Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto said that he was “surprised” and did not see any “rationality” in the United States and Israel’s war on Iran, adding that plans to deploy peacekeeping troops under the Board of Peace to Gaza have been temporarily postponed amid escalating tensions in the Middle East.

“We are all confused and I am saddened, I don’t feel there’s any rationality in this (military campaign against Iran),” he said in an interview with Bloomberg on Saturday (Mar 14) that was published on Sunday.

The US and Israel launched their most ambitious attacks on Iran in decades on Feb 28, plunging the region into a new conflict as Tehran responded by launching missiles towards other countries in the Gulf.

Iran had claimed that it had “ample evidence” that US bases in their territory were being used to launch attacks.

Prabowo had described the US-Israel military campaign as an “asymmetrical war” in which Iran may “just have to survive”.

The Indonesian president told Bloomberg that Iranian officials were wary of entering into negotiations with the US to end the conflict.

“Twice, twice, they felt that basically they had been tricked. That’s what they said,” said Prabowo.

He also raised concerns about whether the US strategy of bombing Iran could lead to a regime change.

“It’s very difficult to conduct these operations just purely from the air,” Prabowo said, adding that it would take “indiscriminate bombing” to achieve such a goal.

The military campaign has killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who had led the country since 1989. In his place, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late supreme leader, was then appointed to succeed his father as the new head of the Islamic Republic.