New Iranian supreme leader puts TARGET on US military bases

New video. Operation Epic Fury. U.S. strikes targeting Iran a terror regime. The joint U.S. and Israeli campaign hitting sites including airfields and missile infrastructure around that country. U.S. Central Command says our forces are degrading Iran's military capabilities hour by hour, day by day. I'm Harris Faulkner. You are in the Faulkner Focus. Here is President Trump from yesterday.

They've lost their Navy, they've lost their Air Force. They have no anti-aircraft apparatus at all. They have no radar. Their leaders are gone. And we could do a lot worse here. We're leaving certain things that if we take them out or we could take them out by this

afternoon, in fact, within an hour, they literally would never be able to build that country

back.

U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker on U.S. efforts to take out Iran's missile and drone threats.

I think that and with air superiority and dominance that we have right now, we can continue to methodically take out all their ability to produce these things. And so, you know, I think President Trump gets all the credit for this successful

effort together with our military. And here is the new video showing the regime using cluster munitions. The regime is targeting civilians with the controversial and widely banned bombs, 100 countries against them. Huge questions now about Iran's new supreme leader.

Is this real? His first public statement since Islamic leaders chose him early this week. They haven't shown him yet on camera. And we don't really know what's happened with him. We do know that when our U.S. military hit where they were the first day of this war,

they killed 39 members, including his father and other family members. So we don't know what kind of condition he's in. In this statement, we don't see his voice. There are reports that this is supposed to be the revelation and to signify his own handwriting. Retired Navy Captain Brent Sadler is coming up in focus.

We'll get deeper into that. Let's begin with Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yankst in Tel Aviv.

Trey.

Harris, good morning. We heard indirectly today from Iran's supreme leader, Mushtaba Khamenei, who made remarks through state media. Basically, you had a TV presenter reading what they say is a written statement from Mushtaba Khamenei, but we have still not seen him on camera

or in person since Operation Epic Fury began. As these remarks were made, we were getting new details into more of the same from the Iranian regime. He said through state media that U.S. bases in the region will be attacked. He called on people to participate in Quds Day, which is tomorrow, the last Friday of

Ramadan, and then went on to say, we believe in friendship with neighbors and only target the bases and will inevitably continue. What he didn't mention were the attacks on Gulf countries that are not US bases. As you can see in this video here, a drone yesterday targeted Oman's largest fuel storage facility in the country, a massive fire erupting after that attack. And it comes as the Iranians are still launching ballistic missiles at Israel, now using cluster munitions against a civilian population.

Earlier this week we arrived at one site where a cluster bomb destroyed an apartment. Take a look. Rescue crews searched through a destroyed apartment in the heart of Tel Aviv. Piles of concrete and rubble lay on a walkway nearby. This is the aftermath of a cluster munition strike.

Then I went to this shelter. You can see this shelter. To this shelter and let's say a few seconds after the siren was a very huge explosion."

First responders are here at a scene in Tel Aviv, where an Iranian cluster munition exploded after it was launched in the latest ballistic missile barrage. You can see the amount of rubble and debris here. First responders say multiple people are being treated with shrapnel injuries and there are at least a dozen impact sites by the ballistic

missile or one of the cluster missiles being used where it can spread into over 80 sub munitions over a vast area. But yet still we're seeing when those are being used, the end result is residential buildings and commercial property being targeted and we're going out there, so red alert coming soon. They would target them and give them. Let's go to the shelter in here.

All right, so you guys see right now, this is what Israel's been dealing with. Even as we are here at the site of this impact, we got to take cover here.

And so...

Guys, go inside of the shelter that's in this building.

The sirens right now are sounding outside and the officials that were on the scene of this impact have now taken cover in a safe room waiting for this new missile barrage to pass.

And right now, we have several casualties today from this attack at the different locations inside the area of Tel Aviv.

And Harris, earlier today, the Iranians fired another cluster of munition at Israel. We could hear in the distance as air defense systems tried to shoot down that incoming fire. But when these bombs explode over the city, it's incredibly difficult to intercept. And often rains shrapnel and debris down on the population below. Harris?

Trey Yinks, always great reporting. Thank you for the update for this hour. More now on the regime's use of cluster munitions. These weapons are designed to spread damage over a wide area of the battlefield, but Iran is using them to target its own civilians,

as Trey was just reporting for us. And here is the process. A large missile is fired from the air or from the ground. The casing then opens during flight, releasing a cluster of as many as 70 small and deadly bombs. Those dozens of bombs spread out into the air indiscriminately, hence the threat to anyone there, including civilians. Upon impact, the field of explosives

can cover an area of up to five miles. More than 100 countries have signed a global treaty banning cluster munitions because of the threat to civilians. And there are countries who are not on it. For instance, Iran and Israel.

