Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Shutterstock)
A call from Netanyahu about Khamenei’s location reportedly helped convince Trump to authorize a strike on Iran.
By World Israel News Staff
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tipped off President Donald Trump about the existence and location of a meeting in which now-slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was gathering with his senior advisers, providing the intelligence needed for a potential strike and helping push the U.S. president toward an attack on Iran, according to a report by Axios.
The report said a phone call between Netanyahu and Trump on Monday, February 23, was one of the key factors that swayed Trump, who had been weighing whether to pursue diplomacy or authorize an attack on Iran, toward military action.
Israeli intelligence indicating Khamenei’s exact location — and a rare opportunity to target him along with other senior figures — reportedly shifted the president’s calculus.
After speaking with Netanyahu, Trump ordered the CIA to independently verify the intelligence regarding the meeting and Khamenei’s whereabouts. Three days later, on Thursday, February 26, the agency authenticated the information.
The CIA “confirmed that these people were all going to be together, and we needed to take advantage of it,” a source told Axios.
Also on Thursday, the U.S.’s lead negotiators on Iran, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, called Trump to report that it was impossible to reach a deal with Tehran that would meet Washington’s demands.
According to a source with firsthand knowledge of the call, Kushner and Witkoff told Trump that “if you decide you want to do diplomacy, we will push and fight to get a deal. But these guys showed us they weren’t willing to make the deal you will be satisfied with.”
By Friday, Trump felt that diplomatic options had been exhausted and that the intelligence regarding Khamenei’s location presented a strategic opportunity, and finally gave the order to strike.
A U.S. official told Axios that Trump had not engaged in a ruse to lull Iran into a false sense of security and had genuinely remained open to a diplomatic solution until the last moment.
“One side of the house was negotiating and the other side of the house was doing joint military planning” with Israel, the source told Axios.
The insider added that Trump was “assessing both things all the time.”
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