Israel will do ‘what we need to do’, PM says about eliminating Khamenei

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told America’s ABC News on Monday night that eliminating Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would not escalate but rather “end the conflict” between Tehran and Jerusalem.

Asked by ABC News‘s Jonathan Karl about reports that U.S. President Donald Trump had rejected an Israeli plan to assassinate Khamenei, concerned that it would escalate the conflict, Netanyahu responded, “It’s not going to escalate the conflict, it’s going to end the conflict.”

Pressed on the issue, the prime minister told ABC that Jerusalem was “doing what we need to do” to address the threat posed by Tehran.

“I’m not going to get into the details, but we’ve targeted their top nuclear scientists,” Netanyahu said, adding: “It’s basically Hitler’s nuclear team.”

“We’ve had half a century of conflict spread by this regime that terrorizes everyone in the Middle East,” the premier noted. “The ‘forever war’ is what Iran wants, and they’re bringing us to the brink of nuclear war.”

An Israeli official told The Wall Street Journal newspaper on Saturday that Khamenei is “not off limits” as a target in the IDF’s ongoing campaign against Iran.

“The official said Israel wasn’t ruling out any potential targets to destroy the nuclear program, including Khamenei, in response to a question from the WSJ in an interview,” the newspaper stated.

The Reuters news agency subsequently reported that Trump “vetoed” a plan to assassinate the supreme leader, in what top Israeli officials denounced as fake news.

Jerusalem launched “Operation Rising Lion” against the Iranian regime because intelligence indicated that Tehran had amassed enough highly enriched uranium for nine bombs, Netanyahu told Fox News on Sunday.

“All they had to do was weaponize them. We stopped that by attacking their nuclear scientists,” he said.

Asked whether regime change was part of Jerusalem’s plans for the future of the Islamic Republic, the Israeli leader said that it “could certainly be the result because the Iran regime is very weak.”

“Eighty percent of the people would throw these theological thugs out,” he said of internal opposition to the regime. “They murder them, they oppress them—for 46 years they’ve yearned for freedom,” he added.

“The Persian people and the Jewish people have had an ancient friendship that goes back to the times of Cyrus the Great; that could happen again,” Netanyahu told Fox, while saying that “the decision to act, to rise up, at this time is the decision of the Iranian people.”

JNS