23.3.2026
Less than 48 hours before the US-Israeli strike on Iran began, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone to US 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 Iran’s former 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 from Saturday night to Saturday morning, 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 US 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 strike orders, but the call amounted to the Israeli leader’s closing argument to his US 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. Reuters