Trump says the U.S. will meet with Iran but downplays the need for a nuclear agreement.

“I don’t care if I have an agreement or not,” Mr. Trump said. “The only thing we’d be asking for is what we were asking for before, about we want no nuclear.”

Mr. Trump again argued that the American strikes dealt a devastating blow to Tehran’s ambitions, pushing back forcefully against the findings of a preliminary U.S. intelligence report that said the attacks had only set back Iran’s nuclear program by a matter of months. Mr. Rubio also stepped in with a more detailed case for why he thought the Iranian program had been set back by years.

Israel sought to bolster that argument, releasing a statement from its atomic energy commission that said the American strike on the reinforced Iranian nuclear site at Fordo “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.”

The comments by Mr. Trump and his officials were the latest in an effort to portray the 12-day war — the biggest and deadliest ever between Iran and Israel — as a success. Iranian officials have made similar claims since the cease-fire took effect. On Tuesday, residents of Tehran took to the streets for a victory rally and Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said that Israel had “failed in achieving its sinister goals: the destruction of facilities, the dismantling of nuclear expertise, and the incitement of social unrest.”

On Wednesday, both Iran and Israel moved to restore a sense of normalcy after nearly two weeks of Israeli airstrikes, waves of retaliatory Iranian ballistic missiles and direct U.S. military involvement in bombing Iran’s nuclear sites.

Here’s what else to know:

• White House pushback: In offering the most detailed case to date for why the Trump administration contends that Iran’s nuclear effort has been set back for years, not just months, Mr. Rubio centered his argument on a “conversion facility” at Isfahan that was destroyed, robbing Iran of equipment that is key to producing a nuclear weapon. “You can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility,” Mr. Rubio said.

• Nuclear divide: Iran’s hardliner-dominated parliament voted to “suspend” cooperation with the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog and bar its inspectors from the country, according to state news media. Though the move was so far no more than symbolic — the legislation would need approval from a higher Iranian authority — it signaled simmering tensions between Iran and the agency, which some Iranian officials accuse of helping Israel justify its attacks.

• Truce holding: People in Israel and Iran took the first tentative steps to return to normalcy as a cease-fire held for a second day. In Tehran, residents who had fled intense Israeli bombardments began returning home. And in Israels, students headed back to schools and workers to offices after days of restrictions ordered by the military were lifted.

But Mr. Trump seemed to downplay the importance of a diplomatic agreement with Tehran over its nuclear program, expressing complete confidence that Iran will not pursue a nuclear weapon after the U.S. attacks.

“We may sign an agreement,” he said at a news conference at the conclusion of the NATO summit. “I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary. I mean they had a war they fought. Now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States was seeking direct talks between the countries.

“We’d love to have peaceful relations with any country in the world, and so obviously that will depend on Iran’s willingness not just to engage in peace, but to negotiate directly with the United States, not through some third-country or fourth-country process,” Mr. Rubio said.

Before the United States attacked Iran, the two countries were engaged in diplomatic efforts over limiting Iran’s nuclear program after Mr. Trump withdrew from a previous agreement that had been negotiated during the Obama administration.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, and Oman, which acted as a mediator in the talks that began in April, had been working with Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, as part of those negotiations. Iran had rejected an American proposal, which would have seen Tehran join a consortium with the United States and Arab nations to produce nuclear fuel for power plants. But under that proposal, Iran would be barred from doing any production inside its territory.

On Wednesday, administration officials repeatedly made the case that the American strikes had crippled Iran’s nuclear program, disputing the conclusions of a preliminary U.S. defense intelligence assessment.

Mr. Trump suggested that the U.S. strikes brought about the end of the conflict between Iran and Israel, comparing it to the Americans’ dropping two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II.

“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima,” he said. “I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki. But that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war. This ended the war. If we didn’t take that out, they would have been, they’d be fighting right now.”

