US president Donald Trump vetoed an Israeli plan in recent days to kill Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, two US officials told Reuters on Sunday.

The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said top US officials have been in constant communications with Israeli officials in the days since Israel launched a massive attack on Iran in a bid to halt its nuclear programme.

They said the Israelis reported that they had an opportunity to kill the top Iranian leader, but Mr Trump waved them off of the plan.

When asked about the Reuters report, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, told Fox News: “There’s so many false reports of conversations that never happened, and I’m not going to get into that.”

“But I can tell you, I think that we do what we need to do, we’ll do what we need to do. And I think the United States knows what is good for the United States,” Mr Netanyahu said.

Meanwhile, Iran has launched a fresh wave of ballistic missiles towards Israel, Iran’s state media said on Sunday. The sound of explosions was reported in the Tel Aviv area.

Iranian media also reported an Israeli strike hit the Tehran police headquarters in the city centre on Sunday.

Earlier on Sunday, Israel said it had struck a nuclear facility in Iran’s Isfahan.

Mr Trump claimed in a social media post that Iran and Israel will have peace “soon”. He added that there were many unspecified meetings happening and that the two countries should make a deal.

Israel and Iran exchanged another round of air strikes late on Saturday and into Sunday, with at least 10 people killed in Israel.

Iranian missiles penetrated air defences in the north and centre of Israel as well as hitting a science institute near Tel Aviv.

This wave of Iranian attacks began shortly after 11pm on Saturday, when air raid sirens blared in Jerusalem and Haifa.

Israeli authorities have raised the confirmed death toll at Bat Yam to six, with about 180 injured.

The city south of Tel Aviv was hit in a second wave of strikes during the night.

It brings the number of fatalities from Iran’s missile strikes on Israel to 10.

In Iran, Shahran oil depot in Tehran was targeted and set ablaze in an Israeli attack, Iran said, but it added that the situation was under control.

Israeli strikes also targeted Iran‘s defence ministry building, causing minor damage, the semi-official Tasnim news agency said on Sunday.

Iran has said 78 people were killed there on Friday, the first day of Israel’s shock attack, and scores more on the second, including 60 when a missile brought down a 14-storey apartment block in Tehran, where 29 of the dead were children.

Mr Netanyahu said on Saturday that Israel’s strikes have set Iran’s nuclear programme back, possibly by years, and that heavier blows were yet to come.

“We will hit every site and every target of the Ayatollahs’ regime and what they have felt so far is nothing compared with what they will be handed in the coming days,” he said in a video message.

Hours after presiding over a military parade in Washington DC, Mr Trump threatened that if Iran attacked the United States in any way, it would face the might of the US military “at levels never seen before”.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, the US president

wrote: “The US had nothing to do with the attack on Iran, tonight. If we are attacked in any way, shape or form by Iran, the full strength and might of the US Armed Forces will come down on you at levels never seen before. However, we can easily get a deal done between Iran and Israel, and end this bloody conflict!!!”

Amid the continued conflict, planned negotiations between Iran and the US over Tehran’s nuclear programme were cancelled, throwing into question when and how an end to the fighting could come.

World leaders made urgent calls to de-escalate and avoid all-out war.

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis said on Sunday that they targeted Israel in co-ordination with Iran, the first time an Iran-aligned group has publicly announced joint attacks with Tehran.

The Yemeni group targeted central Israel’s Jaffa with several ballistic missiles in the last 24 hours, a military spokesman said in a televised address.

The region is already on edge as Israel makes a new push to eliminate the Iranian-backed militant group Hamas in Gaza after 20 months of fighting.

Israel – widely believed to be the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East – said its hundreds of strikes on Iran over the past two days have killed a number of top generals, nine senior scientists and experts involved in Iran’s nuclear programme. – Agencies