Netanyahu says Israeli attacks could lead to regime change in Iran

WASHINGTON

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News on Sunday that regime change in Iran "could certainly be the result" of its ongoing Israeli military operations.

Fox's Bret Baier on his Special Report program asked Netanyahu about the goal of the strikes that began early Friday.

"Is regime change part of the effort here?" Baier asked.

"It could certainly be the result because the Iran regime is very weak," Netanyahu replied, claiming that Israel "got" Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' chief intelligence officer and his deputy in Tehran.

Israel is ready to do whatever is necessary to achieve to remove "two existential threats," he said, referring to the nuclear threat and the ballistic missile threat.

"We did act -- to save ourselves, but also, I think, to not only protect ourselves, but protect the world from this incendiary regime. We can't have the world's most dangerous regime have the world's most dangerous weapons," Netanyahu said.

He also stressed Israel "will not have a second Holocaust, a nuclear holocaust. We already had one in the previous century."

Since early Friday, Israel has launched a series of strikes against Iranian territory, targeting nuclear and missile facilities and killing senior military figures and leading scientists. Oil and gas infrastructure was also targeted.

Iran responded with missiles targeting several areas across Israel.

Netanyahu said Israel informed US President Donald Trump about the attack "ahead of time" and the two countries are "fully coordinated."

"I deeply appreciate President Trump's decision to help with the defense of Israel. American pilots are shooting down drones that are headed to towards Israel, as do our pilots. American THAAD missile batteries are helping defend Tel Aviv and greater Tel Aviv area," he said.

Asked about the media reports that said Trump vetoed Israel's plan to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Netanyahu said: "Actually, there are so many false reports of conversations that never happened, and I'm not going to get into that."

Trump's assassination attempts

Netanyahu also claimed that Iran was behind the two assassination attempts against Trump in 2024.

"Through proxies, yes," he said, when asked "Do you have intel that the assassination attempts on President Trump were directly from Iran?"

"They want to kill him. He's enemy number one. He's a decisive leader. He never took the path that others took to try to bargain with them in a way that is weak, giving them basically a pathway to enrich uranium, which means a pathway to the bomb, padding it with billions and billions of dollars," the Israeli premier said.

Trump is a "great threat" to Iran's plans to weaponize nuclear weapons and use them, he said.

"He took up this fake agreement and basically tore it up. He killed Qasem Soleimani. He made it very clear, including now, ‘You cannot have a nuclear weapon, which means you cannot enrich uranium.’ He's been very forceful, so for them, he's enemy number one," he added.

Claiming that Iran also "tried to kill" him, Netanyahu said: "They fired a missile into my bedroom window. They missed."