Tehran, Iran (CNN) Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif called US President Donald Trump's decision to order the drone strike that killed the country's top military commander an act of "state terrorism" in an interview with CNN Tuesday.

Zarif said the Trump administration's decision to abandon the nuclear deal Tehran negotiated with world powers and embrace hardline policies against Iran "destroyed stability" in the Middle East, and he warned of worse to come if the US did not reverse course.

"This is an act of aggression against Iran and amounts to an armed attack against Iran, and we will respond. But we will respond proportionally not disproportionally," he said. "We will respond lawfully, we are not lawless people like President Trump."

Zarif was referring to a tweet Trump sent Saturday in which the President said that if Iran strikes any Americans or American assets, the United States has 52 Iranian sites targeted -- a reference to the number of Americans taken hostage in the 1979 revolution -- "some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture," he wrote.

Iran's top diplomat said those comments showed Trump "has no respect for international law and is prepared to commit war crimes -- attacking cultural sites is a war crime."

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