President Donald Trump confirmed that he engaged in a fiery Monday phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he urged Israel to halt its strikes on Lebanon as uncertain peace talks between the U.S. and Iran plod on.
“I don’t want to say angry,” he told the New York Post’s “Pod Force One” in an interview that was published Wednesday. “I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon. You know, at some point, I said, ‘Bibi, we gotta stop this. You gotta stop it.’”
The terse conversation, first reported by Axios, underscores the shifting priorities between the two allies in the Middle East. Trump, who has seen his approval rating dragged further down by the war, has been engaged in weekslong negotiations with Iran while Israel continues to go after Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.
Tehran says Israel’s campaign is a violation of the April ceasefire that temporarily calmed hostilities.
But the president insisted his relationship with Netanyahu remains strong.
“I like Bibi a lot. And I’ve worked very well with him,” he said. “I’m a wartime president. He’s a wartime prime minister. Very important part of the world. And I think we’ve done very well. We’ve gotten along very well together.”
On Wednesday, Iran struck a passenger building at Kuwait’s international airport, according to the Associated Press, killing one person and injuring dozens. U.S. Central Command wrote on Tuesday night that its forces “successfully defeated multiple Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, and conducted self-defense strikes on Qeshm Island in response to attempted attacks by Iran across the Middle East.”
In his interview with the Post, Trump said he didn’t know if Iran’s blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for global trade, would still be in place by Labor Day. But he expressed confidence in the peace talks and said he’d like to meet the country’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.
Khamenei’s father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war.
The war, Trump said in the interview, had to happen now — and not after the midterms, even as Republicans face increasingly negative headwinds ahead of the November elections.
“If there wasn’t me, there’d be no Israel right now,” he said.