‘Enemy number one’: Iran wants to kill US President Trump, says Israeli PM Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday (local time) that Iran had pinpointed US President Donald Trump as a threat to its nuclear program and actively worked to assassinate him.

"They want to kill him. He's enemy number one," Netanyahu said, as quoted by Fox News on Sunday. It was his first interview since Israel launched its blistering attacks on Iran on June 12.

Netanyahu said, “These people who chant ‘Death to America’, tried to assassinated President Trump twice."

“Do you wan these people to have nuclear weapons and means to deliver them to your cities?” the Israeli PM asked as he who sought to justify Israel’s recent waves of missile strikes in Iran.

"He's a decisive leader. He never took the path that others took to try to bargain with them in a way that is weak, giving them basically a pathway to enrich uranium, which means a pathway to the bomb, padding it with billions and billions of dollars," Netanyahu said.

"He [Trump] took up this fake agreement and basically tore it up. He killed Qasem Soleimani. He made it very clear, including now, 'You cannot have a nuclear weapon, which means you cannot enrich uranium.' He's been very forceful, so for them, he's enemy number one," Fox News quoted Netanyahu as saying.

Netanyahu went on to call himself Trump's "junior partner" in threatening Iran's ability to weaponise nuclear arms. He said he was also a target of the regime after a missile was fired into the bedroom window of his home.

‘Imminent threat’

Netanyahu said his country was facing an "imminent threat" of nuclear destruction and was left with no choice but to act aggressively in the "12th hour."

"We were facing an imminent threat, a dual existential threat," he said.

“One, the threat of Iran rushing to weaponize their enriched uranium to make atomic bombs with a specific and declared intent to destroy us. Second, a rush to increase their ballistic missile arsenal to the capacity that they would have 3,600 weapons a year,” he said.

Netanyahu added, "Within three years, 10,000 ballistic missiles, each one weighing a ton, coming in at mach 6, right into our cities, as you saw today… and then in 26 years, 20,000 [missiles]. No country can sustain that, and certainly not a country the size of Israel, so we had to act."

Netanyahu reiterated what his administration has always maintained — by doing so, Israel is not only protecting itself but also protecting the world.

Isarel launched missile attacks on Iran last Friday, June 12. Iran has since retaliated with a large-scale ballistic missile attack on Israeli cities, although many of the projectiles were thwarted.

Netanyahu told Fox News he believes Israel's offensive measures have set back the Iranian nuclear program "quite a bit," sharing his belief that negotiations with the terrorism-sponsoring regime were clearly "going nowhere."

He also said his country is prepared to do whatever is necessary to eliminate the nuclear and ballistic missile threat Iran poses to the world.

Netanyahu described the operation, coined as Operation Rising Lion, as "one of the greatest military operations in history." Addressing the Iranian people, he said they had been oppressed for 50 years by the same Islamic regime that has long threatened to destroy the State of Israel, as per Fox News.