Trump tells Israeli reporter attack could last 2-3 days or much longer, will take Iran years to recover

US President Donald Trump says that it will take Iran “several years” to recover from the joint US-Israeli attack on the country, in a phone conversation with reporter Barak Ravid from Israel’s Channel 12 news.

The president says that he can choose to make the campaign as long as he likes or finish within a matter of days, with a warning that he would attack again if Iran attempts to rebuild.

“I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding [your nuclear and missile programs],” Trump says in a five-minute phone interview from Mar-a-Lago with Ravid, who publishes the English quotes on Axios.

However, he stresses that, “In any case, it will take them several years to recover from this attack.”

Trump cites two main reasons for launching the strikes, Ravid reports, with the first being the failure of negotiations this week led by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

The president accuses Iran of backing away from reaching a nuclear deal, saying he recognized that Tehran wasn’t seeking an agreement in earnest. “The Iranians got close and then pulled back — close and then pulled back. I understood from that that they don’t really want a deal,” he says.

His second reason — Iran’s decades of bad behavior. Ravid says Trump told him that when writing his speech Friday announcing the attack, “he asked his team to compile every Iranian-linked attack around the world over the past 25 years.”

Trump tells Ravid: “I saw that every month they did something bad, blew something up or killed someone.”

Ravid says Trump also claimed in their conversation that Iran had begun rebuilding some of the nuclear facilities that the US and Israel struck during last June’s 12-day war.  And the president also told Ravid that if the US had not bombed three key nuclear facilities in June, Iran could have developed a nuclear weapon by now, rendering the current attack impossible.

Trump also describes his conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this evening as a positive one, Ravid tells Channel 12.