Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain did not come up in Netanyahu-Trump meeting, says Israel’s public diplomacy chief

The issue of Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site did not come up in the meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump, says National Public Diplomacy Directorate head Tzipi Hotovely.

“The idea that we have some intelligence here is a sort of fake news that ran throughout the day,” she tells Israeli reporters. “We know how to work in close cooperation with the US intelligence through our channels. We don’t need this meeting to bring intelligence.”

During a Fox News interview shortly before his meeting with Netanyahu, Trump said US had intelligence on the site and “I don’t need Bibi” to tell him about it, appearing to express irritation with Netanyahu.

On the Iran threat, “there was a deep understanding in the meeting that we are striving for the same goal,” says Hotovely, who was not present during the Trump-Netanyahu Oval Office meeting but was briefed afterward by Netanyahu.

She stresses that “there is no truth to the claim that Israel is pushing the US toward some point.”

“The prime minister’s goal was to deepen coordination, but not to push the president to take one action or another,” Hotovely says. “We do not tell the president of the United States what to do.”

“There are many, many ways to reach this goal” of preventing Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon, she argues.

During the meeting, Netanyahu told Trump that the late senator Lindsey Graham was Israel’s “number one friend,” only to have the president correct him and say, “I am Israel’s number one friend. Lindsey was number 2.”

There was no pressure from Trump in the meeting for Israel to move forward with the reconstruction of Gaza, nor was there pressure to withdraw IDF forces from Syria or Lebanon, Hotovely claims.

“There is more or less an understanding of where we are on the Gaza issue,” she says. “And of course the most important thing to say on the Gaza issue is that reconstruction will not begin before full demilitarization.”

The possibility of Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords did come up in the meeting. At the same time, Jewish violence against Palestinians in the West Bank did not come up, Hotovely says.