Amid simmering tensions with the agency, which some Iranian officials accuse of helping Israel justify its attacks, Iran’s hardliner-dominated parliament voted on Wednesday to “suspend” cooperation with the agency and bar its inspectors from the country, according to state news media. Though the move was so far no more than symbolic — the legislation would need approval from a higher Iranian authority before taking effect — its passage is another show of defiance from Iran.

While it may perhaps a signal that Iran will renew its nuclear ambitions despite the U.S. and Israeli strikes on its facilities, the vote could simply be a tactic to gain leverage in any new negotiations with the Trump administration over its nuclear program.

One of the I.A.E.A.’s main purposes is to monitor nuclear activity in Iran and other countries, including all those who have signed on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The goal is to keep them from building nuclear weapons. Iran is a party to the treaty, while Israel is not. The I.A.E.A. still has some oversight in Israel, which has not confirmed or denied having nuclear weapons, but is widely believed to have them.

Under its agreement with Iran, the I.A.E.A. is supposed to inspect the nuclear facilities Iran has publicly declared, including those at Natanz and Fordo that the United States bombed over the weekend. Israeli officials say there may be other, secret nuclear sites that Iran has not told the watchdog about.

Rafael Grossi, the director general of the I.A.E.A., told reporters in Vienna on Wednesday morning that he had requested that Iran allow his inspectors back into the sites, but he did not respond to the Iranian parliament’s vote. The watchdog’s inspectors stayed in Iran throughout the war and were ready to return to the sites to verify how much nuclear material Iran had left. The inspectors last checked on the sites a few days before Israeli airstrikes began, the agency said on Tuesday.

But the I.A.E.A.’s relationship with Iran appears to be at a low point. Only a day before Israel began its attack, the agency formally declared that Iran was not complying with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations. It said Iran consistently failed to provide information about undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple locations.

Iranian officials repeatedly criticized Mr. Grossi during the war, saying that his comments that there was no evidence of a systematic Iranian effort to build nuclear weapons came too late to prevent Israel from seizing on the I.A.E.A. report as it began its attacks.

The watchdog’s access to Iran was at its best after the 2015 deal between Iran and the United States and other Western powers that restricted Iran’s nuclear enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief. As part of the agreement, the agency gained oversight over new parts of Iran’s nuclear program. It was also given the power to carry out snap inspections, visiting sites on short notice, including places that Iran had not said were nuclear facilities.

But Iran gradually rolled back that extra access after President Trump unilaterally pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018 during his first term, and reimposed heavy sanctions. That prompted Iran not only to restrict I.A.E.A. monitoring of its nuclear activities but also to start enriching uranium past the limits set by the agreement.

The watchdog said in a report in late May that Iran was still cooperating with it and that it was able to mount a “large verification effort,” though it outlined several ways in which it said that cooperation was “less than satisfactory.”

The I.A.E.A. noted in the report that Iran has repeatedly said that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the agency said that it could not confirm that assertion unless Iran gave it more information and allowed it to monitor more of its activities.

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.

His argument centered on the belief that a “conversion facility” — which is key to converting nuclear fuel into the form needed to produce a nuclear weapon — was destroyed. The facility, in Isfahan, is where enriched uranium gas has been converted into solid materials, and ultimately a metal, that can be used to fabricate a nuclear bomb or a warhead.

Israel reported hitting the facility, and an associated laboratory for turning the fuel to metal, and The New York Times described the hit at the time. Independent analysts believe the plant was severely damaged.

“You can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility,” said Mr. Rubio, who serves simultaneously as interim national security adviser. “We can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,” he added, speaking of the conversion facility. “The whole thing is blackened out. It’s gone. It’s wiped out.”

Satellite photographs show extensive destruction, but not until international nuclear inspectors are allowed on the site will it be possible to know what it would take to rebuild, on the site or elsewhere.

The report by the Defense Intelligence Agency focused largely on the state of the Fordo plant, the country’s deeply buried enrichment facility, which produced the near-bomb-grade fuel that would ultimately feed a conversion facility.

The United States used powerful “bunker buster” bombs to hit that plant. Officials familiar with the intelligence report said that early findings concluded that the strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by months. Officials said the strikes sealed off entrances to the facility, but had not led to a collapse, leaving open the possibility that Iran could eventually dig it out.

