Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei would end the conflict between the two nations. He defended Israel’s ongoing military actions against Iran, saying it is aimed at ending the conflict rather than escalating it.
“It’s not going to escalate the conflict, it’s going to end the conflict,” Netanyahu told ABC News in an interview when asked about reports that US President Donald Trump vetoed an Israeli plan to kill the supreme leader out of concern it would intensify the Iran-Israel showdown.
His remarks came after US President Donald Trump vetoed an Israeli plan to target Iran’s Supreme Leader, fearing it could worsen the conflict. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, has ruled in the face of sanctions, near constant international tensions as well as protests that were ruthlessly repressed, most recently the 2022-2023 women-led uprising.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Iran’s Islamic regime had pinpointed US President Donald Trump as a threat to its nuclear program and has been trying to assassinate him. Notably, assassination attempts were made on Trump twice last year while he was campaigning for the Presidential elections.
Asked whether he had any intel that the assassination attempts on Trump were directly from Iran, Netanyahu said, “Through proxies, yes, through their intel, yes, they want to kill him.” “They want to kill him. He’s enemy number one,” Netanyahu said, as quoted by Fox News. Netanyahu calls himself Trump’s ‘junior partner’. “He’s a decisive leader. He never took the path that others took to try to bargain with them weakly, giving them basically a pathway to enrich uranium, which means a pathway to the bomb, padding it with billions and billions of dollars,” he said. “He took up this fake agreement and basically tore it up. He killed Qasem Soleimani. He made it very clear, including now, ‘You cannot have a nuclear weapon, which means you cannot enrich uranium.’ He’s been very forceful, so for them, he’s enemy number one,” Fox News quoted Netanyahu as saying. Netanyahu said that he was also a target of the regime after a missile was fired into the bedroom window of his home. He went on to call himself Trump’s “junior partner” in threatening Iran’s ability to weaponise nuclear arms.
Netanyahu said that Israel is facing an imminent and dual existential threat. “One, the threat of Iran rushing to weaponise their enriched uranium to make atomic bombs with a specific and declared intent to destroy us. Second, a rush to increase their ballistic missile arsenal to a capacity of 3,600 weapons a year…. Within three years, 10,000 ballistic missiles, each weighing a ton, coming in at Mach 6, right into our cities, as you saw today… and then in 26 years, 20,000 [missiles]. No country can sustain that, and certainly not a country the size of Israel, so we had to act.”
Iran has since retaliated with a large-scale ballistic missile attack on Israeli cities, although many of the projectiles were thwarted.
Netanyahu said he believes Israel’s offensive measures have set back the Iranian nuclear program “quite a bit,” sharing his belief that negotiations with the terrorism-sponsoring regime were clearly “going nowhere.” He also said his country is prepared to do whatever is necessary to eliminate the nuclear and ballistic missile threat Iran poses to the world. Netanyahu described the operation, coined as Operation Rising Lion, as “one of the greatest military operations in history.” Addressing the Iranian people, he said they had been oppressed for 50 years by the same Islamic regime that has long threatened to destroy the State of Israel, as per Fox News.
