By Erin Banco, Gram Slattery and Maayan Lubell
WASHINGTON/JERUSALEM, March 23 (Reuters) - Less than 48 hours before the U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone to President Donald Trump about the reasons for launching the kind of complex, far-off war the American leader once had campaigned against.
Both Trump and Netanyahu knew from intelligence briefings earlier in the week that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his key lieutenants would
soon meet at his compound in Tehran, making them vulnerable to a “decapitation strike” – an attack against a country's top leaders often used by Israelis but traditionally less so by the United States.
But new intelligence suggested that the meeting had been moved forward to Saturday morning from Saturday night, according to three people briefed on the call.
The call has not been previously reported.
Netanyahu, determined to move forward with an operation he had urged for decades, argued that there might never be a better chance to kill Khamenei and to avenge previous Iranian efforts to assassinate Trump, these people said. Those included a murder-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by Iran in 2024, when Trump was a candidate.
The Justice Department has accused a Pakistani man of trying to recruit people in the United States in the plan, meant as retaliation for Washington's killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' top commander, Qassem Soleimani.
By the time the call took place, Trump already had approved the idea of the United States carrying out a military operation against Iran but had not yet decided when or under what circumstances the United States would get involved, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.
The U.S. military had for weeks built up a presence in the region, prompting many within the administration to conclude it was just a matter of when the president would decide to move forward. One possible date, just a few days earlier, had been scuttled because of bad weather.
Reuters was unable to determine how Netanyahu’s argument affected Trump as he contemplated issuing orders to strike, but the call amounted to the Israeli leader’s closing argument to his U.S. counterpart. The three sources briefed on the call said they believed it - along with the intelligence showing a closing window to kill Iran's leader - was a catalyst for Trump’s final decision to order the military on February 27 to move ahead with Operation Epic Fury.
Trump could make history by helping eliminate an Iranian leadership long reviled by the West and by many Iranians, Netanyahu argued. Iranians might even take to the streets, he said, overthrowing a theocratic system that had governed the country since 1979 and been a leading source of global terrorism and instability ever since.
The first bombs struck on Saturday morning, February 28. Trump announced that evening that Khamenei was dead.
In response to a request for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly did not directly address the call between Trump and Netanyahu but told Reuters the military operation was designed to "destroy the Iranian regime's ballistic missile and production capacity, annihilate the Iranian regime's Navy, end their ability to arm proxies, and guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon."
Neither Netanyahu's office nor Iran's U.N. representative responded to comment requests.
Netanyahu in a news conference on Thursday dismissed as “fake news” claims that “Israel somehow dragged the U.S. into a conflict with Iran. Does anyone really think that someone can tell President Trump what to do? Come on.”
Trump has said publicly that the decision to strike was his alone.
Reuters reporting, with officials and others close to both leaders speaking mostly on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of internal deliberations, does not suggest that Netanyahu forced Trump to go to war. But the reporting shows that the Israeli leader was an effective advocate and that his framing of the decision – including the opportunity to kill an Iranian leader who allegedly had overseen efforts to kill Trump – was persuasive to the president.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in early March suggested that revenge was at least one motive for the operation, telling reporters, "Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh."
JUNE ATTACK TARGETED NUCLEAR, MISSILE SITES
Trump ran his campaign in 2024 based on his first administration’s foreign policy of "America First" and said publicly that he wanted to avoid war with Iran, preferring to deal with Tehran diplomatically.
But as discussions over Iran's nuclear program failed to produce a deal last spring, Trump began contemplating a strike, according to the three people familiar with White House deliberations.
A first attack came in June, when Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and missile sites, and killed several Iranian leaders. U.S. forces later joined the attack, and when that joint operation ended after 12 days, Trump publicly reveled in the success, saying the U.S. had "obliterated" Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Yet months later, talks began again between the U.S. and Israel about a second aerial attack aimed at hitting additional missile facilities and preventing Iran from gaining the ability to build a nuclear weapon.
