Netanyahu: Iran should dismantle nuclear program if it wants to stop campaign; Israel, US ‘fully coordinated’; attacks could lead to fall of regime

Israel is willing to call off its campaign if Iran accepts US demands to dismantle its nuclear program, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicates in an interview with Fox News.

“The issue here is stopping those things that will threaten our survival. And we’re committed to stopping them. And I think we can achieve them,” he tells host Bret Baier in a half-hour interview. “Now, if they are willing to accept President [Donald] Trump’s terms, that’s another matter.”

Otherwise, he says, “it’ll end when we remove those capacities, and we will.”

(Trump has stated that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” and “can’t have enrichment.” He also said last month that Iran’s leaders had two options as regards their nuclear facilities: “blow them up nicely [themselves] or have the US “blow them up viciously.”)

Netanyahu doesn’t specify to Fox News today that regime change in Iran is a goal of Israel’s ongoing military campaign, but says that “could certainly be the result because the Iran regime is very weak.”

Netanyahu refuses to address reports that Trump vetoed an Israeli strike on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. “There’s so many false reports of conversations that never happened, and I’m not going to get into that,” he says. “But I can tell you, I think that we do what we need to do.”

He says that Israel shared intelligence with the US that Iran was building nuclear weapons: “It was absolutely clear that they were working on a secret plan to weaponize the uranium. They were marching very quickly. They would achieve a test device and possibly an initial device within months, and certainly less than a year. That was the intel we shared with the United States.”

He also accuses Iran of developing plans to give nuclear weapons to the Houthis in Yemen.

Israel and the US are “fully coordinated,” says Netanyahu.

“I’ve been in constant contact with President Trump,” he says. “We’ve known each other for many years. And obviously, we informed our American friends and President Trump, our great friend, ahead of time. We did.”

Netanyahu calls Trump the “enemy number one” for Iran.

“He’s a decisive leader,” he says. “He never took the path that others took to try to bargain with them in a way that is weak, giving them basically a pathway to enrich uranium, which means a pathway to the bomb, padding it with billions and billions of dollars. He took up this fake agreement and basically tore it up. He killed [IRGC chief] Qassem Soleimani.”

Asked whether Israel has the capacity to take out Iranian sites deep underground, Netanyahu says, “We’ve certainly done quite a bit. We’ve destroyed the main facility in Natanz. That’s the main enrichment facility. And if we need to, we’ll add whatever is needed. But yes, we’re committed to achieving both goals. I’m not going to get into all of our objectives. I don’t want to get into specific operational plans.”

“We have quite a few startups, too, and quite a few rabbits up our sleeve,” he says.

Netanyahu says the Iranians “were completely surprised” by Israel’s operation.

“So we have a free highway to Tehran, and we can now pick off the targets that we need in Tehran and other places without having our plane shot down,” says Netanyahu.