From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, March 3, 2026
Report: Israel would not have attacked Iran without Trump’s green light, Israeli official says; PM and Trump spoke 15 times in past two months
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Israel would not have attacked Iran if US President Donald Trump had not approved the joint US-Israel attacks that were launched on Saturday, a senior Israeli official tells Channel 12 news.
The comments come soon after Trump told reporters at the White House that Israel did not drag the US into the war.
“The coordination between the two countries was very deep,” the unnamed official says, according to the network. “If Trump had not given the green light, we would not have acted.”
Channel 12 reporter Barak Ravid also says that Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke some 15 times in the two months before the attacks were launched.
Briefly chronicling the lead-up to the attack, he says that Trump and Netanyahu spoke on Monday, February 23, and that Netanyahu suggested Saturday as the day to launch, because intelligence information showed that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be meeting with key colleagues in a known location that day.
Trump said he would consider this but was waiting to see if the last-ditch nuclear negotiations with Iran would remain deadlocked, according to the report.
On Thursday, the CIA confirmed the intelligence on Khamenei’s expected location, and hours later, the negotiations in Geneva indeed collapsed. Trump then decided to go ahead with the opening strikes on Saturday morning, in which Khamenei was indeed eliminated.
The Times of Israel Community.