'Enemy Number One’: Netanyahu Warns Iran Sees Trump as Assassination Target

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has charged in explosive remarks that Iran's Islamic regime had plotted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, whom they saw as the main threat to its nuclear ambitions.

"They want to kill him. He's enemy number one," Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News broadcast Sunday.

The Israeli prime minister credited Trump's firm stance on Tehran's nuclear ambitions for Iran's reported animosity toward him. "He's a firm leader. He never adopted the approach others adopted in attempting to negotiate with them in a fashion that is weak, offering them essentially a window of enriching uranium, or in other words, a window to the bomb, filling it with billions and billions of dollars," Netanyahu stated.

He emphasized Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord and his directive to kill Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani as turning points. "He picked up thisphony agreement and essentially ripped it up. He killed Qasem Soleimani. He made it very explicit, including now, 'You cannot have a nuclear weapon, which means you cannot enrich uranium.' He's been very assertive, so for them, he's enemy number one," he said to Fox News.

Netanyahu also disclosed that Iran targeted him himself, remembering a time when a missile exploded right into his bedroom. "They tried to kill me too," he said, referring to himself as Trump's "junior partner" in trying to battle Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile threats.

Israel is now running on what he termed a "dual existential threat," Netanyahu said, citing Iran's enrichment of uranium with the goal of developing atomic weapons, and on top of that, a vast expansion of its missile arsenal.

"We were facing an imminent threat, a dual existential threat," Netanyahu said. “One, the threat of Iran rushing to weaponise their enriched uranium to make atomic bombs with a specific and declared intent to destroy us. Second, a rush to increase their ballistic missile arsenal to a capacity of 3,600 weapons a year. Within three years, 10,000 ballistic missiles, each weighing a ton, coming in at Mach 6, right into our cities, as you saw today. and then 26 years, 20,000 [missiles]. No nation can keep that up and especially not a nation the size of Israel, so we had to take action.

Netanyahu defended Israel's most recent offensive against Iran, Operation Rising Lion, as a necessary action against increasing threat. He stated that the mission had "set back the Iranian nuclear program quite a bit" and maintained that continued diplomatic overtures with Tehran were pointless. "Negotiations with the terrorism-sponsoring regime are clearly going nowhere," he stated.

Iran, in recent days, responded with a massive ballistic missile attack against Israeli targets. Although most of the missiles were downed, the escalation has opened up a perilous new page in the conflict in the region.

Netanyahu referred to Operation Rising Lion as "one of the greatest military operations in history," and sent a clear message to the Iranian people. "You have been oppressed for 50 years by the same Islamic regime that has long threatened to destroy the State of Israel," he stated, according to Fox News.

The Israeli Prime Minister concluded by stating that his country is absolutely ready to do whatever it takes to remove the threat of Iran's nuclear and missile programs—not only for its own existence, but for the security of the world in general.