U.S. Congress members say Gulf Arab leaders privately call for eliminating Iranian nuclear threat.

Mr. Trump’s cryptic remarks were being watched closely for clues about his intentions. The prospect of direct American involvement in the war has added to fears of a wider conflagration in the Middle East, and led to rifts among the president’s Republican allies and supporters.

Hours earlier, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had dismissed threats Mr. Trump had made a day earlier and rejected his call for an “unconditional surrender.”

“Intelligent people who know Iran, the nation and the history of Iran will never speak to this nation in the language of threats, because the Iranian nation cannot be surrendered,” Mr. Khamenei said in a televised statement, according to Iranian state media. “The Americans should know that any U.S. military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage.”

As Israel’s strikes on Iran continued for a sixth straight day, and Iran fired missiles in response, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, issued an “urgent notice” to American citizens wanting to leave Israel. He said the embassy in Jerusalem was working on “evacuation flights & cruise ship departures” for those interested; Israel, meanwhile, was doing the same to bring home citizens who had been caught abroad when the fighting began.

Mr. Trump told reporters in Washington that Iran wanted to negotiate and that it was not too late for talks, but criticized the leadership in Tehran for not acting sooner. “Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine,” he said, ominously concluding, “You would have had a country.”

In fact, Iran had entered into negotiations with the United States about the future of its nuclear program, but it put those talks on hold after Israel began its bombing campaign. Iran’s mission to the United Nations on Wednesday rejected Mr. Trump’s claim that Iran was now seeking to resume talks, saying “no Iranian official has ever asked to grovel at the gates of the White House.”

Here’s what else to know:

• Next steps: Israel has been pressing for the United States to assist in the effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, and in particular to use its largest bunker-busting bombs — which Israel does not have, nor the planes capable of delivering them — against Iranian nuclear facilities deep underground.

• Threat of retaliation: Iranian officials have said that if the United States enters the war, Iran will attack American bases in the region. Iran has prepared missiles for these possible strikes, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed intelligence reports.

• Shift in strategy: In Iran, Israel is carrying out the kind of broad and brazen attack that it long threatened but never dared to enact. The campaign reflects an extraordinary shift in Israeli military doctrine since Hamas, Iran’s ally in Gaza, attacked the country in October 2023. That change has redrawn the power dynamics in the Middle East, unraveled Iran’s regional alliance and enshrined Israel as the dominant military force in the region.

• Internet disrupted: Amid severe disruptions to internet services in Iran, the country’s state broadcaster urged people to remove WhatsApp from their phones, claiming that the messaging app was collecting user information and sending it to Israel. WhatsApp has rejected the allegations.

And instead of expressions of solidarity with Iran, they said, they heard warnings about the threat posed to the Middle East by Iran’s nuclear program — and the need to eliminate it.

“Obviously they would prefer a more peaceful way of getting rid of the nuclear weapons, but they all made clear that a nuclear armed Iran is an existential threat to them,” said Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, in a phone interview from the Emirates. “They prefer peaceful ways — but this way is working as well.”

The government of Saudi Arabia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. The Bahraini government responded to questions about the delegation’s remarks by sharing a previously-issued statement in which they condemned the Israeli attack on Iran and called for restraint.

The Emirati government, in a statement to The New York Times, also reiterated its position that it “strongly condemns the Israeli military escalation against Iran.”

“The U.A.E. considers de-escalation an urgent priority and continues to engage with regional and international partners to prevent further instability,” it said.

In 2020, Bahrain and the Emirates established diplomatic ties with Israel for the first time, in what are called the Abraham Accords, and Israeli and American officials have held out hope of normalizing relations with other states in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia. But Bahraini and Emirati ties with Israel have been strained since the war in Gaza began in 2023.

The countries visited by the congressional delegation have long viewed Iran with distrust, but have shifted over the past few years to a policy of courting Iran with diplomacy — viewing it as a more pragmatic way to contain their neighbor.

Publicly, all three countries swiftly condemned the devastating Israeli bombing campaign against Iran that began on Friday and set off the fiercest conflict in their long history of hostility. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said that Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities to ward off a threat to Israel, and has raised the possibility of toppling the Iranian government.