But the reason Iran most likely could still race to a bomb relatively quickly, officials said, is that Iran likely retains much of its enriched uranium and likely has secret nuclear facilities in which to process it further.

International inspectors and nuclear experts agree that the extensive damage to the conversion facility created a key bottleneck in the weapons-making process, and agreed that rebuilding it would likely take years. But that assumes, of course, that Iran did not build another conversion plant in secret, as part of an insurance policy against the destruction of its “declared” facilities, which are inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The American attacks on Sunday morning in Iran were focused on two different elements of the nuclear program. The first was the two centers where enrichment was done, Natanz and Fordo.

The second set of attacks were focused on facilities that could be used to turn the nuclear material into a weapon. Most of those were centered in Isfahan, including the conversion facility and the lab that produces uranium metal, which can be used in manufacturing a warhead. The United States objective appeared to be to take out both parts of the production chain in the hopes of setting the Iranians back as far as possible.

In a separate assessment, David Albright and Spencer Faragasso of the nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit organization that follows the state of the Iranian program in depth, wrote on Wednesday that “Israel’s and U.S. attacks have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program.” They concluded “it will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack.” But their report noted that stocks of near-bomb-grade uranium and lesser-enriched materials remain, along with centrifuges that had been manufactured, but not yet installed. Iran may have moved some of the material to secret locations.

The same report noted that the conversion facility was “severely damaged.”

Mr. Trump argued that Iran had essentially given up its nuclear ambitions, saying they are not “even thinking” about nuclear enrichment anymore, though he did not provide any evidence to back up that assessment. Mr. Rubio was more careful. “Now anything in the world can be rebuilt," he said, “but now we know where it is, and if they try to rebuild it, we’ll have an option there as well.”

Mr. Rubio also railed against the leaks of the Defense Intelligence Agency report by “staffers” and said the F.B.I. had been asked to investigate.

The statement, however, provided official Israeli backing to President Trump in the wake of uncertainty about the result of the U.S. strikes on Fordo. The White House shared the same statement with reporters about an hour before the Israeli prime minister’s office, and Mr. Trump read most of the statement aloud at a news conference at a NATO summit in the Netherlands.

According to the commission’s statement, “the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that preliminary Israeli damage assessments had raised questions about the effectiveness of the U.S. strikes on the Fordo site, which is south of Tehran. Israeli defense officials said that they had collected evidence that the underground facilities at Fordo had not been destroyed.

The Times also reported that a classified preliminary assessment by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said that the bombings set back Iran’s nuclear program by less than six months. Officials cautioned that the report was only an initial assessment and that others would follow as more information was collected and as Iran examined the three sites. Iranian state news outlets, which tend to amplify any foreign news developments that appear to support Iranian positions, widely reported on that assessment.

On Wednesday morning, however, Israel’s military said that Iran’s nuclear program had been significantly delayed.

“The assessment is that we caused significant damage to the nuclear program,” Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, chief spokesman for the Israeli military, said in a video statement, adding, “I can also say that we pushed it back years.”

The Israeli military, General Defrin noted, was still investigating the results of its strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Mr. Netanyahu has insisted that the war sent Iran’s nuclear program “into oblivion.” And President Trump, who on Wednesday pushed back on the classified preliminary U.S. intelligence, has claimed that the American strikes “obliterated” three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, and the Natanz and Isfahan facilities.

On June 13, Israel launched a wide-scale attack on Iran, targeting the country’s nuclear facilities, nuclear scientists and senior military commanders. Iran retaliated by firing barrages of missiles at Israel.

After more than a week of war, the U.S. military joined in and attacked the three Iranian nuclear sites. On Tuesday, Israel and Iran agreed to a cease-fire.

Vivian Yee and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting to this article.

