Trump calls Iran war 'a little detour' as Tehran dismisses renewed US sanctions campaign

President Donald Trump is finally proposing the Iran policy that our allies have spent decades avoiding: If you want the benefits of doing business with the United States, you cannot also help finance the regime in Tehran.

It really is that simple.

Trump’s "Economic D-Day" is not merely another sanctions package filled with the names of Iranian officials who do not have American bank accounts and never planned to visit Disneyland. The important idea is to punish the foreign countries, banks, refiners, shipping companies and middlemen that keep Iran in business.

They must choose between Iran and America. They should no longer be allowed to choose both.

Iran's South Pars Phase 14 gas refinery has restored 70% of its refining capacity after it was hit during an Israeli attack last year, Reuters reported, citing Iran's oil ministry news agency SHANA.

The refinery will be fully operational by the end of the year, CEO Touraj Dehqani said, with the damaged section being integrated into the production cycle.

Dehqani added that reconstruction began right after the Israeli airstrike on the facility on June 14, 2025, according to the Anadolu Agency.

Israel also struck the South Pars natural gas field, located offshore in the Persian Gulf, in March 2026. South Pars is Iran’s portion of the world’s largest natural gas field, which it shares with Qatar. It supplies about 80% of Iran’s natural gas, according to The Associated Press.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this post.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Saturday announced they killed a company commander in Hamas, Sharif al-Hasanat.

"Throughout the war, he took part in leading efforts to restore Hamas’ underground infrastructure & recently continued to advance terror attacks against IDF troops and Israeli civilians," the IDF said in a social media post. "He posed an immediate threat to IDF troops and was eliminated in order to remove the threat."

Oil prices remained elevated after futures closed on Friday, with Brent crude ending the week at nearly $94 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) closing at $86.64.

Oil prices ticked higher this week after President Donald Trump declared that the U.S. would enlist its allies in an economic isolation campaign against Iran.

The average price of gasoline has edged up by less than 1%, rising from $4.07 a week ago to $4.10 on Saturday, according to AAA.

Futures markets for Brent crude and WTI open again on Sunday evening.

Dr. Sheila Nazarian, an Iranian-American plastic surgeon, joined "Life, Liberty & Levin" on Friday to discuss how she and her family were narrowly able to flee Iran after the Islamic revolution.

Nazarian told host Mark Levin that her father was a pathologist at the Shah's Heart Hospital at the time of their escape in 1985.

"One of his lab techs told him, 'You saved my eyesight. I'm going to save your life. You're on the list to be killed,'" Nazarian said. "And before we knew it, the next day, my father left to Vienna. He said he was going on a medical conference and left our passports with the government."

"About a few months later, we hired smugglers to smuggle us across the desert, across the border into Pakistan," she continued. "We were shot at by border police, the Iranian border police. They didn't want us to leave. We left everything behind in Iran. Left everything my parents had worked for to come to America."

"By the time I made it here, I was seven years old, and I'm so blessed to be an outspoken woman in a country that allows for free speech," Nazarian concluded.

Nazarian starred in Netflix’s 2020 reality series Skin Decision: Before and After, which offered a behind-the-scenes look at the cosmetic procedures she performed on patients.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they fired in southern Syria on Saturday "toward a terrorist who advanced terror attacks in final stages of preparation."

The terrorist who was targeted "posed an immediate threat to IDF soldiers," according to the IDF.

This comes after Israel launched airstrikes on the Abu al-Duhur airbase near Aleppo on Tuesday, saying Syria was on the verge of breaching a security agreement by allowing Turkish troops to deploy from the base.

Those attacks were condemned by Turkey and discouraged by U.S. officials.

During a campaign stop for Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., on Friday, President Donald Trump again stated that he views the Strait of Hormuz as an "American territory."

During his speech, Trump recalled that before he decided to wage war against Iran in late February, he had traveled to Iowa earlier in the year and remarked to his White House advisors about low gas prices there at the time.

"I left, I went, and I said, 'you know, I hate to do this to you' because the country was booming," Trump said. "I said, 'I hate to do this, but we're going to have to take a little detour down to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and we're going to have to put out the nuclear weapons stuff, because they're going to have a nuclear weapon, and we cannot let them have a nuclear weapon.' We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon."

"So we went down and we stopped them. They'll never have a nuclear weapon," Trump said. "They want to make a deal so badly, we don't even know if we want."

"Because I view the Strait of Hormuz as an American territory right now. It's an American territory," he added.

Trump said that once the U.S. operation against Iran is complete, "oil is going to be down at lower than it was even just a little while ago." He also argued that the stock market has since recovered compared to the onset of the war.

Later in the speech, the president quipped about potentially bombing Iran again while asking the crowd if they wanted him to read “The Snake,” a 1968 song by Al Wilson that Trump has repeatedly cited since his 2016 campaign while discussing illegal immigration.

"Look, it's a Friday night. We have plenty of time, right? What the hell do I have to do? Go back, bomb Iran a little bit more. What now?" Trump said.

The U.S. has largely pivoted to a strategy of sanctions and an overall economic crackdown on Iran, rather than continuing a traditional military response. The U.S. Naval blockade of Iran's ports remains in effect.

Iran has allowed a number of Iraqi oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported on Saturday.

It's unclear how many ships have been granted passage through the strait, but Iraqi President Nizar Amedi said on Saturday that Iran allowed vessels carrying Iraqi oil through the narrow waterway in recent days, Reuters reported.

According to Iranian state media, one of Baghdad’s main requests during Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf’s visit to Iraq was special permission for Iraqi tankers.

Iraq produced around 4 million barrels of oil per day before the outbreak of the Iran war, with the vast majority of that product being exported through the heavily-impacted Strait of Hormuz.

Reuters contributed to this post.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei called the Trump administration's planned strategy to get the entire world to cut off Tehran economically a "return to full-scale classic colonialism."

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the plan Thursday as "the greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world."

"If you insist on doing business with them, either transferring money, buying their oil, or doing seaborne ship transfers, then the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. government will put its full might and force toward enforcing against you," Bessent added.

Baqaei denounced this, saying in a Friday social media post: "No State may lawfully compel foreign banks, enterprises, or airports - each subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of its own sovereign - to renounce lawful commerce with a third State."

"Such secondary sanctions find no foundation in international law," Baqaei added. "When combined with a naval blockade amounting to military aggression, these demands reduce the sovereignty of all other States to something provisional, conditional, and revocable at the whim of another power."

"The end result would be the complete erosion of sovereignty as the foundational basis of the UN-based inter-State system, and a recipe for an abysmal return to full-scale classic colonialism," he concluded.

An Iranian Shiite cleric said the smell of "burned flesh" still lingers near the compound of Iran's late supreme leader, according to video circulated by Iranian media and shared Friday by Iran International.

"Someone told me that when you go near the Supreme Leader’s compound, you can still smell burned flesh. I went there myself and found it was true — you can still smell burned flesh," the cleric told a nighttime gathering of Islamic Republic supporters in Tehran's Tajrish Square.

The cleric also disputed previous accounts of the scale of the attack on the compound.

“Our leader had a frail body, but contrary to reports that seven or eight bombs were dropped on the site, they hit the Supreme Leader’s compound with 110 bombs and missiles,” he said.

Iran International did not identify the cleric in its X post or provide independent confirmation of his account.