The Emirati ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, called the Iranian president on Tuesday to express “solidarity with Iran and its people during these challenging times.” Saudi Arabia, long viewed as Iran’s bitter rival, denounced “the blatant Israeli aggressions against the brotherly Islamic Republic of Iran.” Bahrain warned of the attack’s “grave repercussions on regional security and stability.”

But in private this week, the congressmen said, senior officials in each country presented a different perspective, though they also heard criticism of Israel.

“What we heard was a continued sense of optimism for the future,” said Representative Brad Schneider, a Democrat from Illinois and co-chairman of the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus. “And a concern and understanding that a nuclear Iran is a threat to that future but that the Abraham Accords are a pathway to secure that future.”

Arab leaders in the region are wary of public alignment with Israel, knowing that among their people, Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territories are deeply unpopular.

“We’ve traveled to this region enough times to realize that there’s some Kabuki theater that goes on,” said Representative Jimmy Panetta, Democrat of California. “However the consistent message was basically pointed at Iran and their deep destabilizing forces — not just with their nuclear capabilities but also with their proxies.”

Gulf officials also seemed encouraged that the Israeli attack had shown “that maybe Iran is not nearly as strong as it is reported to be,” said Representative Zach Nunn, Republican of Iowa.

During their meetings in Saudi Arabia, the congressmen discussed the prospect of the kingdom recognizing Israel.

“Where we are today, that is not likely to be the next step going forward,” Mr. Schneider said, adding, “But what we did hear was a progress and commitment to a peaceful future in the region.”

Mr. Panetta, who met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia in 2023, shortly before the war in Gaza began, said he had left that meeting “with great optimism and hope” for a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But, he said, the war in Gaza had changed the calculus.

“I’ve been back to Saudi Arabia twice since then, and there is obviously another part to the equation,” he said. “That is obviously going to be the Palestinian question, which needs to be addressed.”

The congressional delegation’s trip had been planned months ago. The congressmen decided to go ahead with their visit despite the escalating violence between Israel and Iran.

Israeli warplanes continued to operate at will in Iranian airspace, pummeling targets, and many Israelis were getting their hopes up that the United States would join the bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear program, long viewed by Israelis as a threat to their future.

The war with Iran is far from over and the outcome is unclear. But with Israel’s initial successes, the sense of unity and national pride represented a sharp turnaround for a country that was deeply traumatized by the deadly, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that set off the war in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu, a conservative and a political phoenix, has risen again, seemingly imbued with a renewed confidence and a sense of his historical significance.

“We are getting rid of the evil Iranian empire that threatens our existence,” he said in a television interview on Israel’s right-wing Channel 14 on Tuesday night. “Within five days we’ve turned the tables,” he said, having opened what he called “an aerial expressway to Iran.”

“This is an enormous moment, a moment of pride for the nation of Israel,” he added.

Matan Kahana, a centrist lawmaker in the opposition and a former fighter pilot, said, “There is unity from wall to wall in Israel over the campaign to remove the Iranian nuclear threat.”

“Now people are asking ‘Why didn’t we do it earlier?’” he said, adding that Israelis see this as “a war of no choice” and that so far, Iran is enduring the worst of it.

The newfound unity has not erased older political and social rifts that have plagued Israel, including over exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox religious seminary students, the security lapses that enabled the October 2023 attack, and the fate of hostages still held in Gaza.

But some of Mr. Netanyahu’s veteran detractors are reassessing him.

“The decision to go to war was entirely Netanyahu’s,” wrote Nahum Barnea, a leading political columnist, in the popular Yediot Ahronot newspaper this week. He noted that Mr. Netanyahu had become known as risk-averse over the years.

“We shouldn’t downplay the importance of the decision,” Mr. Barnea added, comparing it to the kind of decision that Israel’s revered founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, might have made.

“Maybe we misread him; maybe he’s changed,” Mr. Barnea wrote of Mr. Netanyahu.

