US President Donald Trump on Monday expanded his threat against Iran to include all of the country’s power plants and bridges, as his ultimatum to make a deal ticked closer after Tehran rejected a 45-day ceasefire proposal and said it wants a permanent end to the war.

“The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” Trump said. He suggested that his deadline of 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday (3 a.m. Israel time on Wednesday) was final, saying he’d already given Iran enough extensions.

“We have a plan… where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again, I mean, complete demolition, by 12 o’clock, and it will happen over a period of four hours if we want that to happen,” he said.

“We don’t want that,” he added, noting that the US may end up helping Iran rebuild, in which case he would not want to have to reconstruct expensive infrastructure like that.

He said Iran did not take him seriously before, leading him to order the demolition of a major bridge near Tehran last week within minutes of talks falling apart.

“Do I want to destroy their infrastructure? No. It would take them 100 years to rebuild,” he said.

“If we left today, it would take them 20 years to rebuild their country… and the only way they’re going to be able to rebuild their country is to utilize the genius of the United States of America,” he claimed.

At an earlier White House Easter egg roll event, Trump was asked if his plans to blow up civilian bridges and power plants in Iran would constitute war crimes, and said they would not “because they [Iran] killed 45,000 people in the last month.”

The comments appeared to refer to Iran’s gunning down of thousands of protesters earlier this year amid a large-scale rebellion against the theocratic regime.

“You know what’s a war crime? Allowing a sick country with demented leadership to have a nuclear weapon,” Trump added.

At the later press conference, a reporter again pressed the president on his threat to bomb Iranian civilian infrastructure, to which the president responded by insisting that the Iranian people would be okay with such strikes.

“They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” he said, adding that Iranians are urging the US to “please keep bombing.”

Asked what his reaction would be if Iranians were to return to the streets, Trump acknowledged that doing so could well be a death sentence, saying: “They should do it. But the consequences are great. They were told, ‘If you protest, you will be shot immediately.'”

He said earlier that Iranians live in a “violent, horrible world,” where “if you protest, you get shot.”

Iran’s army responded defiantly to Trump Monday night, saying the US president’s “arrogant rhetoric” on the war was not hindering the........

© The Times of Israel