underwater vehicles that can scan the seafloor with sonar much more quickly than the last time Iranian mines threatened the strait.

And while the Navy has been experimenting with underwater robots to destroy mines, the task force will still need to deploy small teams of explosive ordnance disposal divers for the time-consuming and dangerous task of approaching each mine underwater and carefully placing charges to destroy it.

“There was a massive boom and blast wave,” said Dr. Vadim Bankovich, head of the Orthopedics Department, whose office faces the floor of the old surgical building that took a direct hit.

Shlomi Codish, the director general of the hospital, said that much of the building had been evacuated in recent days. Mr. Codish said that all patients and medical staff had been in protected spaces when the missile struck, and that the hospital was treating several patients with minor injuries.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed it had targeted Israeli military facilities next to the hospital, according to the Fars news agency, an Iranian outlet affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards. It offered no evidence for the claim, and Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the claim.

When he received an alert on his cell phone warning him of incoming missile fire, Dr. Bankovich said he and his team rushed to a windowless safe space, where patients at his department were already gathering. After leaving the safe space 10 minutes later, he found cabinets toppled, ceiling panels scattered on the ground, and medical devices shattered.

“Windows blew out everywhere, even those reinforced with iron in the protected rooms,” said Dr. Bankovich, referring to the hospital’s safe rooms. He and his team had been sitting 100 feet away from the site of the missile strike. Now, the view from his office is one of destruction.

Dr. Bankovich said that his department would have to be shut down because of the damage.

“We felt the warmth of the blazes,” he said.

The strike on Soroka Medical Center came on the seventh day of the war, and was the first time a hospital has been directly hit since Iran began launching missiles and drones at Israel, in retaliation for Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and senior military commanders.

In recent days, Iran has scaled back its missile fire, and the Israeli military has eased some of its wartime directives for civilians, signaling that it believes the threat from Iran’s missile fire has diminished. But the strike on the hospital underscored that Iran can still inflict serious damage within Israel, despite the Israeli military’s strikes on missile launchers in Iran and its advanced air defense systems, which have intercepted most projectiles midair.

Since the war began on Friday, Iranian attacks have hit several population centers — including high-rise residential buildings and a research institute — killing at least 24 people and injuring more than 800, according to Israeli health authorities.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed to avenge the strike on the hospital. “We will make the tyrants from Tehran pay the full price,” he said in a post on X.

Standing in a staff parking lot carpeted with rubble and shattered glass, as damaged cars were towed away, Avichay Amrami, 38, a hospital attendant, recalled how “people were running in different directions after the strike. There was chaos.”

Concerned that the hospital building was at risk of collapse, Mr. Amrami and his co-workers immediately began evacuating patients to safer areas.

“Luckily, the floor that was hit was empty,” Mr. Amrami said.