Trump: “I don’t know if Iran will give up yet, but it will give up” — Iran is “doing very badly,” the U.S. president says

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he does not know whether Iran will “give up yet,” but described the country as “doing very badly” in the seven-month war with the United States. “I don’t know if they’re going to give up yet, but they will give up,” Trump told reporters, as Reuters reports.

The statement comes a day after Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, told Iranian state media that Tehran “did not surrender” to Washington and “will not surrender,” according to Al Jazeera’s live blog. Trump also attacked Iran’s leadership, saying it “has been destroyed”: “The problem is the country’s leadership has been destroyed. When they took them out, new people came — I don’t know if they’re good, bad, I don’t know. We’ll see,” he said.

The U.S. blockade has cut off Iran’s financial lifeline — oil exports — and the economic costs of the war have made life harder for Iranians, Reuters writes. Last week, Iran’s president declared at the UN General Assembly that Tehran would never submit to U.S. pressure.

Rising oil prices because of the war have meanwhile become a major issue for Trump’s Republican Party ahead of November’s U.S. midterm elections, while the Strait of Hormuz — through which a fifth of the global supply of crude oil and liquefied natural gas passed before the conflict — remains blocked. The war began on February 28, when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran and Tehran responded with attacks on Israel and Gulf states hosting U.S. bases.