When pressed on Wednesday at the NATO summit in the Netherlands about whether the intelligence report was incorrect, Mr. Trump — who has often questioned the findings of America's own intelligence agencies — said it was “very inconclusive” and that officials at the agency “really don’t know.” There was no reason to worry about Iran rebuilding its nuclear program, he said, reiterating his claims about “obliteration.”

“It’s gone for years, years,” he said. “Very tough to rebuild because the whole thing has collapsed. In other words, inside, it’s all collapsed. Nobody can get in to see it because it’s collapsed.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose agency conducted the classified preliminary report, also questioned its accuracy, arguing that the U.S. strikes were “flawless.”

“Any assessment that tells you something otherwise is speculating with other motives, and we know that because when you actually look at the report — by the way, it was a top secret report — it was preliminary, it was low confidence,” he said at the NATO summit, adding that the Pentagon was working with the F.B.I. to conduct a leak investigation.

The report also said that much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes. Israeli officials and the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have also suggested the same.

But on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he did not believe Iran had time to move materials, including uranium, out of the facilities.

“I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out because we acted fast,” he said. “If it would have taken two weeks, maybe, but it’s very hard to remove that kind of material, very hard and very dangerous for them to remove it.”

Later in the day, the Israeli atomic energy commission said that U.S. strikes had made a key nuclear enrichment site in Iran inoperable, appearing to contradict initial private assessments by Israel that raised questions about the effectiveness of the attacks.

The office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement on behalf of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, but did not clarify how the commission had reached its conclusion about the enrichment site, the heavily fortified Fordo nuclear facility.

The statement, however, provided official Israeli backing to Mr. Trump in the wake of uncertainty about the result of the U.S. strikes on Fordo. The White House shared the same statement with reporters about an hour before the Israeli prime minister’s office, and Mr. Trump read most of the statement aloud at a news conference at a NATO summit in the Netherlands.

Hegseth said the Pentagon was working with the F.B.I. to conduct a leak investigation and blamed news organizations for “trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success.”

Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the chief spokesman of the Israeli military, said the soldiers, members of a combat engineering battalion, were killed after an explosive device was placed near them in the southern city of Khan Younis on Tuesday afternoon.

“This is a difficult and painful morning for all of the people of Israel,” he said.

General Defrin described the deaths as part of a “complex” incident that was still being investigated. He added the battalion which the soldiers belonged to has been locating and demolishing tunnels and killing militants.

The Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, posted on Telegram that its operatives had targeted Israeli forces in Khan Younis on Tuesday, but it was unclear if it was referring to the seven soldiers who were killed.

The war in Gaza began after the deadly attack on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas on Israel, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and roughly 250 others were taken hostage. The Israeli military campaign has devastated Gaza, and more than 50,000 people have been killed in the enclave, according to the Palestinian health authorities.

The deadliest day for the Israeli military since the start of the war was in January 2024, when 24 soldiers were killed, including 20 in a single explosion.

While Israel and Hamas have engaged in indirect negotiations for a new cease-fire and release of hostages, they have repeatedly failed to reach an agreement.

The talks have stalled over the permanence of a new cease-fire. Hamas has insisted on a total end to the war in Gaza, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has rejected that demand, saying the dismantling of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities must be achieved first.

Palestinians in Gaza have struggled to find food, fuel and medicines amid Israeli restrictions on the entry of goods into the territory. Israel blocked aid from entering Gaza for nearly three months earlier this year. But since mid-May, it has allowed some supplies to enter through a new Israeli-backed distribution system as well as trucks hired by the United Nations and other international organizations.

The rollout of the new mechanism, which Israeli officials contend enables Palestinians to access food without Hamas benefiting, has been marred by chaos, with scores of Palestinians killed as they approach distribution sites.

Fifty hostages abducted during Hamas October 2023 are still believed to be in Gaza. About 20 of them are thought to be living, while the rest are presumed dead, according to the Israeli authorities. The hostages remain in perilous conditions, their families have said, urging their swift and safe return.

Both Palestinian civilians and families of hostages in Israel have expressed hope that the cease-fire between Israel and Iran on Tuesday will redirect attention to the negotiations on Gaza.