Barak Ravid Details Trump’s ‘Exceptionally Firm and Direct’ Call With Netanyahu as Ceasefire Teetered
President Donald Trump personally pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt a retaliatory strike on Iran on Tuesday in a tense intervention just hours after a fragile U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect.
The flare-up began when Iran launched a missile at Israel shortly after the ceasefire deadline, an allegation Tehran denied. In response, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz greenlit an airstrike, with fighter jets en route to targets near Tehran.
After engaging with a press gaggle in which the president appeared furious and cursed out both countries, Trump called the Israeli prime minister directly from Air Force One while en route to the NATO summit in Europe.
One White House official told Barak Ravid, Axios’ global affairs correspondent, that Trump was “angry” and spoke to Netanyahu in “an exceptionally firm and direct way” to convince him to “completely cancel the attack.”
“The president told Netanyahu what needed to happen to sustain the ceasefire. The Prime Minister understood the severity of the situation and the concerns President Trump expressed,” the White House source told Ravid.
Trump then declared the crisis over, writing via Truth Social: “All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran,” he wrote. “Nobody will be hurt. The Ceasefire is in effect!”
According to Israeli officials, however, also speaking to Axios, Netanyahu insisted that he “could not cancel the strike” and that some response was necessary to the morning’s missile attack from Iran. Israeli officials confirmed that they had then decided to call off further strikes and scale back the attack from multiple targets to just one, a strike on a radar system that had already taken place before Trump’s call.
“In the conversation, President Trump expressed his immense appreciation for Israel, which achieved all its war objectives. The President also expressed his confidence in the stability of the ceasefire,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
