Iran warned Wednesday that it will carry the war beyond the Middle East and strike targets “in places you cannot imagine” if President Trump follows through on his threat to deliver another “big hit” against the Islamic Republic.

“If aggression against Iran is repeated, the promised regional war will extend beyond the region this time,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement aired on state media, vowing “crushing blows” against the United States and Israel should fighting resume.

The Guards added that they had not yet used their full military capability in earlier exchanges with American and Israeli forces, and dismissed Trump’s public warnings as posturing. “We are men of war, and you will witness our power on the battlefield, not in hollow statements or on social media pages,” the statement said.

Iran has previously vowed only to strike American bases in neighboring Gulf countries.

Tehran did not specify what locations it considered fair game beyond the Middle East, nor what weapons it would use to reach them. Iran has demonstrated long-range ballistic missile capabilities in past conflicts and maintains a network of proxy forces and operatives across multiple continents.

The warning followed Trump’s disclosure Tuesday that he had come within an hour of ordering a fresh round of strikes before pulling back at the urging of Persian Gulf allies who told him a diplomatic breakthrough was still possible.

“I was an hour away from making the decision to go today,” Trump told reporters. “We may have to give them another big hit. I’m not sure yet. You’ll know very soon.”

The president has set Iran’s renunciation of nuclear weapons as the central condition for ending the war, which has been frozen in an uneasy six-week cease-fire. Iranian negotiators have so far refused that demand, instead pressing for sovereign control of the Strait of Hormuz and the withdrawal of American forces from neighboring countries.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has publicly questioned the reliability of the Trump administration as a negotiating partner, and Pakistan’s interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, traveled to Tehran on Wednesday to continue acting as a back-channel intermediary, Iranian state media reported.

The cease-fire has held, but barely. The Senate this week advanced a symbolic war powers resolution that would bar further military operations against Iran without congressional authorization, a measure Trump is expected to reject if it reaches his desk. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement Wednesday condemning the earlier American and Israeli strikes on Iran as illegal and calling for a comprehensive halt to hostilities.

Inside Tehran, the regime has leaned into a posture of public defiance. Revolutionary Guard members have begun staging open-air demonstrations on city streets, training civilians to handle Kalashnikov-style assault rifles. Military parades through the capital now routinely feature pickup trucks mounted with belt-fed Soviet-era machine guns, the kind of imagery long associated with the regime’s proxy militias rather than its uniformed forces.

Iran’s nationwide internet blackout, imposed in the war’s opening days, entered its 82nd consecutive day Wednesday, according to the monitoring service NetBlocks. The country has now been cut off from the global internet for more than 1,900 hours.

US Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the war has effectively foreclosed any near-term possibility of an Oct. 7-style attack on Israel from the Iranian axis. He also confirmed that the Pentagon is still investigating a first-day strike on what American officials described as a missile facility but Iran has insisted was a girls’ elementary school. More than 165 people were killed in the strike. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei on Wednesday called the American account “a baseless fabrication.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)