From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
Ahead of Saturday strike, PM phoned Trump to say Khamenei would convene his top advisers that day — report
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned US President Donald Trump last Monday to inform him that Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be gathering in Tehran with his senior advisers on Saturday morning, making it possible to take them all out in one strike, according to Axios, citing sources briefed on the call.
The report, which describes the February 23 conversation as “the call that changed the Middle East,” says that Trump directed the CIA to look into the tip from Israel’s Military Intelligence, which the US spy agency confirmed.
US officials quoted by the news site says that as preparations for the strike moved ahead, Trump made a “deliberate decision” not to focus on Iran too much in his State of the Union speech the day after his call with Netanyahu, concerned Khamenei could go underground.
By Thursday — the same day as Trump’s top envoys met with Iranian negotiators in Geneva — the CIA definitively “confirmed that these people were all going to be together, and we needed to take advantage of it,” a source tells Axios.
Following the Geneva meeting, Trump was reportedly informed by his envoys that the talks were going nowhere: “If you decide you want to do diplomacy, we will push and fight to get a deal. But these guys showed us they weren’t willing to make the deal you will be satisfied with.”
The next day, after deciding that the negotiations were for naught and the intelligence on Khamenei was solid, Trump ultimately gave the order to strike.
The Axios report also cites a US official who says that the US and Israel initially planned to strike sometime in late March or early April so the administration could time to build support for the attack with Americans, but Netanyahu “agitated” to move up the assault, warning that Iranian opposition leaders in hiding risked being killed by the regime.
“We didn’t make the case in advance as well as we could have because the opportunity came on us so fast,” the official says.
The Times of Israel Community.