The US-Israeli war against Iran has exposed further divisions between the two countries after an Israeli strike on Iran’s largest gasfield angered US allies in the Gulf and prompted Donald Trump to say he knew nothing in advance about the attack – a claim that Israeli officials disputed.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said he had spoken to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu following the strikes on Iran’s South Pars gasfield – part of a reserve shared with Qatar – and had told the Israeli prime minister to refrain from further attacks that could escalate a regional war on energy infrastructure.
“I told him, ‘Don’t do that,’ and he won’t do that,” Trump said. “We didn’t discuss [the strikes]. We do independent, but get along great. It’s coordinated. But on occasion he’ll do something, and if I don’t like it … and so we’re not doing that any more.”
Israeli attacks on the South Pars gasfields have opened a Pandora’s box of retaliatory strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure, including pipelines and natural gas processing facilities that serve LNG (liquefied natural gas) to economies around the world, particularly in Asia.
While the US has focused on targeting Iran’s military, navy and ballistic missile complex, Israel has instead carried out targeted assassinations and bombed civilian infrastructure. Those strikes led to severe ecological concerns following the bombing of oil depots in Tehran, and prompted Iran to launch retaliatory attacks on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, as well as Saudi Arabia’s Samref refinery, near the Red Sea port of Yanbu, the country’s only outlet for crude exports given the current closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Seeking to distance himself from the Israeli strikes without condemning them outright, Trump claimed on Truth Social that he had known nothing about the targeting of Iran’s gas reserves in advance, and would oppose them in the future – unless Iran launched further attacks on Qatar’s energy infrastructure.
“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to South Pars unless Iran unwisely decides to attack Qatar — in which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen before,” Trump wrote in the message.
Israeli officials disputed that claim, telling US and Israeli media that Washington had in fact been informed of the South Pars gasfield attack before it took place.
Israel’s efforts to bring about regime change and its attacks on critical infrastructure have increasingly raised criticisms among US allies that Washington has effectively allowed its foreign policy to be hijacked by Netanyahu’s government.
“The American administration’s greatest miscalculation, of course, was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place,” wrote Badr Albusaidi, the foreign minister of Oman. “This is not America’s war, and there is no likely scenario in which both Israel and America will get what they want from it.”
Late on Thursday, Netanyahu denied he had dragged the US into the conflict, telling reporters: “Does anyone really think that someone can tell President Trump what to do?”
He also claimed that thanks to the US-Israeli attacks, Iran could no longer enrich uranium or make ballistic missiles.
His comments came a day after Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, told lawmakers that Iran had not carried out uranium enrichment since Israel attacked its nuclear infrastructure last year.
“As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,” Gabbard said in written testimony to the intelligence committee in the House of Representatives.
Gabbard – who until this year had publicly and repeatedly stated her opposition to a war with Iran – also said that Israel and the US have different goals in the war.
“The objectives that have been laid out by the president are different from the objectives that have been laid out by the Israeli government,” Gabbard told the intelligence committee in the House of Representatives.
“We can see through the operations that the Israeli government has been focused on disabling the Iranian leadership. The president has stated that his objectives are to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles launching capability, their ballistic missile production capability and their navy.”
Anger over the Iran war has led to one prominent defection from within the administration. Joe Kent, the former director of the United States national counterterrorism center and an ally of Gabbard’s, resigned from his post earlier this week.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” he wrote. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
