BEIRUT/MIAMI/TEL AVIV/DUBAI — US President Donald J. Trump said he is not interested in negotiating with Iran and raised the possibility that the Iran war would only end once Tehran no longer has a functioning military or any remaining leadership in power.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Mr. Trump said the air campaign could make negotiations a moot point if all potential leaders of Iran are killed and the Iranian military is destroyed.

“At some point, I don’t think there will be anybody left maybe to say ‘We surrender,’” Mr. Trump said.

IRAN PRESIDENT’S APOLOGY CAUSES STIR
Israel said it had initiated fresh strikes across Iran on Sunday, and a huge fire engulfed a government office block in Kuwait hit by drones, as a war that has brought chaos to the Middle East and roiled global oil markets entered its second week.

Mr. Trump has justified the attack by saying Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, without providing evidence, and was getting too close to being able to build a nuclear weapon.

The US and Israel have discussed sending special forces into Iran to secure its stockpile of highly enriched uranium at a later stage of the war, Axios reported, citing four people with knowledge of the discussions. The White House did not immediately comment on the report.

Iran’s president apologized to neighboring states for its attacks on US facilities in those countries, in an attempt to cool anger across the Gulf, but stirred criticism from hardliners at home.

“I personally apologize to neighboring countries that were affected by Iran’s actions,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said, urging them not to join US-Israeli attacks on Iran.

He dismissed Mr. Trump’s demand for the Islamic Republic’s unconditional surrender as “a dream,” but said its temporary leadership council had agreed to suspend attacks on nearby states unless strikes on Iran originated from their territory.

Mr. Pezeshkian’s comments caused a political stir in Iran, prompting his office to reiterate Iran’s military would respond firmly to attacks from US bases.

Ali Larijani, Iran’s secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said on state television there was no rift among Iranian officials over its handling of the war.

Saudi Arabia has told Tehran that continued Iranian attacks on the kingdom, and its energy sector, could push Riyadh to respond in kind, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates reported Iranian drone attacks in their countries on Saturday and early Sunday with varying degrees of damage. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards also targeted US forces at a base in Bahrain, Iranian state media said.

In Norway’s capital Oslo, the US embassy was hit by an explosion early on Sunday, causing minor damage but no injuries, Norwegian police said. It was not immediately clear what caused the blast or who was involved.

Washington has halted for now a federal security bulletin that would have warned of a heightened threat to the US in light of the Iran conflict, a Trump administration official told Reuters. But a recent US intelligence assessment had warned that Iran and its proxies “probably” pose a threat of targeted attacks on the United States.

ISRAEL WARNS LEBANON TO REIN IN HEZBOLLAH
Huge explosions were heard in parts of Tehran, state media reported, while Israel said it had struck Iranian missile sites and command centers.

The US-Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,332 Iranian civilians and wounded thousands, according to Iran’s United Nations ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani.

US forces were likely responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls school that killed scores of children, US officials have told Reuters. But Mr. Trump, without citing evidence, told reporters on Saturday that Iran was responsible.

“We think it was done by Iran because they are very inaccurate as you know with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran,” said Mr. Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing behind Mr. Trump aboard Air Force One, said the matter was still under investigation.

Iranian attacks have killed 10 people in Israel. At least six US service members have been killed. Their remains arrived on Saturday at an Air Force base in Delaware.

In Iran, local news agencies, citing an Iranian oil ministry source, said its fuel depots were hit by strikes in three areas, including Karaj, west of Tehran.

Tehran has responded to the US-Israeli war on Iran by hitting Israel and Gulf Arab states hosting US military installations. Israel has launched fresh attacks in Lebanon after the Iran-aligned militia Hezbollah fired across the border.

With the conflict spreading, Israel warned Lebanon of a “very heavy price” if it did not rein in Iran-allied Hezbollah militants, as it pounded the group’s strongholds with airstrikes and mounted a deadly airborne raid in the east.

On Saturday morning, more buildings in Beirut’s Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs had been reduced to rubble, dust and tangled wires, Reuters video showed. The death toll from Israel’s attacks on Lebanon since Monday rose to around 300.

Iran’s apparent strategy of maximum chaos has driven up the costs of the conflict by raising energy prices and hurting global business and logistics links.

Kuwait’s national oil company began cutting output on Saturday, adding to earlier oil and gas cuts from Iraq and Qatar. Oil prices have hit multi-year highs with the conflict effectively shutting the Strait of Hormuz. — Reuters

BEIJING — US-China dialogue is vital to preventing globally damaging miscalculations, China’s top diplomat said on Sunday, ahead of a highly anticipated summit this month between leaders Xi Jinping and Donald J. Trump.

