Washington:

US President Donald Trump reportedly gave a green light to the US-Israeli joint military strikes on Iran after a phone call with Israel’s premier, Benjamin Netanyahu. The fateful phone call happened less than 48 hours before the attacks began, when the Israeli leader — determined to move forward with an operation he had urged for decades — argued that there might never be a better chance to kill Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, news agency Reuters reported.

Citing sources, the report said that both Netanyahu and Trump had intelligence reports confirming that Ali Khamenei will meet his key lieutenants soon at his compound in Tehran, making all of them vulnerable to a “decapitation strike” — an attack against a country’s top leaders often used by Israelis but traditionally less so by the United States.

Both leaders got on the call when new intelligence came, suggesting the meeting in Tehran had been moved forward to Saturday morning from Saturday night, Reuters reported, quoting three people who were briefed on the call.

Trump had reportedly already approved the US military action against Iran by the time the call between Netanyahu and Trump took place, but it was yet to be decided when or under what circumstances the United States would get involved.

During the phone call, Netanyahu, who was determined to move forward, told Trump that the US and Israel might never get a better chance to kill Khamenei and “to avenge previous Iranian efforts to assassinate Trump”, the report said.

Those included a murder-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by Iran in 2024, when Trump was a candidate. The Justice Department has accused a Pakistani man of trying to recruit people in the United States in the plan, meant as retaliation for Washington’s killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ top commander, Qassem Soleimani.

Netanyahu’s War Pitch

Reuters

The US had started preparing for a possible military operation weeks before Trump’s and Netanyahu’s call by building a military presence in the Middle East. The buildup had prompted many in the Trump administration to conclude that it was only a matter of days before Trump decided to move forward. One possible date, just a few days earlier, had been scuttled because of bad weather, according to Reuters.

During his call, Netanyahu reportedly told Trump that he could make history by helping eliminate an Iranian leadership long reviled by the West and by many Iranians. The Israeli leader argued that, emboldened by US-Israeli action, Iranians might even take to the streets again and overthrow the theocratic system that had governed the country since 1979 and been a leading source of global terrorism and instability ever since.

It’s not clear how Netanyahu’s argument affected Trump as he contemplated issuing orders to strike. Still, the call amounted to the Israeli leader’s closing argument to his US counterpart, according to Reuters.

At least three people briefed on the call believe that, along with the intelligence showing a closing window to kill Iran’s leader, Netanyahu’s arguments worked as a catalyst for Trump’s final decision to order the military on February 27 to move ahead with Operation Epic Fury.

The first bombs struck Iran on Saturday morning, February 28. Trump announced that evening that Khamenei was dead.

Later, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told Reuters that the US-Israeli military operation was designed to “destroy the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile and production capacity, annihilate the Iranian regime’s Navy, end their ability to arm proxies, and guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”

Israel’s Denial

Last week, the Israeli PM denied reports claiming that it was Israel that dragged America into a conflict with Iran. Terming the reports as “fake news”, Netanyahu told reporters, ” Does anyone really think that someone can tell President Trump what to do? Come on.”

Trump has also publicly said that the decision to strike was his alone.

But the Reuters reports show that the Israeli leader might have been an effective advocate and that his framing of the decision, including the opportunity to kill an Iranian leader who allegedly had overseen efforts to kill Trump, was persuasive to Trump.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth in early March suggested that revenge was at least one motive for the operation, telling reporters, “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”

The June War

Reuters

During his election campaign in 2024, Trump publicly said he wanted to avoid war with Iran, preferring to deal with Tehran diplomatically. But the US leader reportedly began contemplating a strike after the discussions over Iran’s nuclear program failed to produce a deal last spring.

A first attack came in June, when Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and missile sites and killed several Iranian leaders. US forces later joined the attack, and when that joint operation ended after 12 days, Trump publicly revelled in the success, saying the US had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Yet months later, talks began again between the US and Israel about a second aerial attack aimed at hitting additional missile facilities and preventing Iran from gaining the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

The Israelis also wanted to kill Khamenei, a long-time, bitter geopolitical foe who had repeatedly fired missiles into Israel and supported heavily armed proxy forces encircling the nation. That included the Hamas militant group that launched the surprise attack on October 7, 2023, from Gaza, and Hezbollah, based in Lebanon.

The Israelis began to plan their attack on Iran under the assumption they would be acting alone, Defence Minister Israel Katz told Israel’s N12 News on March 5.

But during a December visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Netanyahu told the American commander-in-chief that he was not fully satisfied with the outcome of the joint operation in June, Reuters reported, citing two sources.

Trump reportedly indicated during those talks that he was open to another bombing campaign, but he also wanted to try another round of diplomatic talks.

What Pushed Trump To Attack Iran Again

As per the report, two events pushed Trump toward attacking Iran again. One was the operation on January 3 to capture Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, which resulted in no American deaths while removing from power a long-standing US foe –demonstrating the possibility that ambitious military operations could have few collateral consequences for US forces.

The other was the massive anti-government protest that erupted in Iran, prompting a vicious response by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing thousands. Trump then promised to help the protesters but did little immediately that was public.

Privately, however, cooperation intensified between the Israel Defence Forces and the US military’s Middle East command, known as CENTCOM, with joint military planning conducted during secret meetings, according to two Israeli officials speaking on condition of anonymity.

Not long after, during a February visit by Netanyahu to Washington, the Israeli leader briefed Trump on Iran’s growing ballistic missile programme, pointing out specific sites of concern. He also laid out the dangers of the ballistic missile program, including the risk that Iran might eventually gain the ability to strike the American homeland, said three people familiar with the private conversations.

The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s December and February meetings with Netanyahu.

The Final Call

By late February, many US officials and regional diplomats reportedly considered a US attack on Iran very likely to proceed, though the details remained uncertain. Trump was briefed by Pentagon and intelligence officials on the potential advantages to be gained from a successful attack, including the decimation of Iran’s missile programme, Reuters cited two people familiar with those briefings as saying.

Before the phone call between Netanyahu and Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly told a small group of top congressional leaders on February 24 that Israel was likely to attack Iran, whether or not the US participated, and Iran would then likely retaliate against US targets.

Behind Rubio’s warning was apparently an assessment by American intelligence officials that such an attack would indeed provoke counterstrikes from Iran against US diplomatic and military outposts and US Gulf allies. This prediction reportedly proved accurate.

The strikes have led to Iranian counterattacks on US military assets, the deaths of more than 2,300 Iranian civilians and at least 13 US service members, attacks on US Gulf allies, the closure of one of the world’s most vital shipping routes and a historic spike in oil prices that is already being felt by consumers in the United States and beyond.

Trump also believed that there was a chance, even if small, that the killing of Iran’s top leaders could usher in a government in Tehran that was more willing to negotiate with Washington. The possibility of regime change was one of Netanyahu’s arguments in the call shortly before Trump gave final orders to attack Iran.

That view was not held by the Central Intelligence Agency, which had assessed in the weeks prior that Khamenei would likely be replaced by an internal hardliner if he were killed, as Reuters previously reported.

Trump repeatedly called for an uprising after Khamenei was killed. With the war in its fourth week and the region engulfed in conflict, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards still patrol the nation’s streets. Millions of Iranians remain sheltered in their homes.

Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, considered even more harshly anti-American than his father, has been named the new supreme leader of Iran.