President Trump said on Monday that the United States would continue attacking Iran for as long as it took to leave it incapable of posing a threat, an indication that an expanding war in the Middle East could continue for weeks or more.
“Whatever the time is, it’s OK, whatever it takes,” Mr. Trump said at an event at the White House, in his first public comments on the war since U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran began on Saturday. “Right from the beginning we projected four to five weeks, but we have the capability to go far longer than that,” he added. “We’ll do it.”
The Trump administration has at times offered conflicting rationales and expectations for the campaign. While Mr. Trump signaled that the United States was prepared for a long war and had urged the Iranian people to rise up against the government, the American defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, vowed that the operation would not become another protracted Middle Eastern conflict.
“This is not Iraq,” Mr. Hegseth said at a Pentagon news conference on Monday. “This is not endless.”
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the same news conference that the campaign was in its early stages, with more American forces heading to the Middle East.
“This work is just beginning and will continue,” General Caine said, adding that when additional fighter jets arrived in the coming days, the United States would be “just about where we want to be in terms of total combat capacity and total combat power.”
Mr. Trump, in separate news interviews, declined to rule out sending ground troops into Iran and said that still-bigger waves of airstrikes were coming.
Listing his objectives, he said, “We’re destroying Iran’s missile capability, and we’re doing that hourly.” He added that the strikes were “annihilating their navy,” ensuring that Iran “can never obtain a nuclear weapon” and that it cannot continue to sponsor militant groups across the Middle East.
Internationally, he claimed, “everybody was behind us; they just didn’t have the courage to say so.” Mr. Trump concluded his remarks at a Medal of Honor ceremony in Washington without taking questions from reporters.
In a sign of the widening conflict, Qatar’s Ministry of Defense said its air force had shot down two Su-24 bombers coming from Iran, the first report that Iran — which has fired missiles and drones at its neighbors in the Persian Gulf and Israel in retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault — had also sent warplanes into foreign airspace.
As U.S. and Israeli planes pounded targets in Iran for the third day, the fighting expanded into Lebanon, where the Iranian-allied militia Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel, prompting Israel to bombard the militia’s strongholds outside Beirut.
Jake Tapper of CNN reported that Mr. Trump told him in a phone call on Monday that the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran could soon intensify. “We haven’t even started hitting them hard; the big wave hasn’t even happened,” Mr. Trump said, according to CNN. “The big one is coming soon.”
The New York Post reported that the president had said in an interview that he wasn’t ruling out putting American ground troops in Iran. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground,’” Mr. Trump told the tabloid. “I don’t say it.”
Israeli fighter jets, meanwhile, streaked through the skies over the Iranian capital, Tehran. Their strikes focused on internal security, intelligence and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps targets in the city, Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, an Israeli military spokesman, said in a televised address.
Iran launched explosive drones across the Gulf. And three U.S. fighter jets were shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses, in what the U.S. military called an “apparent friendly fire incident.” All six crew members “ejected safely, have been safely recovered and are in stable condition,” the U.S. military said in a statement, extending its gratitude to Kuwait for participating in the operation against Iran.
Six U.S. service members have been killed so far in retaliatory attacks by Iran. Mr. Hegseth said an Iranian weapon had eluded U.S. air defenses and hit a fortified American tactical operations center in Kuwait.
The U.S. military had initially announced three deaths in the strike. On Monday, it said that a fourth service member had died of injures from the attack and that the bodies of two others had been recently recovered.
“We expect to take additional losses,” General Caine said on Monday.
More than 550 people have been killed in the strikes on Iran, the Iranian Red Crescent Society said on Monday. The Lebanese Health Ministry said that at least 31 people had been killed in Israeli airstrikes there. At least 10 people have been killed in Israel, and six, including civilians, have been killed across the Gulf since Saturday, according to the authorities.
The attacks have rattled global markets, sent oil prices soaring and raised fears of a wider, more intensive regional war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Monday that the U.S.-Israeli attacks were aimed in part at “forging the conditions for the brave Iranian people to remove the yoke of tyranny.” But critics say the Trump administration has no clear endgame in Iran, where the leaders have remained defiant since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, was killed in a U.S.-Israeli attack on Saturday.
Iran’s top security official, Ali Larijani, denied news reports that the nation’s interim leaders were seeking to negotiate with Washington, and he denounced Mr. Trump for what he called “delusional fantasies” and for plunging the Middle East “into chaos.” In a string of fiery social media posts, he wrote, “Iran, unlike the United States, has prepared itself for a long war.”
Speaking on Capitol Hill before a briefing for congressional leaders on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States and Iran were not engaged in any diplomatic talks and “the hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military.”
The United States and Israel have struck more than 2,300 targets in Iran since Saturday, including military bases and weaponry, military officials said. Civilian infrastructure, including Gandhi Hospital in Tehran, has also been damaged, photos from a news media tour organized by the Iranian authorities showed.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said reports of damage to the hospital were “extremely worrying” and reiterated that health facilities were protected under international law.
Iranian missiles and drone attacks have led to explosions in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and other countries where the United States has military bases. Oil and gas facilities across the Gulf have also been hit, increasing worries about global energy supplies.
On Monday, Iranian drones targeted a power plant and an energy facility in Qatar. Soon after, QatarEnergy, one of the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas, said that it was halting production, which sent the price of natural gas soaring. In Saudi Arabia, a small fire broke out at a refinery after drones targeting it were intercepted. Bahrain said that it had intercepted 70 ballistic missiles and 59 drones launched by Iran and that debris had fallen across the country.
The conflict brought more upheaval to war-weary Lebanon, where the Israeli military said it had targeted more than 70 Hezbollah weapons storage facilities and missile launchers in the southern part of the country.
The attacks have displaced nearly 30,000 people in Lebanon, according to the country’s Ministry of Social Affairs. In southern Lebanese villages near the Israeli border, parents bundled sleepy children into cars and crawled through miles of traffic toward Beirut, many clutching little more than a change of clothes. In the Dahiya, the densely populated Hezbollah stronghold on the southern outskirts of Beirut, residents fled with barely a suitcase among them as explosions echoed nearby.
“This country is beautiful, but we need peace,” said Musa Hashem, 50, a municipal worker who had fled Beirut’s southern suburbs. He was sitting by the roadside with his twin brother and their eight children. “We just want this war to stop,” he said.
The Lebanese prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said that his government did not support any military actions launched from Lebanese territory. He demanded that Hezbollah, which has been an entrenched force in the country for decades, limit its activities to the political sphere.
Reporting was contributed by Anton Troianovski, Johnatan Reiss, Adam Rasgon, Ismaeel Naar, Richard Pérez-Peña, Hwaida Saad, Raja Abdulrahim and Michael Levenson.
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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