United States President Donald Trump has said renewed fighting with Iran is “highly unlikely”, ahead of a meeting with Qatar’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, at the White House on Monday.

Trump, however, warned that the possibility of fresh military action would depend on whether Tehran agreed to what he described as a very strong deal.

In an interview with CNN on Sunday, the president said he was prepared to resume strikes if necessary but maintained that the US had already inflicted significant damage on Iran.

“I would if necessary, but we hit them really hard. I hit them so hard. You don’t know how hard I hit them,” he said.

Trump had threatened to resume military strikes in recent weeks, while reports in US media suggested that hostilities could restart after last Tuesday’s midterm elections.

The meeting with Sheikh Mohammed, who also serves as Qatar’s foreign minister, will be Trump’s first engagement with a foreign leader since the Republican Party suffered a major midterm defeat and lost control of Congress.

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi suggested on Sunday that diplomatic efforts to end the conflict had been paused as regional mediators assessed the political implications of the US election results.

“For the past few days, there has been no more travel (by mediators), and the reason for this is the shock that the election results in the United States have caused to everyone,” Araghchi told Iranian state television.

“We now have to see how long it will take for them to digest these results, in order to determine how we are going to move forward,” he added.

Trump has acknowledged that the unpopular war with Iran, which began with US-Israeli strikes in late February, contributed to the Republican Party’s electoral setback.

Araghchi also argued that the American public was opposed to the conflict and Israel’s influence on US foreign policy.

“Americans are evidently sick and tired of Israel bamboozling US administrations into Forever Wars,” he wrote on X. “They had enough. So has our region.”

During the CNN interview, Trump again suggested that Iran’s economic difficulties would force its leadership to accept Washington’s demands.

“They’re a failing nation. It just came out, you saw this year, 301 per cent inflation,” Trump claimed. “They’re withering away financially. We’ve hit them militarily. We could finish them off.”

However, Iran’s official figures put year-on-year inflation at nearly 90 per cent in September.

Meanwhile, Iranian state television reported that the island of Qeshm in the Strait of Hormuz came under attack overnight on Sunday, hours after the official IRNA news agency reported two explosions on the island.

Regional powers, including Qatar and Pakistan, have made repeated efforts to secure a lasting end to the conflict, but their mediation efforts have yet to produce a definitive agreement.

Although large-scale fighting has largely subsided, tensions remain high, with Iran continuing efforts to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, a vital route for global energy supplies, while the US Navy maintains a counterblockade of Iranian ports.