Senior US officials feared that Israel intended to assassinate Iran’s top negotiators as the Trump administration pursued a high-stakes deal to end the war there and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, current and former officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The officials said the US worried that Israel might assassinate Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Iranian parliamentary speaker who is leading negotiations with the US, or Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who has also been a public face of the talks.
They said the concern was so serious that this spring the United States took the unusual step of asking intermediaries to warn Tehran that Israel might attempt to assassinate the two leaders. “If these two men are killed, the pragmatists would be gone,” a US official told the newspaper.
“This illustrates the divergence in war aims between the United States and Israel, as well as the Israeli prime minister's fundamental willingness to torpedo any negotiation the United States might conclude,” Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official who advised both Republican and Democratic administrations, told the newspaper.
The newspaper noted that Israel's embassy in Washington declined to comment.
US officials had also urged Israeli counterparts as early as March not to target Iran's political leadership while diplomatic efforts were underway, according to a diplomat cited by the newspaper.
A White House official told The Washington Post, “The president wants the peace process to play out.”
According to the newspaper, while both countries initially backed regime change in Iran after the conflict began on Feb. 28, US officials later concluded that Iran’s political and military establishment would likely remain in power and shifted focus toward securing a negotiated settlement.
It said tensions deepened after Israel allegedly assassinated senior Iranian national security official Ali Larijani in March.
“The turning point wasn’t the assassination of the supreme leader, it was the assassination of Larijani,” a Western official was quoted as saying. “The US was looking for an Iranian official to deal with an all of a sudden he was gone.”
According to the Washington Post, Araghchi and Ghalibaf later became Washington’s principal interlocutors in securing an initial ceasefire in April and negotiating a broader framework agreement in June to end the conflict.
