Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu spoke for the first time in weeks on Wednesday amid expectations of an imminent Israeli strike on Iran, which Yoav Gallant warned would be “deadly, precise and surprising”.
Netanyahu’s defence minister issued the warning in a video message on Israeli media on Wednesday night, broadcast after he postponed a scheduled trip to Washington.
Gallant said that the Iranian missile attack on Israel on 1 October had been a failure but would be avenged.
“Whoever attacks us will be hurt and will pay a price. Our attack will be deadly, precise and above all surprising, they will not understand what happened and how it happened, they will see the results,” the Israeli defence minister said.
Gallant’s video message was broadcast a few hours after the conversation between Netanyahu and Biden, their first in seven weeks, which was joined by the vice-president, Kamala Harris, whose presidential campaign could be upset by the widening hostilities in the Middle East and any consequent spike in oil prices. It also emerged on Wednesday that Netanyahu last week spoke with Harris’s opponent, Donald Trump.
A White House readout of the call did not directly mention possible retaliation for the Iranian missile strike but said Biden had condemned Tehran’s attack “unequivocally” and pledged “ironclad” support for Israel.
Biden and Netanyahu “agreed to remain in close contact over the coming days, both directly and through their national security teams,” the readout said.
The timing and scope of the Israeli retaliation is still unclear, and a miscalculation could propel Iran and Israel into a full-scale war, which neither side says it wants. The US, Israel’s staunch ally, is wary of being drawn into the fighting, and of oil price shocks.
The Biden administration is keen to weigh in on Israel’s plans and avoid surprises like the Israeli killing of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, although the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel had so far refused to share details. Biden said last week that he would not support strikes on Iranian oil or nuclear sites.
Netanyahu’s relationship with Biden has deteriorated significantly since the spring over Israel’s war in Gaza. Biden allegedly shouted and swore at Netanyahu in July over Israel’s failure to give Washington advance warning of another strike on a senior Hezbollah leader, according to a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward.
In War, a book out next week, Woodward reports that Biden regularly accused Netanyahu of having no strategy, and shouted: “Bibi, what the fuck?” at him in July, after Israeli strikes near Beirut and in Iran.
Netanyahu’s office also confirmed that the prime minister had recently spoken with the former president Trump. The Republican, who is in a close White House race against Harris, called Netanyahu last week and “congratulated him on the intense and determined operations that Israel carried out against Hezbollah”, according to Netanyahu’s office.
“World leaders want to speak and meet with President Trump because they know he will soon be returning to the White House and will restore peace around the globe,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement about that call, which a Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, also joined.
There still appear to be disagreements within Israel’s security cabinet over an appropriate response to Iran’s firing of 180 ballistic missiles, an attack that was mostly intercepted by air defence systems but killed one person in the occupied West Bank and hit some Israeli military sites.
Netanyahu promised that Iran would pay for the attack, while Tehran has repeatedly warned that an Israeli attack on its soil would be met with further escalation.
Israel is fearful of a costly war of attrition with Iran while it is fighting in Gaza and Lebanon. After Tehran fired its first ever direct salvo at Israel in April in retaliation for the killing of a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander in Syria, Israel heeded western calls for restraint, striking an air defence battery at an Iranian airbase.
Israel’s response this time is expected to be more severe, but its timing remains unclear. Axios reported that the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, postponed a scheduled visit to Washington on Wednesday at Netanyahu’s insistence. The prime minister wanted the cabinet to vote on the attack plans first and to speak to Biden himself before Gallant held discussions with Pentagon officials, the report said.
In Lebanon on Wednesday, eight days into Israel’s ground invasion, clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces appeared to be spreading across the mountainous border area.
The militant group said it had pushed back Israeli troops near Labbouneh, close to the Mediterranean coast, and attacked units with rocket fire in the villages of Maroun el-Ras, Mays al-Jabal and Mouhaybib.
Four people were killed and 10 wounded by an Israeli airstrike in Wardanieh, near the coastal town of Sidon.
Heavy fire from Lebanon triggered rocket sirens and air defence interceptions across northern Israel on Wednesday, killing two people in the border town of Kiryat Shmona and wounding six in the major city of Haifa.
A quarter of Lebanon is now under Israeli evacuation orders, which have driven 1.2 million people from their homes. At least 1,400 have been killed in the last three weeks.
During their call Biden emphasised to Netanyahu the “need to minimise harm to civilians, in particular in the densely populated areas of Beirut”.
Many Lebanese people fear that Israel’s intense bombings and use of widespread evacuation orders mean the country faces a similar fate to Gaza, where 42,000 people have been killed in a year of fighting. The war was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October rampage in southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
