Iran weighs retaliation against US for strikes on nuclear sites

Iran and Israel traded air and missile strikes as the world braced on Monday for Tehran's response to the US attack on its nuclear sites and US President Donald Trump raised the idea of regime change in the country.

Iran vowed to defend itself on Sunday, a day after the US joined Israel in the biggest Western military action against the country since its 1979 revolution, despite calls for restraint and a return to diplomacy from around the world.

Commercial satellite imagery indicated the US attacks on Saturday on Iran’s subterranean Fordow nuclear plant severely damaged or destroyed the deeply buried site and the uranium-enriching centrifuges it housed, but the status of the site remained unconfirmed, experts said.

In his latest social media comments on the strikes, Trump said "monumental damage was done to all nuclear sites in Iran".

"The biggest damage took place far below ground level. Bullseye!!!" he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Trump earlier called on Iran to forgo any retaliation and said the government "must now make peace" or "future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier".

The US launched 75 precision-guided munitions including bunker-buster bombs and more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles against three Iranian nuclear sites, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, told reporters.

The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said no increases in off-site radiation levels had been reported after the US strikes. Rafael Grossi, the agency's director general, told CNN that it was not yet possible to assess the damage done underground.

A senior Iranian source told Reuters that most of the highly enriched uranium at Fordow had been moved elsewhere before the attack. Reuters could not immediately corroborate the claim.

Tehran, which denies its nuclear programme is for anything other than peaceful purposes, sent a volley of missiles at Israel in the aftermath of the US attack, wounding scores of people and destroying buildings in Tel Aviv. But it had not acted on its main threats of retaliation, to target US bases or choke off oil shipments that pass through the Strait of Hormuz.