“Failure to engage between the two nations would only lead to misunderstandings and misjudgments, escalating toward confrontation and harming the world,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi told a press conference on the sidelines of an annual parliament meeting in Beijing.

With the US president focused on the war he and Israel launched against Iran, analysts are watching for signs that his visit to meet Mr. Xi will go ahead. China has not previously announced the summit between the leaders of the world’s biggest economies, expected for the end of the month.

‘DONROE DOCTRINE’ VS BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE
“The agenda for high-level exchanges (with the US) is on the table,” Mr. Wang said. “What is required is for both sides to make thorough preparations to create a conducive environment to manage existing differences,” he added, without giving further details.

In addition to the week-old Iran war, which has killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and more than 1,300 others in the country, according to Tehran, Mr. Trump authorized the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, testing Beijing’s commitment to its strategic partners.

On Iran, Mr. Wang urged an immediate halt to military operations, saying the war that should not have happened and that the use of force was not a way to resolve issues. He did not go beyond Beijing’s previous condemnations and expressions of concern, despite reports Tehran had neared a deal to buy supersonic anti-ship missiles from Beijing.

Mr. Trump’s pursuit of a “Donroe Doctrine” — his rebranding of a 19^th century policy asserting Washington’s zone of influence in the Americas — is crashing into Mr. Xi’s flagship Belt and Road and Global Security initiatives, which have been decades in the making and carry significant personal political investment for the Chinese leader.

Mr. Trump has also threatened military action against Colombia and Mexico and said Cuba’s communist regime “looks like it’s ready to fall” on its own, raising questions for Latin American countries over how their China ties might protect them if put to the test.

China’s foreign policy has not faced this much scrutiny since the Cold War, said Yasser Nasser, a historian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“In some senses it is existential in that it reveals that Chinese economic commitments or commitments to arms deals, for example, do not translate to directly confronting the US or preventing interventions as, for example, it did during the Vietnam War.”

‘CANNOT RETURN TO LAW OF THE JUNGLE’
Mr. Wang appeared to take a swipe at Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions.

“If China, like some traditional major powers, was keen on carving out spheres of influence in its neighborhood, stoking bloc confrontation, or even shifting problems onto its neighbors, would Asia still be as stable as it is today?” Mr. Wang said. He did not name the US.

Beijing has grown more belligerent in its backyard over the past year, analysts say.

It has held massive war games around Taiwan, escalated a diplomatic spat with Japan over remarks by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi that a Chinese attack on the democratically governed island could trigger a military response from Tokyo, and repeatedly confronted Philippine ships in disputed areas of the South China Sea.

Still, Mr. Wang sought to project China’s economy as a stabilizing force, in contrast to Mr. Trump’s military assertiveness.

“A hard fist is not the same as a hard reason,” he said. “The world cannot return to the law of the jungle. Resorting to force at every turn does not prove one’s might.” — Reuters

KUALA LUMPUR — Families of those aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on Sunday urged the Malaysian government to extend a contract it signed with deep-sea exploration firm Ocean Infinity to continue a search for the aircraft that disappeared 12 years ago.

The Boeing 777 was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, becoming one of the world’s enduring aviation mysteries.

Multiple search operations for the plane have been conducted in the southern Indian Ocean since then, but all have proved fruitless.

Malaysia in March last year agreed to allow Ocean Infinity to resume the hunt under a “no find, no fee” principle, with the firm to be paid $70 million only if the wreckage was successfully located.

Malaysia’s Air Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) said on Sunday, however, that operations had not yielded any findings so far, after two search phases covering 28 days and around 7,571 square kilometers (2,923 square miles) of seabed.

Operations were periodically disrupted by weather and sea conditions, with the second phase ending on Jan. 23, the AAIB said.

“The government remains committed to keeping the families informed and will continue to provide updates as appropriate,” it said.

Voice370, a group representing families of those onboard, said it was unlikely for Ocean Infinity to resume the search before its contract ends in June, due to the coming winter months in the southern hemisphere and deteriorating sea conditions.

It urged the government to grant any request for Ocean Infinity to extend its agreement, as well as expand the same terms to other interested exploration firms.

“A simple addendum extending the contract period without altering the core terms of the agreement would allow the search to continue without delay,” it said.

Ocean Infinity had conducted prior searches for the plane but failed to find substantive wreckage.

Malaysian investigators in a 2018 report drew no conclusion about what happened aboard the flight but did not rule out the possibility that the aircraft had been deliberately taken off course. — Reuters