Donald Trump warns Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Iran as US holds talks with Tehran

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Donald Trump warns Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Iran as US holds talks with Tehran
الخميس 29 مايو, 2025

The FT.


Donald Trump has warned Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to attack Iran while Washington negotiates with Tehran over a nuclear deal, in a sign of tension between the US and its ally.

“I told him this would be inappropriate to do right now, because we are very close to a solution,” the US president told reporters on Wednesday. “Now that could change any moment . . . but right now, I think they want to make a deal, and if we can make a deal, it would save a lot of lives.”

Trump added that he believed an agreement with Iran could be reached within “the next couple of weeks” and that talks had made “a lot of progress”.

The president was speaking hours after a report in The New York Times said Netanyahu was considering a unilateral attack on Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities.

Israeli media have also reported in recent days that Trump and Netanyahu had a “heated” phone call last Thursday in which the president warned the Israeli leader against striking Iran’s facilities while the US was trying to negotiate a nuclear deal.

Trump has been signalling in recent days that an agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions could be imminent, although some US officials have played down the prospect of a breakthrough.

There are still deep divisions between Iran and the US over whether Iran should be allowed to maintain any kind of uranium-enrichment capability.

Western diplomats in Tehran said there had been no significant progress in the latest round of talks in Rome and warned a deal was still far off.

Some diplomats described the talks as a “show” staged by Iran and the US, each for its own strategic purposes.

One said that during Trump’s recent trip to the Gulf he had come under pressure from Arab states — particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE — not to carry out a strike against Iran or allow Israel to do so. “Since Trump’s visit to the region, we’ve heard fewer threats of military action,” the diplomat said.

Israel fears a deal would keep Iran’s nuclear facilities in place for years and simply be a rerun of agreement the Obama administration struck with Tehran in 2015. Netanyahu denounced that deal as a “historic mistake”. Trump pulled out of it in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran.

Israel also thinks it has a unique window of opportunity to permanently destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, having disabled large parts of the country’s strategic air defence system in October.

Its degrading of Hizbollah and Hamas, Iran’s proxies in the region, has also made it less concerned about possible military retaliation for a strike against Iran’s nuclear complex.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, has held several rounds of talks with his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, in recent weeks, facilitated by Oman’s foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi.

Araghchi has rejected western calls to stop all enrichment of nuclear material on Iranian territory. He said on X on Tuesday that if the west continued to demand zero enrichment there would be “nothing left for us to discuss on the nuclear issue”.

Additional reporting by Lauren Fedor in Washington

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