In its largest military action against Iran to date, Israel’s strikes hit about 100 targets including nuclear facilities and military command centres, and killed the armed forces’ chief, top nuclear scientists and other senior figures.
“We are fairly close to a pretty good agreement,“ Trump told reporters on Thursday, hours before news broke of the Israeli attacks.
But on Friday, Trump seemed unbothered by Israel’s action, and on his Truth Social platform urged Iran to make a deal.
Timing ‘makes sense’
“I doubt Israel would do this if the US told it not to,“ Menachem Merhavy, an Iran expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told AFP.
Netanyahu said he had “ordered” the attack on Iran’s nuclear programme months ago.
But his obsession with Iran goes back much further than the ongoing Gaza war, sparked by an unprecedented attack by Tehran-backed Palestinian group Hamas.
He said at the time Israel “must do everything” to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, even if it meant striking the country’s nuclear facilities as Israel had in Iraq in 1981.
Netanyahu called the UN Security Council’s 2015 approval of an agreement with world powers lifting sanctions in exchange for curbs on Iran’s nuclear activities a “historic mistake”.
Iran’s reaction was to gradually abandon its commitments, enriching uranium to levels close to weapons-grade material and in unprecedented quantities.
‘Reshape the Middle East’
Since the start of the Gaza war, Netanyahu has said on several occasions he was seeking to “reshape the Middle East”.
The fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, another Iranian ally, helped cement the regional dominance of Israel -- the Middle East’s only, if undeclared, nuclear power.
In February, Netanyahu told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that with the Trump administration’s support “I have no doubt that we can and will finish the job”.
“Trump really thinks that as long as Iran is weaker, he will be able to achieve a deal on the nuclear file,“ said Citrinowicz.
Holly Dagres, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned that “if the Trump administration somehow thinks it’s going to be having a sixth round of talks with the Iranians in Oman on Sunday, then it truly doesn’t understand the Islamic republic and how it operates”.
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