In a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump said that the United States has begun negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
Trump also raised the bombshell proposal he made during the Israeli Prime Minister’s first visit to the White House in February: for the United States to take control of the Gaza Strip and depopulate it. This time, Netanyahu framed that proposal as allowing Palestinians to voluntarily migrate from the territory.
The two men also referenced the 17% tariffs Trump recently placed on Israel — which the president did not say he would lift, instead discussing U.S. aid to Israel.
Trump made the announcement about Iran while sitting alongside Netanyahu in the Oval Office on Monday. Trump has been pressuring Iran into talks, and otherwise threatening military action to combat Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Now, he revealed, those talks will begin in earnest on Saturday. He alluded to military action against Iran, though not explicitly.
“We’re having direct talks with Iran, and they’ve started,” Trump said. “It will go on Saturday. We have a very big meeting and we’ll see what can happen, and I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious, and the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with or frankly that Israel wants to be involved with if they can avoid it. So we’re going to see if we can avoid it.”
The talks appear to be the most significant U.S.-Iranian diplomacy since the 2015 agreement on Iran’s nuclear program spearheaded by President Barack Obama. Both Netanyahu and Trump have long reviled that agreement.
Netanyahu was its fiercest public opponent while it was being negotiated, controversially addressing Congress in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the elected officials to block the deal. Trump has also long lambasted that agreement and withdrew from it in 2018 at Netanyahu’s urging.
On Monday, by contrast, Netanyahu adopted a conciliatory tone toward Trump’s efforts, hoping for a resolution similar to Libya’s 2003 agreement to get rid of its nuclear weapons.
“We’re both united in the goal that Iran does not ever get nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said. “If it can be done diplomatically in the full way, the way it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing but whatever happens we have to make sure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons.”
Israel struck sites in Iran last year in response to a missile attack, in the first direct fire between the two countries. But experts on the region believe Israel may be hoping for a green light to take stronger action.
Trump warned of steep consequences if the United States does not reach a satisfactory agreement with Iran.
“If the talks aren’t successful with Iran, I think Iran’s going to be in great danger … because they cant have a nuclear weapon,” he said. He added that if the talks fail, “It’ll be a very bad day for Iran.”
Most of the questions from reporters present at the meeting focused on the broad set of tariffs Trump has placed on countries worldwide, including Israel. Addressing the tariffs was one of the focuses of Netanyahu’s trip, but when asked whether he planned to remove the Israel tariffs, Trump said “maybe not” — and brought up America’s military aid to Israel.
“Don’t forget, we help Israel a lot,” he said. “You know, we give Israel $4 billion a year — and congratulations, by the way, that’s pretty good — but we give Israel billions of dollars a year, billions, it’s one of the highest.”
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