President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he’d personally asked Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to conduct airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities because such attacks could negatively affect ongoing talks with Tehran on a new deal to restrict the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program.
Asked after the Oval Office swearing in of new interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to confirm reports that he’d intervened during a phone call with the Israeli leader last week, Trump replied: “Well, I’d like to be honest. Yes, I did.”
Pressed further on what he told Netanyahu, he said he did not think it was “appropriate” for Israel to strike Iran while the talks are ongoing.
“We’re having very good discussions with them. And I said, I don’t think it’s appropriate right now, because if we can settle it with a very strong document,” he said, adding that any agreement would be “very strong with inspections”.
Trump also said he doesn’t trust the Iranians but stressed that the agreement wouldn’t require trust because it would rely on verification by inspectors.
“I want it very strong, where we can go in with inspectors. We can take whatever we want, we can blow up whatever we want, but nobody getting killed. We can blow up a lab, but nobody’s going to be in the lab, as opposed to everybody being in the lab and blowing it up,” he continued.
The president added that he’d waved Netanyahu off an attack “because we’re very close to a solution now”.
“I think they want to make a deal, and if we can make a deal, save a lot of lives,” he said.
The president’s remarks, which came during a media session following a swearing-in ceremony for interim District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, followed a round of talks between American and Iranian representatives under mediation by the government of Oman.
After the most recent set of negotiations over the weekend, Trump told reporters traveling with him in New Jersey that U.S. officials had had “some very, very good talks” with their Iranian counterparts.
He repeated his assessment in the Oval Office on Wednesday, telling members of the White House press corps that the U.S. was “doing very well with Iran”.
“I think we’re going to see some, some, something very sensible, because there [are] only two outcomes … a smart outcome and there’s a violent outcome,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody wants to see the second but I think we’ve made a lot of progress, and we’ll see. You know, they still have to agree to the final stages of a document, but I think you could be very well surprised what happens there, and it would be a great thing for them.”
