Benjamin Netanyahu briefed Donald Trump ahead of Iran strike.
Intelligence on a possible meeting of Ali Khamenei shaped timing.
Strike framed as both strategic opportunity and retaliation angle.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called US President Donald Trump two days before launching an attack on Iran, briefing him on the reasons, Reuters reported.
The call, described by three people briefed on its contents, took place against the backdrop of a rapidly closing intelligence window. Both leaders had been told earlier that week that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his senior lieutenants were due to gather at his compound in Tehran — making them, in the clinical language of military planning, vulnerable to a decapitation strike, the report said.
2 March 2026
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Then came new intelligence: the meeting had been moved forward from Saturday night to Saturday morning. The window was narrowing by the hour.
Netanyahu, who had pressed for exactly this kind of operation for decades, argued that there might never be a better opportunity to kill Khamenei. And there was a second dimension that he knew would resonate personally with Trump: Iran had allegedly spent years trying to have the president killed.
A 2024 murder-for-hire plot, which the Justice Department attributed to Iranian orchestration, had been intended as retaliation for Washington's killing of Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani. Netanyahu framed the strike as a chance to settle that account — and, potentially, to trigger a popular uprising that might finally bring down a theocratic regime that had governed Iran since 1979 and destabilised the region ever since.
Reuters further noted that Trump already approved the concept of a military operation against Iran before the call took place, but had not yet determined the timing or the precise circumstances under which the US would act. The American military had been quietly building its presence in the region for weeks, and many within the administration had concluded that the question was not whether the president would move, but when. One prospective date had already been abandoned because of bad weather.
Netanyahu has since gone out of his way to distance himself from any suggestion that Israel drove the United States into the conflict. "Fake news," he told a news conference on Thursday, dismissing reports that Israel had dragged Washington into war.
Trump, for his part, has said publicly that the decision to strike was his and his alone.