To be sure, many Israelis are sleep deprived. Air raid sirens have sent millions of people rushing for protected spaces and bomb shelters in the middle of the night day after day. At least two dozen people have been killed so far by Iranian missiles that evaded Israel’s air defenses.

Some people are spending the night in approved underground parking lots and train stations.

Many citizens are anxious. Sales of tranquilizers are up by a third, Israel’s Channel 12 television reported.

And before ordering their coffee, customers can be heard asking shop staff members where the nearest fortified shelter is. Israelis generally get a 10-minute warning for incoming missile fire.

Still, Israeli television pundits brag that whereas residents of Tehran are fleeing their city, tens of thousands of Israelis who were stranded abroad after Israel abruptly closed its airspace on Friday have been clamoring for seats on the special flights arranged to bring them home.

The intensity of the Iranian missile strikes has waned in recent days and the Israeli authorities slightly relaxed restrictions on Wednesday evening, permitting small gatherings and allowing people to go back to work — so long as their workplace provides easy access to a bomb shelter.

Experts expect that if Mr. Trump orders the American military to directly participate in Israel’s bombing campaign, Iran will quickly retaliate against U.S. troops stationed across the Middle East.

“The Americans should know that any U.S. military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned on Wednesday, according to state news media.

More than 40,000 U.S. active-duty troops and civilians are working for the Pentagon in the Middle East, and billions of dollars in weapons and military equipment are stored there. Over decades, both during and after war, the American military has fortified its defenses in the region, said Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s top official for Middle East policy during the Biden administration.

The United States further strengthened those defenses, she said, after Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel in October 2023, which set off a broader conflict between Israel and Iran’s regional allies.

“In some ways, the U.S. military has absolutely set the theater to respond to Iranian attacks, should the regime choose to turn its missiles or activate its militias against U.S. forces,” Ms. Stroul said on Wednesday.

She added, “The tipping point in whether this expands, is what decisions the United States makes in the coming days, with respect to partnering with Israel in offensive operations.”

Hundreds of, if not a few thousand, American troops are stationed elsewhere in the Middle East, including in Jordan, Syria and Oman, on bases run by those countries. The precise numbers weren’t available as the Trump administration looks to trim its footprint in some places, like Syria.

Adel Abdel Ghafar, a senior analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha, Qatar, predicted that American troops stationed in Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait would be Iran’s first targets. Nonessential American personnel and family have already been withdrawn from the embassies in those three countries.

Iran’s proxy fighters in neighboring Shiite-majority Iraq and elsewhere pose a formidable ground threat to American military and diplomatic outposts, Mr. Abdel Ghafar said. And it would take only three or four minutes for a ballistic missile fired from Iran to hit bases in Gulf countries housing U.S. troops, he said.

“This gives much less time for air defenses” to intercept incoming missiles, he said, “so it would be disastrous.”

Here is where American troops in the Middle East might be most vulnerable.

Iraq

As many as 2,500 American troops and military contractors are in Iraq, based in the capital, Baghdad, as well as in the northern Kurdish region and in the western desert. The Al Asad desert base, which is controlled by the Iraqi military, was targeted by Shiite forces backed by Iran earlier this week in drone strikes. American forces stationed there shot down the weapons.

The American military has a fraught relationship with the Iraqis, after the eight-year war and the occupation that ended in 2011, but U.S. troops were welcomed back just a few years later to fight Islamic State militants who had seized control of areas in the country’s north and west. In 2020, the Trump administration ordered an airstrike that killed the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, as he arrived in Baghdad to meet with Iraq’s prime minister. The strike escalated tensions between Washington and Tehran.

Bahrain

The headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet are in Manama, Bahrain, and host about 9,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel. Part of its mission is to ensure safe passage for commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, where 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows through. Iran has threatened to seed the strait with as many as 6,000 naval mines, a tactic meant to pin American warships in the Persian Gulf. It would also disrupt global oil trade, especially for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which ship a lot of oil through the strait, as well as energy buyers like China and India.

