(The Epoch Times)—U.S. President Donald Trump’s ultimatum for Iran to agree to a peace deal is set to expire on April 6, and with talks appearing to show no meaningful progress, the risk of a sharp escalation in the war looms large.
Senior Israeli officials told Epoch Magazine Israel on April 3 that talks between Washington and Tehran—being conducted indirectly through Pakistan’s army chief—have so far faltered and have not produced any meaningful breakthrough.
According to those sources, if no agreement is reached before the deadline, Trump may order a significant escalation in the fighting.
Trump has in recent days intensified his warnings to Iran, threatening to expand strikes on Tehran’s critical infrastructure, including bridges and electric power facilities.
“Our Military … hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” Trump wrote in an April 3 post on Truth Social.
The warning followed a U.S. strike on a major bridge near Tehran, identified by a U.S. official as the B1 Bridge connecting the capital to Karaj.
The official said the objective was to disrupt a key military supply route used to sustain Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capabilities.
Trump shared footage of the strike online, writing that more attacks could follow unless Iran agrees to a deal.
“The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again—Much more to follow!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
“It is time for Iran to make a deal before it is too late, and there is nothing left of what still could become a great country!” he added in all-caps.
The escalation in targeting signals a potential shift in the campaign toward degrading Iran’s infrastructure more broadly, a move that could deepen the humanitarian and economic toll of the war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on April 3 that Israel’s operations are being carried out in close coordination with Washington and have already significantly degraded Iran’s industrial base.
“In full coordination between President Trump and me, we will continue to pound Iran. This regime is weaker than ever,” Netanyahu said.
He added that Israeli airstrikes have destroyed roughly 70 percent of Iran’s steel production capacity in recent days, calling it a “tremendous achievement” that limits the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ access to funding and its ability to manufacture weapons.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi condemned the strike as an attack on civilian infrastructure, saying it would be ineffective at forcing Tehran’s surrender and would instead tarnish Washington’s image.
“Every bridge and building will be built back stronger,” Araghchi wrote in an April 2 post on X. “What will never recover: damage to America’s standing.”
Iranian state media reported that at least two civilians were killed in the bridge strike, with several others injured. Separate reports said strikes had also hit health care infrastructure in Tehran and beyond.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Ghebreyesus said in a post on X that recent attacks have damaged medical facilities in Tehran and elsewhere in the country, including the Pasteur Institute, a medical research center, with more than 20 verified attacks on health care infrastructure since March 1, leaving at least nine dead.
“The Delaram Sina Psychiatric Hospital sustained significant damage due to a strike on 29 March, and the Tofigh Daru pharmaceutical facility, which produced medicines for treating cancer and multiple sclerosis, was damaged in another attack on 31 March,” he added.
“The conflict in Iran, and the region, is impacting the delivery of health services and the safety of health workers, patients, and civilians present at health facilities. Peace is the best medicine.”
Diplomacy Through Pakistan Faces Uncertainty
Even as military pressure mounts, Washington has continued to signal that diplomacy remains possible.
Trump has said that peace talks have been ongoing—both direct and indirect—while Iranian officials have dismissed that characterization, saying that only preliminary exchanges of messages are taking place and that this does not amount to actual negotiations.
Pakistan said on April 2 that it is prepared to host talks between the United States and Iran, positioning itself as a key intermediary in efforts to de-escalate the conflict.
A spokesperson for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said both sides had expressed confidence in Islamabad’s role, though no timeline has been set and any negotiations would depend on when Washington and Tehran are ready to engage.
U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff has confirmed that a 15-point framework for a potential cease-fire has been conveyed to Iran through Pakistani mediation, describing the exchanges as constructive.
Witkoff said during a recent Cabinet meeting that Iran is “looking for an off-ramp” following Trump’s threats to escalate strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure.
Iranian officials have publicly rejected the notion that formal negotiations are underway.
Araghchi said in a recent interview that Tehran is receiving messages—some direct and others via intermediaries—but does not consider this a negotiation process. He added that Iran has not formally responded to the U.S. proposal and continues to demand a full end to hostilities, guarantees against future attacks, and compensation for damages.
Israeli officials told Epoch Magazine Israel that Washington has privately urged restraint in certain areas. According to those sources, the United States has asked Israel to refrain from targeting key Iranian figures, including Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and Araghchi, in order to preserve the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough.
The requests suggest that while Washington is escalating military pressure, it is also seeking to avoid actions that could derail backchannel contacts or foreclose a negotiated settlement.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
