Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, with President Donald Trump’s help, he would “finish the job” on Iran, after a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the weekend.
Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem after the Sunday meeting, Netanyahu and Rubio said Israel was in lockstep with the Trump administration to block Iran’s path to develop nuclear weapons.
Since Israel and Hamas went to war 16 months earlier, “Israel has dealt a mighty blow to Iran’s terror axis,” Netanyahu said. “Under the strong leadership of President Trump, and with your unflinching support, I have no doubt that we can and will finish the job.”
Rubio called Iran the “single greatest source of instability in the region.”
“There can never be a nuclear Iran… that could then hold itself immune from pressure and from action, that can never happen,” he said, adding that Trump has “been clear about that as well.”
But Iran dismissed the threat – “When it comes to a country like Iran, they cannot do a… thing,” Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, said at a Monday news conference, using an expletive. Iran funds and supports multiple militant groups in the region, including Hamas and Hezbollah.
Israel considers strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities
The comments came amid growing indications that Israel is considering direct strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities within months.
A U.S. intelligence assessment predicted in the last days of former President Joe Biden’s administration through the early days of Trump’s that Israel would likely try to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities within six months, according to reports. Israel would push Trump to join in, seeing him as more likely to back the strikes than Biden, the assessments found.
Israel said on Sunday it had received a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs after Trump directed the military to lift a Biden-era ban on supplying the weapons to Israel days after he took office.
The bombs, also known as “bunker busters,” can penetrate underground areas, meaning they could be used to strike Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. Israel reportedly used one of the bombs to kill Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, in a strike on Beirut last September.
The Biden administration provided thousands of the bombs in the early days of Israel’s siege of Gaza, launched after Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped about 250 others on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel dropped almost 600 of the bombs on Gaza within the first six weeks of the war, a study later found.
But Biden later held up a shipment of the bombs out of concern Israel would drop them on densely populated areas as Israel prepared to attack Rafah in southern Gaza, where it had told civilians to evacuate.
The fighting in Gaza paused last month after Hamas agreed to release 33 hostages in exchange for Israel to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and begin to withdraw its forces from the enclave. Another three Israeli hostages and 369 prisoners were released on Saturday, setting the deal back on course after it looked doomed to collapse last week as both sides accused the other of violating terms of the agreement.
(This story has been updated with new language.)
Contributing: Reuters
Read More: Emboldened by Trump, Netanyahu says Israel will ‘finish’ job on Iran