live Iran Confirms IRGC Naval Commander Killed

US President Donald Trump says the United States is engaged in "serious discussions" with "a new, and more reasonable, regime" in Iran aimed at ending ongoing military operations.

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that "great progress" has been made but warned that if a deal with Iran is not reached soon, the United States could escalate its actions by "blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island."

Quick roundup of other news stories connected to the war with Iran:

An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said that Tehran has not had "any direct talks" with the United States since the last round of talks, although it was not clear which talks he was referring to. Regarding reports that negotiations between Iran and the United States are being held through intermediaries, Ismail Baghaei said: "What has been discussed so far have been messages about America's willingness and request for negotiations, which we received from some intermediaries, including Pakistan."

Shmuel Abramzon, the chief economist at the Israeli Finance Ministry, said on March 30 that the country's economy is on track to shrink in the first quarter of 2026 due to the war with Iran. Based on current indicators of economic activity and the experience of past wars, Abramzon said that the Israeli economy is expected to experience negative growth of 9.5 percent.

Citing military sources, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that the country has closed its airspace to US aircraft engaged in the war with Iran.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he has offered Russia a mutual halt on strikes against energy sites in the two countries in response to a global oil crisis triggered by the war in Iran.

"If Russia is ready to stop hitting Ukrainian energy facilities, we will not respond against their energy sector," Zelenskyy told journalists in a ‌WhatsApp chat on March 30.

In response to threats from Iran against US- and Israeli-affiliated universities in the region, the American University of Armenia (AUA) has suspended in-person classes and moved to online instruction.

In a statement, the Yerevan-based university said that it had received no direct threats and it was just taking a "precautionary measure."

On March 29, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps announced that it considers Israeli and American universities in the Middle East "legitimate targets" in response to attacks it claimed hit universities in the capital Tehran and in the central city of Isfahan.

Those reported strikes have not been confirmed by the US or Israel.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the Iranian government has repeatedly made use of cluster munitions delivered by ballistic missiles, which violates the laws of war and may constitute war crimes.

The New York-based rights group reported that three separate Iranian attacks involving cluster munitions had hit populated areas in Israel, killing at least four people.

"Iran's use of cluster munitions in populated areas of Israel poses a foreseeable and long-lasting danger to civilians," said Patrick Thompson, Human Rights Watch's crisis, conflict, and arms researcher.

"Cluster munition bomblets are dispersed over a wide area, making them unlawfully indiscriminate in violation of the laws of war."

HRW said that although Iran is not a party to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions -- which comprehensively bans all production and use of these weapons -- international humanitarian law still bans indiscriminate attacks, including those that cannot distinguish between civilians and military targets.

Iranian media have reported that Majid Zakariaei, commander of the protection unit of the Natural Resources and Watershed Management Organization, a government body responsible for forests and water resources, has been killed.

According to the semiofficial ISNA news agency, Zakariaei was wounded in attacks on March 28.

The report said he died on the night of March 29.

Zakariaei had served as commander of the unit for one year and had previously headed the protection unit of Iran’s State Land Affairs Organization.

Iran has executed two men convicted of links to the exiled Iranian opposition group, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), and of plotting attacks in Tehran with improvised launcher devices, the Iranian judiciary’s news outlet said on March 30.

The two men, identified as Akbar Daneshvar-Kar and Mohammad Taqavi Sangdehi, were executed in the early hours of March 30. Iranian media said they were accused of carrying out “multiple terrorist acts,” and that explosive devices and related equipment were found in safe houses linked to them.

The MEK is an Iranian opposition group dating to the 1960s that has opposed both the Shah and the Islamic republic. It was previously designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization before being delisted in 2012.

In November 2025, Mai Sato, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, warned that the cases of the two men and four others were marked by serious due process concerns, including delayed access to lawyers and allegations of torture, and said imposing the death penalty in such cases would violate international law.

With reporting by Reuters

The New York Times late on March 29 reports that several hundred US special operations troops have arrived in the Middle East to give President Donald Trump and the military additional options in the war with Iran.

The report, citing two unnamed US officials, said the commandos have not yet been assigned specific roles in the conflict. They will join the thousands of marines and elite paratroopers being sent to the region to join the 50,000 troops already there.

The commando forces include Army Rangers and Navy SEALs, the Times cited the officials as saying.

US leaders, including Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have said the deployment of any additional troops would be designed to give the president further options in dealing with Iran.

Among the possibilities is a potential seizing of Iran's Kharg Island, a key oil terminal and a major cog in the country's economic machine. The US military could also seek ways to safeguard shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which has been largely closed by Iran.

Another potential use of special forces, the Times reported, would be a mission to capture Iran’s highly enriched uranium supplies at the Isfahan nuclear site.

The reported noted that military experts caution that even 50,000 troops are a small number for a major land operation. The US-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 was close to 250,000 at the beginning, the Times said.

US President Donald Trump said he wants to “take the oil in Iran” and perhaps seize Kharg Island, while at the same time insisting that Washington is doing “extremely well” in negotiations with Iran and said he is "pretty sure" a peace deal will be reached.

The mixing of threats and the possibility of peace deal with Tehran came in an interview published late on March 29 in the Financial Times and remarks an hour later to reporters aboardAir Force One.

To reporters, Trump hailed progress in talks with Iran, saying they were being held directly and indirectly and asserted that Tehran was partially opening the crucial Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which some 20 percent of the world's oil and natural gas supplies pass.

He didn't elaborate on what he called direct talks with Iran, whose leaders deny negotiations are taking place. Tehran has said it received a 15-point US peace plan, which it said it would not accept.

"We are doing extremely well in that negotiation. But you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up...whether it's with B52 bombers" or by having torn up the 2015 landmark nuclear deal that Tehran signed with world powers, including the United States, Russia, and China.

"I think we will make a deal with them. Pretty sure. But it's possible we won't," he told reporters. "But we've had regime change already. [The Iranian] regime was decimated, destroyed. They're all dead."

He said, without being specific, that the current leaders have been "very reasonable."

In the FT interview, Trump said that “my preference would be to take the oil," likening the situation to that of Venezuela, where the said the intends to take control of the oil industry “indefinitely” after US forces captured strongman leader Nicolas Maduro in January.

“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran, but some stupid people back in the US say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,” Trump was quoted by the FT as saying.

“Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options,” Trump said, referring to the hub where most of Iran's oil is exported.

“It would also mean we had to be there [in Kharg Island] for a while,” he said “I don’t think they have any defense. We could take it very easily.”

Despite the threats, Trump insisted that indirect talks between the US and Iran via Pakistani “emissaries” were progressing well. Trump has imposed an April 6 deadline for Iran to accept a deal ending the war or face US strikes on its power plants.

Foremost on the administration's demand list is the reopening of the crucial Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has largely blocked, creating a bottleneck of oil and natural gas shipments.

Tehran has said it would allow "nonhostile" nations' ships to pass safely, which Trump hailed as progress.

Read more here.