Kuwait

Five bases in Kuwait, where about 13,500 American troops are stationed, have served for decades as an essential staging point for forces, weapons and military equipment on their way to battlefields around the world.

Military ties between Kuwait and the United States have remained strong since the Persian Gulf war of 1991. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United States led a coalition to contain Saddam Hussein’s forces in the region and keep him from seizing Saudi Arabia. Within months, U.S. forces had chased Saddam’s troops back into Iraq, liberating Kuwait. American troops have been based in Kuwait ever since.

More than a decade later, in 2003, U.S. and international troops used Kuwait as a launchpad to invade Iraq and oust Saddam.

Qatar

The Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar is the largest U.S. military site in the Middle East and is the regional headquarters for the U.S. Central Command, which oversees forces in the region. About 10,000 troops are stationed there.

The U.S. military has been using Al Udeid since the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when it positioned planes there to target the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Two years later, Al Udeid became the main U.S. air operations hub in the region. U.S. commanders used it to coordinate a wide variety of missions during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as strikes against ISIS in Syria. The Air Force has deployed a wide variety of aircraft there, from advanced fighters and long-range bombers to drones, transport planes and in-flight refueling tankers.

It also became the central evacuation point for tens of thousands of Afghans and Americans who fled Afghanistan in 2021 when the U.S. military withdrew.

United Arab Emirates

About 3,500 U.S. military personnel are at the Al Dhafra Air Base, outside Abu Dhabi, where the United States has deployed F-22 fighter jets in recent years, including to protect Emirati fuel tankers that were attacked by Iran-linked Houthi fighters in 2022.

The 380th Air Expeditionary Wing of the U.S. Air Force is based at Al Dhafra, from where it has launched combat operations against the Islamic State and the Houthis, and in Afghanistan. It also has been used as an intelligence-gathering and surveillance unit during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for aerial refueling.

Graphic by Daniel Wood.

The confrontation reflected a bitter rift in President Trump’s coalition, between hawkish Republicans like Mr. Cruz who back aggressive action against Iran and an “America First” coalition including Mr. Carlson that is warning against further entangling the United States in the Middle East.

“You’re a senator who’s calling for an overthrow of the government and you don’t know anything about the country!” Mr. Carlson told Mr. Cruz during a heated exchange on his program that he posted on social media on Tuesday night. Mr. Carlson has warned against American military involvement in the Middle East, and in a full version of the interview with Mr. Cruz he posted on Wednesday, he said it was “one of the weirdest conversations I’ve ever had.”

“I agree with Tucker on 80 percent of the issues,” Mr. Cruz said on his own podcast Wednesday as he reflected on the testy interview. He added, “On foreign policy, Tucker has gone bat-crap crazy. He’s gone off the rails.”

The confrontation began with Mr. Carlson quizzing Mr. Cruz about his understanding of Iran’s demographics, starting with whether he knew the population — even a ballpark figure. Mr. Cruz confessed he did not.

“You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?” Mr. Carlson said, adding: “How could you not know that?” (The C.I.A. World Fact Book estimated Iran’s population at 88.4 million people last year; Mr. Carlson put the figure at 92 million.)

After they argued whether it was a relevant statistic, Mr. Carlson asked Mr. Cruz if he knew the ethnic makeup of the country. Mr. Cruz said it was mainly Persian and predominately Shiite Muslims, then blew up when Mr. Carlson asked what percentage.

“OK, this is cute,” Mr. Cruz said as Mr. Carlson continued pressing him. “OK, I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran.”

(Persians are Iran’s majority ethnic group. The country is also home to large populations of Azeris, who are estimated to make up as much as a quarter of the population, and Kurds, who are believed to make up as much as 10 percent of the population. Shiite Muslims make up the majority of the Iran’s population.)

The interview came as the United States is weighing whether to join Israel’s effort to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program with a bombing campaign. In the last several days, Israel has inflicted considerable damage to Iran’s uranium enrichment center in Natanz and its laboratories in Isfahan. But it is unlikely that it will be able to strike the enrichment center at Fordo, which is buried deep in a mountain, without the firepower of U.S. bombs.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump took to his social media platform to call for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and hinted that the United States could assassinate its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He also raised eyebrows when he wrote “we” — not Israel — now had “total control” of Iranian airspace.

