President Donald Trump rejected a plan from Israel to assassinate Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, POLITICO confirmed Sunday. Israel had a window in recent days to potentially kill the Iranian leader, but the president conveyed that he was adamantly against the plan, said a U.S. official granted anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.
Reuters was the first to report on Trump nixing the plan Sunday morning.
Israel first launched what it called a “preemptive” strike on Iranian nuclear facilities early Friday morning in the Middle East, with the stated aim of destroying the country’s nuclear capacity, accompanied by specific lethal attacks on some of Iran’s top generals and nuclear scientists. The two sides continued to trade strikes Sunday.
Though clearly no fan of the ayatollah, Trump has insisted that a path still exists for Israel and Iran to resolve their issues with diplomacy.
“There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end,” he wrote on Truth Social on Friday. “Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demurred when asked to confirm the report by Fox News anchor Bret Baier on Sunday.
“There are so many false reports of conversations that never happened, and I’m not going to get into that,” he said. “But I can tell you, I think that we do what we need to do, we’ll do what we need to do, and I think the United States knows what’s good for the United States.”
But Netanyahu didn’t deny that regime change was a goal for Israel in its fight with Tehran.
“It could certainly be the result,” he told Baier. “Because the Iran regime is very weak. I think it’s basically left with two things, its plans to have atomic bombs and ballistic missiles.”
Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, also refused to rule out going after Khamenei on Sunday.
“I think it’s fair to say that nobody who’s threatening the destruction of Israel should be off the target list,” Leiter told Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.” But we’re not going to discuss specific individuals, you know, online. The idea is to neutralize and terminate the Iranian intention of destroying Israel through nuclear weapons and through ballistic missiles. And anybody who gets in the way of that, or is actually advancing that cause of destroying Israel, is obviously somebody we’re going to have to deal with.
Rachael Bade contributed to this report.
