US PRESIDENT DONALD Trump has threatened that the entirety of Iran could be “taken out” on Tuesday as the country has rejected the US ceasefire proposal.

Speaking at a news conference today, he said “the entire country could be taken out in one night and that night might be tomorrow night”.

Tomorrow is the deadline that the president set for Iran to re-open the key Strait of Hormuz waterway.

Earlier today Iran rejected the latest US proposal for a ceasefire. “We won’t merely accept a ceasefire,” Mojtaba Ferdousi Pour, head of the Iranian diplomatic mission in Cairo, told The Associated Press. 

“We only accept an end of the war with guarantees that we won’t be attacked again.”

Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency said Tehran had conveyed its response through mediator state Pakistan.

This response came after Israel struck a petrochemical plant in the massive South Pars natural gas field and killed two paramilitary Revolutionary Guard commanders.

The gas field attack aimed at eliminating a major source of revenue for Iran, Israel said. The field is critical to electricity production, but the strike appeared to be separate from Trump’s threats.

The gas field shared with Qatar is the world’s largest.

Also today, Trump threatened an unspecified media outlet with jail time if it does not reveal the person who leaked information about a US military pilot who was missing in Iran.

“We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail,’” Trump told a news conference.

The president said yesterday that the pilot officer had been rescued and was “SAFE and SOUND”.

“The so-called US military rescue operation, planned as a deception and escape mission at an abandoned airport in southern Isfahan under the pretext of recovering the pilot of a downed aircraft, was completely foiled,” said Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesman for the military’s central command, Khatam Al-Anbiya.

Iran later contradicted this claim saying the mission was “completely foiled”.

With reporting from AFP and Press Association.