And the United States said back in 2008, it wants to retain the option as a defense strategy to be able to use these should it be necessary. It is important to note that only Iran is using cluster bombs in this conflict and again against their own people. Of course, they killed 35,000 at least protesters weeks ago in Iran. So using something on their own people, well, we know how they feel about that.

Brent Sadler, retired Navy captain, served in the Pentagon during President Trump's first term. Good to see you. I first of all, just wanna get your reaction to how willing Iran is to kill its own people.

Oh, it's Iran killing its own people. They did 32,000 of them in January, which no one should forget, because it's the best example of the nature of this regime. And certainly, if they're willing to kill their own people, they're certainly not hesitant to kill women and children. And again, the targeting, using these cluster munitions, they're indiscriminate.

This is why there's this international legal debate, discussion, and treaties about banning these weapons.

Brent, I'm going to cut in now because I want to correct myself and also set the record straight. Iran is using these on Israeli citizens at this point. I'll let you go.

No, the weapon system's designed to go after personnel, military personnel in the field, to slow advances when you're trying to defend. You know, first during the Cold War, a Soviet invasion across from the Eastern Europe into the Western Europe, and on the Korean Peninsula, these are the places where there's concern that if the U.S. doesn't have the option, it makes our forces very vulnerable.

But again, these are anti-personnel weapons to slow offensive assaults, not to be used in a city. The only reason you do that is a changing tactic on the part of the Iranian regime to get around Israeli missile defense.

Right, and we do know that Iran is firing munitions from inside populated civilian areas with people in harm's way, but they are targeting Israeli citizens with these cluster bombs I want to make sure I get that right because I didn't at first There's another aerial threat now

Iran's drone swarms are forcing the Pentagon to rapidly expand layered air defenses in the Middle East to protect our troops Station there and the drones fly lower slower, and often arrive in clusters, making them harder to detect and more likely to strain defenses built for high-speed threats. They are cheap for the enemy to produce,

but expensive to defend against. Brent.

Yes, this is another case. The tactics are changing on the battlefield. The Iranians have been using a lot of these Shaheed drones, slow, and also flying very low. But again, there's teams from Ukraine to bring in techniques and concepts of operations to defend against them. So you're seeing this evolve using helicopters with machine guns and

fighter aircraft, much cheaper, more effective way to actually go take out groups of these

types of low cost drones. All right., you talked about is this a shift in terms of those cluster munitions. Is this a shift in terms of the so-called selected new supreme leader for Iran? We know that a statement has been released. It is not in his voice.

We can't verify if it's his handwriting or not. They say it is. And it's released in state-run media by a person reading that. What do you make of what we've learned about that statement?

I think it makes it increasingly clear that this supreme leader is more of a figurehead if he is actually alive or at least not in a comatose kind of state after that attack early in this conflict, that it's really the IRGC that's making the military and the operational decisions on the field. The movement to cluster munitions, I think, would be very clearly inside their purview, as well as the shifting use of drones, the most recent using unmanned surface drones

to go after shipping in the northern end of the Persian Gulf just yesterday.

The Islamic Revolutionary Regiment has been dedicated to the place of the two major leaders of the revolution, Khamenei Khabir and Khamenei Shadohedra, and a whole list of names here. And the people of the country, thank you for your time. So this, again, is read by a speaker from state-run media in Iran, and it goes on to just thank the people. It says, the people's efforts to defend the influence and to support the people of Afghanistan and the United States, the attack on the Syrian border should be used as a means to prevent

the attack on the Syrian border. He just lists all these things. What is the goal here, putting this type of a statement out?

It's really hard to tell. It certainly doesn't signal that he's in charge and that at a time when the country is under attack, you would think that they would put a video or at least have an audio. They didn't do that. So it's pretty clear there's still fractured leadership and less than clear or unified command and control. Again, the attacks are sporadic, opportunistic, not very well coordinated,

that are coming from the ballistic missiles, the drone attacks that you're seeing still. Much, much reduced in scale, but still lethal when they do occur, episodically.

Real quickly, is this the kind of proof that you would look for to say, well, their regime is still in process here, it's still in power? We do know that on the first day of this war, our U.S. military took out 39 other people in that group, including family members, his own father, who was the previous Khomeini.

Your thoughts on whether or not it still has strength, that regime?

It still has muscle on the street. I wouldn't necessarily say it has strength. It's certainly been significantly degraded since the beginning of this conflict, now we're, I think, day 13 of this. But again, still lethal, still a force to reckon with. And this is not the time to let up on the pressure or the tempo of the military operations,

as it starts to shift to provide an opportunity for the Iranian people to take back their country. Again, that's the only way that peace will be enduring, is the nature of whoever runs Iran, takes a 180-degree shift away from this theocratic dictatorship.

This is quite the speech. It's pretty long, and we have translated it. You see, you can hear her voice in the background, but as you pointed out, we don't hear Muqtaba Khomeini's voice. Brent Sadler, thank you, as always. Be sure to like and subscribe for all the Fox News latest on YouTube and catch full

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