‘Keep dreaming’: Iran’s leader reacts to Trump’s claims of destroying country’s nuclear sites

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday dismissed America’s President, Donald Trump claims that the country’s nuclear sites has been completely destroyed by the US strikes in June.

A statement on Khameni’s official website, he told Trump to “keep dreaming” over the comments on the sites’ destruction and questioned the US president’s right “to say what a country should or should not have if it possesses a nuclear industry”.

Recall that in mid-June, the Middle-East was thrown into tension follwing Israe’s unprecedented bombing campaign on Iran. The US briefly joined in, striking key Iranian nuclear facilities.

Last week, during a speech at the Israeli Knesset,

Trump during his visit to Isreal reiterated that the US confirmed “obliterating” Iranian nuclear sites during the strikes.

He said, “So we dropped 14 bombs on Iran’s key nuclear facilities. Totally as I said originally obliterating them and that’s been confirmed.”

In a Sunday interview with Fox News, Trump added Iran “no longer became the bully of the Middle East” after the US strikes which “destroyed their nuclear capability”. He further called the strikes “the most beautiful military operation”.

Although the true state of the nuclear sites remains unclear due to the restricted press access to the country. The Pentagon report revealed that the strikes delayed Iran’s nuclear programme by between one and two years, contradicting an initial classified US intelligence report that according to American media found the setback was only by a few months.

Reacting to Trump’s statement on Monday, Khamenei described it as “improper, wrong, and bullying”.

The June war with Israel took place two days ahead of a planned sixth round of nuclear negotiations between Tehran and Washington, which had begun in April. Nuclear talks have been derailed since with Iran saying it was open to negotiations only if the US provided guarantees of no military action.

The war resulted in the killing of top Iranian scientists and military leaders with the Khamenei whereabouts unknown until the ceasefire was reached. Isreal also suffered loses of human life and destructions.