The Israelis also wanted to kill Khamenei, a longtime, bitter geopolitical foe who had repeatedly fired missiles into Israel and supported heavily armed proxy forces encircling the nation. That included the Hamas militant group that launched the surprise attack on October 7, 2023, from Gaza, and Hezbollah, based in Lebanon.
The Israelis began to plan their attack on Iran under the assumption they would be acting alone, Defense Minister Israel Katz told Israel's N12 News on March 5.
But during a December visit to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Netanyahu told Trump that he was not fully satisfied with the outcome of the joint operation in June, said two people familiar with the relationship between the two leaders, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Trump indicated he was open to another bombing campaign, the people added, but he also wanted to try another round of diplomatic talks.
Two events pushed Trump toward attacking Iran again, according to several U.S. and Israeli officials and diplomats.
The U.S. operation on January 3 to capture Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas - which resulted in no American deaths while removing from power a longstanding U.S. foe - demonstrated the possibility that ambitious military operations could have few collateral consequences for U.S. forces.
Later that same month, massive anti-government protests erupted in Iran, prompting a vicious response by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing thousands. Trump vowed to help the protesters but did little immediately that was public.
Privately, however, cooperation intensified between the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S. military's Middle East command, known as CENTCOM, with joint military planning conducted during secret meetings, according to two Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Not long after, during a February visit by Netanyahu to Washington, the Israeli leader briefed Trump on Iran's growing ballistic missile program, pointing out specific sites of concern. He also laid out the dangers of the ballistic missile program, including the risk that Iran might eventually gain the ability to strike the American homeland, said three people familiar with the private conversations.
The White House did not respond to questions about Trump's December and February meetings with Netanyahu.
TRUMP'S CHANCE AT HISTORY
By late February, many U.S. officials and regional diplomats considered a U.S. attack on Iran very likely to proceed, though the details remained uncertain, according to two other U.S. officials, one Israeli official and two additional officials familiar with the matter.
Trump was briefed by Pentagon and intelligence officials on the potential advantages to be gained from a successful attack, including the decimation of Iran’s missile program, according to two people familiar with those briefings.
Before the phone call between Netanyahu and Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a small group of top Congressional leaders on February 24 that Israel was likely to attack Iran, whether or not the U.S. participated, and Iran would then likely retaliate against U.S. targets, according to three people briefed on the meeting.
Behind Rubio's warning was an assessment by American intelligence officials that such an attack would indeed provoke counterstrikes from Iran against U.S. diplomatic and military outposts and U.S. Gulf allies, said three sources familiar with U.S. intelligence reports.
This prediction proved accurate. The strikes have led to Iranian counterattacks on U.S. military assets, the deaths of more than 2,300 Iranian civilians and at least 13 U.S. service members, attacks on U.S. Gulf allies, the closure of one of the world’s most vital shipping routes and a historic spike in oil prices that is already being felt by consumers in the United States and beyond.
Trump had also been briefed that there was a chance, even if small, that the killing of Iran's top leaders could usher in a government in Tehran that was more willing to negotiate with Washington, said two other people familiar with Rubio's briefing.
The possibility of regime change was one of Netanyahu's arguments in the call shortly before Trump gave final orders to attack Iran, said the people briefed on it.
That view was not held by the Central Intelligence Agency, which had assessed in the weeks prior that Khamenei would likely be replaced by an internal hardliner if he was killed, as Reuters previously reported.
The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump repeatedly called for an uprising after Khamenei was killed. With the war in its fourth week and the region engulfed in conflict, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards still patrol the nation’s streets. Millions of Iranians remain sheltered in their homes.
Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, considered even more harshly anti-American than his father, has been named the new supreme leader of Iran.
(Reporting by Erin Banco and Gram Slattery; Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; Editing by Craig Timberg, Don Durfee and Daniel Wallis)
