BEERSHEBA, Israel — Israel and Iran exchanged more attacks on Thursday as President Donald Trump said he would make up his mind within two weeks on whether the U.S. military will get directly involved in the conflict, seeking to keep open the door to diplomacy on Tehran’s nuclear program.

“Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, reading out Trump’s statement.

Trump has been weighing whether to attack Iran by striking its well-defended Fordo uranium enrichment facility, which is buried deep inside a mountain and widely considered to be out of reach of all but America’s “bunker-buster” bombs.

Earlier in the day, Israel’s defense minister threatened Iran’s supreme leader after Iranian missiles crashed into a major hospital in southern Israel and hit residential buildings near Tel Aviv, wounding at least 240 people.

As rescuers wheeled patients out of the smoldering hospital, Israeli warplanes launched their latest attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz blamed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for Thursday’s barrage and said the military “has been instructed and knows that in order to achieve all of its goals, this man absolutely should not continue to exist.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he trusted that Trump would “do what’s best for America.”

The open conflict between Israel and Iran erupted last Friday with a surprise wave of Israeli airstrikes targeting nuclear and military sites, top generals and nuclear scientists. At least 639 people, including 263 civilians, have been killed in Iran and more than 1,300 wounded, according to a Washington-based Iranian human rights group.

Iran has retaliated by firing hundreds of missiles and drones, killing at least 24 people in Israel and wounding hundreds.

At least 240 people were wounded by the latest Iranian attack on Israel, including 80 patients and medical workers wounded in the strike on the Soroka Medical Center.

The vast majority were lightly wounded, as much of the hospital building had been evacuated in recent days.

Israel’s Home Front Command said that one of the Iranian ballistic missiles fired Thursday morning had been rigged with fragmenting cluster munitions. Rather than a conventional warhead, a cluster munition warhead carries dozens of submunitions that can explode on impact, showering small bomblets around a large area and posing major safety risks on the ground. The Israeli military did not say where that missile had been fired.

Iranian officials insisted that they had not sought to strike the hospital and claimed the attack hit a facility belonging to the Israeli military’s elite technological unit, called C4i. The website for the Gav-Yam Negev advanced technologies park, some 2 miles from the hospital, said C4i had a branch campus in the area.

The Israeli army did not respond to a request for comment. An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, acknowledged that there was no specific intelligence that Iran had planned to target the hospital.

Many hospitals in Israel, including Soroka, had activated emergency plans in the past week. They converted parking garages to wards and transferred vulnerable patients underground.

Israel also has a fortified, subterranean blood bank that kicked into action after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.

The hospital, which serves around 1 million residents of Israel’s south, had been caring for 700 patients at the time of the attack. After the strike, the hospital closed to all patients except for life-threatening cases.

Iran has long maintained its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. But it is the only non-nuclear-weapon state to enrich uranium up to 60%, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.

Israel is widely believed to be the only country with a nuclear weapons program in the Middle East, but it has never acknowledged the existence of its arsenal.

In the last few days, the Israeli air campaign has targeted Iran’s enrichment site at Natanz, centrifuge workshops around Tehran, a nuclear site in Isfahan and what the army assesses to be most of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers. The destruction of those launchers has contributed to the steady decline in Iranian attacks since the start of the conflict.

In announcing that he would take up to two more weeks to decide whether to strike Iran, Trump opened up diplomatic options with the apparent hope Iran would make concessions after suffering major military losses.

Already, a new diplomatic initiative seemed to be underway as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi prepared to travel to Geneva for meetings Friday with the European Union’s top diplomat, and with his counterparts from the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

But at least publicly, Iran has struck a hard line.

Khamenei on Wednesday rejected U.S. calls for surrender and warned that any American military involvement by the Americans would cause “irreparable damage to them.”