Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made shocking claims on Sunday alleging that Iran was behind the two unsuccessful assassination attempts on President Donald Trump during his third presidential campaign last year.
Netanyahu described Trump as Iran's biggest obstacle to obtaining a nuclear weapon and claimed this was the reason the regime tried to eliminate the president in a bombshell interview with Brett Baier of Fox News. "These people who chant, 'Death to America' tried to assassinate President Trump twice," Netanyahu claimed as he addressed the American public to justify the widespread military strikes against Iran after a deadly weekend of missile exchanges between the Jewish nation and the Islamic Republic.
Trump Iran's Biggest Obstacle
"Do you want these people to have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to your cities?" Netanyahu asked. "Of course not. So we're defending ourselves, but we're also defending the world."
Baier appeared shocked by Netanyahu's comments and pressed the prime minister to elaborate on the explosive allegation.
"You just said Iran tried to assassinate President Trump twice," the Fox News anchor said. "Do you have intel that the assassination attempts on President Trump were directly from Iran?"
"Through proxies, yes," Netanyahu replied. "Through their intel, yes. They want to kill him."
U.S. intelligence agencies have never officially linked the two assassination attempts to the Iranian regime, although Trump hinted in a speech last September that Iran was responsible.
Iranian leaders have vehemently denied any connection to the incidents.
Netanyahu then made a light-hearted remark that Trump wasn't their only target, but stressed that he was Iran's top enemy.
"Look, they also tried to kill me, but I'm his junior partner. They understand that President Trump is a great threat to Iran's plans to weaponize nuclear weapons and use them," he said.
Iran Accused Again
In November, federal authorities alleged that an unidentified operative from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard had enlisted 51-year-old Farhad Shakeri to "focus on surveilling, and, ultimately, assassinating" Trump, noting that funding for the operation was unlimited.
Trump survived two assassination attempts during his presidential campaign in the summer of 2024.
On September 15, authorities arrested Ryan Routh at the Trump International Golf Club, where he was found carrying a semi-automatic rifle.
A month earlier, during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump had a close brush with death when a bullet fired by a gunman grazed his ear, narrowly missing his head.
"The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle," Trump told The New York Post last July. "I'm not supposed to be here, I'm supposed to be dead."
Thomas Matthew Crooks, an engineering student who fired the shot but failed to hit his mark, was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.
From jail, Routh wrote a strange four-page letter linking himself to Crooks, in which he criticized the United States' "two-party system."
