US Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that Iran talks are making good progress but Washington was "locked and loaded" to restart military operations if there is no deal.

Vance's comments came hours after President Donald Trump said he had come within an hour of ordering fresh strikes and gave Tehran "two or three days" to reach an agreement.

"A lot of good progress is being made, but we're just going to keep on working at it, and eventually we'll either hit a deal or we won't," Vance told a briefing at the White House.

A top commander of US forces in the Middle East avoided taking responsibility Tuesday for an attack on a school in Iran that left 155 people dead on day one of the war, insisting a "complex" probe continues.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), told a congressional oversight panel that "the school itself is located on an active IRGC cruise missile base," making the investigation "more complex than the average strike." IRGC stands for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

A drone strike on a crowded market in southern Sudan killed 28 people and injured 23 more on Tuesday, a medical source and witnesses told AFP, in one of the deadliest recent attacks on civilians in the country's three-year war.

The strike hit the town of Ghubaysh in West Kordofan, an area controlled by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) whose conflict with the Sudanese military has devastated much of the country since April 2023.

The wounded and the dead were taken to the town's hospital, the medical source said.

Iraqi forces swept the country's desert areas after being placed on high alert following reports that Israeli troops had operated inside the country during the Middle East war.

Early in the war, which was ignited by joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on February 28, foreign troops were detected in the Najaf desert in the country's southwest.

Security officials and witnesses told AFP that a shepherd, who was the first to spot the troops, was killed when a helicopter struck his pickup.

Israel's far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said Tuesday that the International Criminal Court prosecutor has requested an arrest warrant against him, accusing the Palestinian Authority of pushing for the move.

Smotrich said he would retaliate by ordering the evacuation of the Palestinian Bedouin community of Khan al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank.

President Donald Trump warned Tuesday that the United States may strike Iran again -- a day after he said he had held off a major assault in hopes of a peace deal -- but Tehran's army threatened to open "new fronts" if he went ahead.

Trump told reporters at the White House that he had been just "an hour away" from relaunching Washington's attacks on Iran before postponing the order, after weeks of a fragile ceasefire and talks to end the war, which began on February 28.

Iranian authorities held mass public weddings in Tehran for couples who signed up to a state-sponsored scheme declaring their readiness to sacrifice their lives in the war against the US and Israel.

The ceremonies conducted late on Monday involved hundreds of couples in several major squares in the capital, including more than 100 in the vast Imam Hossein square in central Tehran, according to reports in Iranian media.

Gathered around a Revolutionary Guard in central Tehran, an audience of Iranians is learning to use an AK-47 assault rifle, in case it falls to them to defend the country from renewed US attacks.

For nearly half an hour, the soldier demonstrates different types of ammunition and how to assemble and disassemble the Kalashnikov using illustrated boards set up behind him on Haft-e Tir Square.

A former Libyan prison boss was described as a "notorious torturer" known as the "Angel of Death" who raped, murdered and abused detainees, the International Criminal Court heard on Tuesday.

The ICC was kicking off three days of hearings against Khaled Mohamed Ali El Hishri, 47, suspected of 17 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes allegedly committed at Mitiga prison near Tripoli between February 2015 and early 2020.

Oil prices eased and stocks wavered on Tuesday, with investors tracking a potential deal between the United States and Iran and rising bond yields sounding the alarm on interest rate expectations.

The yield on 30-year US Treasury bonds hit its highest level since during the global financial crisis 19 years ago, hitting as high as 5.19 percent during the session, compared to around 4.6 percent before the US-Israel war on Iran began in February.

The move indicated growing market unease over inflation, energy prices and fiscal worries.