Less than 48 hours before the US-Israeli strikes on Iran were to begin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone with President Donald Trump about the reasons for launching the kind of complex, far-reaching war the US leader once campaigned against. Both Trump and Netanyahu knew from intelligence briefings earlier in the week that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his key lieutenants would soon meet at his compound in Tehran, leaving them vulnerable to an “assassination strike” — an attack against the country’s top leaders that is often used by Israelis but traditionally played down by the United States.
But new intelligence revealed that the meeting had been extended from Saturday night to Saturday morning, according to three people briefed on the call.
The call was not reported earlier.
Netanyahu, these people said, is determined to move forward with the operation he has urged for decades, arguing that there may never be a better opportunity to kill Khamenei and avenge previous Iranian attempts to assassinate Trump. These included an assassination-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by Iran in 2024, when Trump was a candidate.
The Justice Department has charged a Pakistani man with trying to recruit people to the United States in the scheme, which was intended as retaliation for Washington’s killing of top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani.
The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said that by the time the call took place, Trump had already approved the idea of ​​the United States launching a military operation against Iran, but had not yet decided when and under what circumstances the United States would get involved.
The US military has built up a presence in the region for several weeks, leading many within the administration to conclude that it simply depends on when the President will decide to move forward. A tentative date, just a few days earlier, was postponed due to bad weather.
Reuters was unable to determine how Netanyahu’s argument influenced Trump as he considered issuing the strike order, but the call was similar to the Israeli leader’s closing argument to his American counterpart. Three sources briefed on the call said they believed that — along with intelligence showing a closed window to kill Iran’s leader — was a catalyst for Trump’s ultimate decision to order the military to proceed with Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 27. Netanyahu argued that Trump could make history by helping topple the Iranian leadership long condemned by the West and many Iranians. Iranians could also take to the streets, he said, to overthrow the democratic system that has ruled the country since 1979 and has been a major source of global terrorism and instability ever since.
The first bomb was hit on Saturday morning, 28 February. Trump announced that evening that Khamenei was dead.
In response to a request for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly did not directly address the conversation between Trump and Netanyahu, but told Reuters the military operation was designed to “destroy the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile and production capability, destroy the Iranian regime’s navy, eliminate their ability to arm proxies, and guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”
Neither Netanyahu’s office nor Iran’s UN representative responded to requests for comment.
Netanyahu dismissed the claims as “fake news” at a press conference on Thursday, saying that “Israel somehow dragged the US into a conflict with Iran. Does anyone really think someone can tell President Trump what to do? Come on.”
Trump has publicly said that the decision to attack was his sole decision.
The Reuters report, in which officials and others close to both leaders spoke mostly on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of internal deliberations, does not suggest Netanyahu forced Trump to go to war. But reporting shows that the Israeli leader was an effective lawyer and that his decision making — which included the opportunity to kill an Iranian leader who allegedly oversaw efforts to kill Trump — was persuasive for the president.
In early March Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested that revenge was at least one motive for the operation, telling reporters, “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”
Attack on targeted nuclear, missile sites in June
Trump ran his campaign in 2024 based on his first administration’s foreign policy of “America First” and publicly stated that he wanted to avoid war with Iran, preferring to deal with Tehran diplomatically.
But when discussions over Iran’s nuclear program failed to reach an agreement last spring, Trump began considering a strike, according to three people familiar with White House deliberations. The first attack came in June, when Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and missile sites and killed several Iranian leaders. US forces later joined the attack, and when that joint operation ended after 12 days, Trump publicly celebrated the success and said the US had “destroyed” Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Yet months later, talks resumed between the US and Israel about a second airstrike aimed at targeting additional missile facilities and preventing Iran from gaining the capability to produce nuclear weapons.
The Israelis also wanted to kill Khamenei, a longtime bitter geopolitical foe who had repeatedly fired missiles at Israel and supported heavily armed proxy forces besieging the country. This included the Hamas terrorist group and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which launched a surprise attack from Gaza on October 7, 2023.
Defense Minister Israel Katz told Israel’s N12 News on March 5 that the Israelis began planning attacks on Iran under the assumption that they would act alone. But during a visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in December, Netanyahu told Trump he was not entirely satisfied with the outcome of the joint operation in June, two people familiar with relations between the two leaders said on condition of anonymity.
Trump signaled he is prepared for another bombing campaign, but he also wants to try another round of diplomatic talks, the people said.
According to several American and Israeli officials and diplomats, the two incidents prompted Trump to attack Iran again.
The January 3 U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas – which resulted in no American deaths while removing a longtime U.S. foe from power – demonstrated the possibility that ambitious military operations may have some additional consequences for U.S. forces.
Later that month, massive anti-government protests broke out in Iran, leading to a brutal response by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing thousands. Trump vowed to help the protesters but did nothing immediately which became public. Privately, however, cooperation with joint military planning intensified during secret meetings between the Israeli Defense Forces and the U.S. military’s Middle East Command, known as CENTCOM, according to two Israeli officials speaking on condition of anonymity.
Shortly afterward, during Netanyahu’s February visit to Washington, the Israeli leader briefed Trump on Iran’s growing ballistic missile program, pointing to specific sites of concern. He also spoke about the dangers of the ballistic missile program, including the risk that Iran could eventually gain the ability to attack the U.S. homeland, three people familiar with the private conversations said.
The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s December and February meetings with Netanyahu.
Trump’s chance in history
By late February, many US officials and regional diplomats believed a US attack on Iran was very likely, although details remained uncertain, according to two other US officials, an Israeli official and two additional officials familiar with the matter.
Trump was briefed by Pentagon and intelligence officials about the potential benefits to be gained from a successful attack, including destroying Iran’s missile program, according to two people familiar with those briefings.
Before the phone call between Netanyahu and Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a small group of top congressional leaders on February 24 that Israel was likely to attack Iran, whether or not the US participated, and that Iran would retaliate against US targets, according to three people briefed on the meeting.
Behind Rubio’s warning was an assessment by U.S. intelligence officials that such an attack would actually provoke Iran’s retaliatory attacks against U.S. diplomatic and military posts and U.S. Gulf allies, said three sources familiar with U.S. intelligence reports.
This prediction proved to be accurate. The attacks led to Iranian retaliatory attacks on U.S. military assets, the deaths of more than 2,300 Iranian civilians and at least 13 U.S. service members, attacks on U.S. Gulf allies, the closure of one of the world’s most vital shipping routes, and a historic increase in oil prices, which is already being felt by consumers in the United States and beyond.
Two other people familiar with Rubio’s briefing said Trump was also told there was a chance, albeit small, that the killing of Iran’s top leaders could lead to a government in Tehran that is more willing to negotiate with Washington.
One of Netanyahu’s arguments in the call shortly before Trump gave the final order to attack Iran was the possibility of regime change, the people briefed on the matter said.
This view was not held by the Central Intelligence Agency, which had assessed weeks earlier that Khamenei, if assassinated, would likely be replaced by an internal hardliner, as Reuters previously reported.
The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump repeatedly called for an uprising after Khamenei was killed. The war is in its fourth week and the region remains engulfed in conflict, with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards still patrolling the country’s streets. Millions of Iranians are taking shelter in their homes.
Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, who is considered an even more staunch anti-American than his father, has been named Iran’s new supreme leader. (Reporting by Erin Banko and Gram Slattery; Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; Editing by Craig Timberg, Don Durfee and Daniel Wallis)
