US President Donald Trump said on Friday he had stopped a military strike on Iran 10 minutes before it was carried out.
"We were ready to respond to Iran, but I decided to stop the strike 10 minutes before it was implemented," Trump said in tweets on Twitter. He pointed out that the strike was not proportional to the fall of a drone, pointing out that the US strikes on Iran were aimed at "three sites." The US president pointed out that the strikes on Iran would have killed 150 people, stressing that it is not a rush to strike Tehran. The New York Times reported that Trump had issued an order for air strikes, but later retracted it. The newspaper quoted senior administration officials involved in the discussions or briefed them, saying that Trump initially agreed to hit a few targets such as radar devices and batteries. According to the sources, the strikes were to be carried out before dawn on Friday, to reduce the risk to the military or civilians. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards announced on Thursday that "a US spy plane was shot down as it penetrated the airspace of the Republic." A US official told Reuters that a US military plane was shot down in the international airspace over the Strait of Hormuz with a surface-to-air missile. On Friday, a commander in Iran´s Revolutionary Guard said Tehran had refrained from shooting down an American plane carrying 35 people, who were accompanying the crashed plane in the Gulf. "There was an American B-8 aircraft with 35 people on board with the plane in the area.
