Netanyahu denies report that Israel pushed US into joining campaign against Iran

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denies that Israel pushed the United States into joining its campaign against Iran, dismissing a report by the Washington Post yesterday that claimed otherwise as “nonsense.”

“The Washington Post story suggesting that Israel pushed President Trump into his bold decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites is nonsense,” writes the official account of the premier on X, adding that Trump “acted in the best interest of the USA based on the same intel we had. We are grateful to President Trump for his decisive leadership and for being a tremendous friend to Israel!”

Current and former Israeli officials told the Post that Netanyahu had issued a general order to prepare for the Iran strikes months before Trump announced that the US and Iran had agreed to hold negotiations on the latter’s nuclear program.

As part of the ongoing preparation, which began in the last year of former US President Joe Biden’s term in office, Israeli officials met with US counterparts in Washington to sway the US into joining the attack, believing this would make it a much more decisive operation, the report said.

Throughout the fall, Israelis met with Biden officials to discuss recent intelligence from both countries that showed nuclear scientists in Iran were meeting to resume theoretical research on weaponization.

However, US intelligence agencies during both the Biden and Trump administrations consistently assessed that Iran’s leadership had not decided to pursue nuclear weapons, multiple sources say in the report.

After the US joined the offensive earlier this week, Channel 12 reported that Trump’s decision came following appeals from Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who urged the president to “take part in history” by annihilating the Iranian nuclear threat.