During his interview with Mr. Carlson, Mr. Cruz echoed that language, saying, “We are carrying out military strikes today.”

Mr. Carlson seized on the pronoun. “You said Israel was,” he interjected.

“Right, with our help. I said ‘we’ — Israel is leading them, but we’re supporting them,” Mr. Cruz retorted.

“Well you’re breaking news here,” Mr. Carlson said, noting that the White House had previously denied that the United States was acting on Israel’s behalf.

“This is high stakes; you’re a senator,” Mr. Carlson added, barely holding in a grin. “If you’re saying the United States government is at war with Iran right now, people are listening.”

Israel long feared that striking Iran’s nuclear facilities would prompt an immediate and overwhelming response from Tehran’s network of allies and proxy militias across the region. Of particular concern was Hezbollah, the politically powerful Lebanese armed group, whose ranks of armed fighters and arsenal of rockets Iran had helped build up, in part as a deterrent against an Israeli attack.

But over the past year and a half, Iran’s allies have been severely weakened or eliminated. The war in Gaza has decimated Hamas, the Iran-allied group that led the Oct. 7, 2023 assault on Israel.

After months of cross-border attacks by Hezbollah in support of Hamas, the Israeli military last year killed much of Hezbollah’s leadership, including its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah; killed or wounded many of its fighters; and depleted its weapons stockpiles.

Hezbollah so far has stayed out of the current round of fighting between Israel and Iran, and the Lebanese government has warned the group not to get involved.

The Iranian-backed government of Bashar al-Assad in neighboring Syria fell last December, toppled by Islamist rebels who are not friendly to Tehran. Almost immediately, Israeli forces bombed Syrian weapons caches and advanced into southern Syria to create a buffer zone, arguing that Mr. Assad’s departure had created a dangerous vacuum on their border.

Across Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran, millions of people waited to see if Mr. Trump would plunge the United States into the war between Israel and Iran. Israel has asked the United States to use its more advanced military capability to help further cripple Iran’s nuclear program.

Just a day earlier, Mr. Trump issued bellicose threats to Iran, telling the more than 10 million people living in Tehran, the capital, to evacuate. In a separate post on social media, he cited the possibility of killing the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump blamed Iran’s leaders for the violence, reiterating that they should have negotiated sooner with the United States to reach a nuclear deal that might have prevented Israel from beginning its strikes. He said Iran now wants to negotiate.

“Why didn’t you negotiate with me before all this death and destruction?” Mr. Trump said. “Why didn’t you negotiate? I said to the people, ‘Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine. You would have had a country.’”

But in response to a question about whether it was now too late to negotiate, Trump said, “Nothing’s too late.”

Iran was, in fact, in talks with the United States about its nuclear program, but suspended them after Israel’s bombing campaign began on Friday.

Mr. Trump said the Iranians have reached out to him and that the two sides may meet, though he declined to provide details of the outreach.

“They even suggested they come to the White House,” he said of the Iranians.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations appeared to deny Mr. Trump’s claim that Iran has asked recently to negotiate, saying “no Iranian official has ever asked to grovel at the gates of the White House.”

“Iran does NOT negotiate under duress, shall NOT accept peace under duress, and certainly NOT with a has-been warmonger clinging to relevance,” it said in a statement on X, calling Trump’s threat against the country’s supreme leader “cowardly.”

On Monday, Mr. Trump left a meeting of the leaders of the Group of 7 nations in Canada a day early to return to Washington to deal with the conflict between Israel and Iran. On Tuesday, he met with his national security team at the White House.

Mr. Trump’s public consideration of joining Israel’s military campaign has sharply divided the Republican Party, and left some of the president’s most prominent supporters in disbelief. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, and Stephen K. Bannon, a former top aide to Mr. Trump, have both warned the president about allowing the United States to be drawn into the conflict. Mr. Trump shot back, describing Mr. Carlson as “kooky” on social media.

Vice President JD Vance has sought to reassure the anti-interventionist part of the party, writing his own lengthy social media post on Tuesday.

“Of course, people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy,” Mr. Vance wrote on X. “But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue. And having seen this up close and personal, I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people’s goals.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump downplayed any rift among his supporters. He said the United States was not looking for a war, but that his position on the matter has always been clear: Iran, he said, cannot have a nuclear weapon.

“So I may have some people that are a little bit unhappy now, but I have some people that are very happy,” he said. “We have people outside of the base that can’t believe that this is happening, they’re so happy.”

The Israeli military also struck laboratories that work to convert uranium gas back into a metal — one of the last stages of building a weapon — at a complex outside the ancient capital of Isfahan where Iran’s most likely repository of near bomb-grade nuclear fuel is stored. The stockpile has so far been spared from attack.

Iranian missile capability has also been degraded by the strikes. Israel said it struck 12 missile launch sites and storage facilities on Tuesday alone.

See a more detailed look at the damage to strategic infrastructure at the link below.

Two buildings were also destroyed at a workshop in Karaj, a city northwest of the capital, where other components were manufactured, the I.A.E.A. added. The agency said it had previously monitored both sites under a 2015 nuclear agreement that Iran signed with the Obama administration and other governments.

The Israeli military said earlier that it had deployed more than 50 warplanes across Tehran overnight to attack weapons production facilities and a centrifuge plant that it said were being used to enrich uranium and manufacture parts used to develop weapons. A military official later said that about 20 targets were hit.

Israel launched a military campaign last week that it said was designed to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, attacking military infrastructure and government buildings and assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders.

On Friday, the Israeli military targeted the nuclear site at Natanz, where Iran produces most of its nuclear fuel. The I.A.E.A. initially said that the attack had destroyed the aboveground part of the fuel enrichment plant, including electricity infrastructure. The agency said on Tuesday that it had also identified “direct impacts” on the underground enrichment halls.

Iran says that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes and has consistently denied that it plans to build a bomb. Tehran has also given no indication that it intends to abandon its atomic industry, and it has launched a wave of deadly missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation.

Last Thursday, the I.A.E.A. said that Iran was not complying with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations, the first time the agency has passed a resolution against the country in 20 years.

“Intelligent people who know Iran, the nation and the history of Iran will never speak to this nation in the language of threats, because the Iranian nation cannot be surrendered,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a televised statement on Wednesday, according to Iranian state media. “The Americans should know that any U.S. military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage.”

The statement on the sixth day of the war came just hours after Israel said it launched a fresh wave of strikes on the Iranian capital.

Overnight, the ayatollah had issued a defiant call to arms, saying in a post on social media that “the battle begins.”

In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that the United States knew where Ayatollah Khamenei was “hiding,” and said that its forces do not plan to kill him for now. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has also spoken in recent days of a potential strike on the Iranian leader.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who has led Iran for more than three decades and is at the heart of Iran’s hard-line foreign policy, did not directly address the threats against his life in his statement or on social media.

He has played a key role in positioning Iran as a counterweight to American, Israeli and Saudi influence across the Middle East. Ayatollah Khamenei has also consolidated control of Iran’s political, military and security apparatus, and crushed dissent to shore up his position as the country’s ultimate decision maker.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting

WhatsApp, in a statement on Tuesday, said the allegations were false.

“We’re concerned these false reports will be an excuse for our services to be blocked at a time when people need them the most,” the statement said. “All of the messages you send to family and friends on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted, meaning no one except the sender and recipient has access to those messages, not even WhatsApp.”

Internet services across Iran have been suffering severe disruptions, according to Iranian officials, experts and citizens, who say the government is likely restricting access to limit the spread of information about strikes and for fear of Israeli cyberattacks.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, is one of the world’s most popular messaging services. It said in the statement that it does not track users’ precise location, nor does it monitor the messages people are sending one another. “We do not provide bulk information to any government,” the statement said.

End-to-end encryption makes it very hard for law enforcement and spy agencies to get access to people’s digital communications.