“Operation Epic Fury” indicates that President Donald Trump has gotten over recent frustrations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, persons close to the White House tell the Washington Examiner.
Trump largely embraced Netanyahu throughout most of his first year back in the White House, but had reportedly begun voicing concerns about the prime minister’s actions in Gaza in late 2025. Multiple outlets reported that the president personally scolded Netanyahu in December, accusing him in private of undermining the Gaza ceasefire process.
However, senior American officials and Trump world insiders say that Saturday morning’s strike campaign could only have been pulled off with close coordination with the Israeli government.
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“I think that what Saturday’s operation shows is that there’s no space in between the United States and Israel when it comes to regional security,” one longtime out-of-government advisor to the president told the Washington Examiner. “The media was always going to try to spin the situation in Gaza, but that was an incredibly complicated situation. There were always going to be hiccups along the way.”
One former Trump national security official told the Washington Examiner that Trump and Netanyahu had always seen “eye-to-eye” about military action against Iran: that it was “a question of when, not if.”
“The situation with Iran is, in many ways, much more simple and straightforward than the situation in Gaza,” that person told the Washington Examiner. “The ayatollah cannot remain in power if he’s going to, one, build nuclear weapons and, two, brutalize the Iranian people protesting regime. And these last few weeks of negotiations finally confirmed they don’t seem to be serious about either.”
The former Trump official specifically pointed to Netanyahu’s visit to the White House earlier this month as evidence of the close coordination between the U.S. and Israel on the issue.
White House officials declined to answer specific questions regarding operational control of Saturday’s strikes. U.S. planes reportedly were targeting Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, while Israel’s strikes targeted critical members of Iran’s political and military leadership.
However, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Trump and his national security team viewed the strikes from a secure location at Mar-a-Lago and that Trump and Netanyahu spoke by phone Saturday morning.
Trump plans to continue monitoring the situation Saturday with his national security advisors.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also reached out to all members of Congress’s Gang of Eight to brief them on the attacks.
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Trump himself referred to Saturday morning’s strikes as an effort “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”
“The United States military has undertaken a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests, we are going to destroy their missiles and raise their missile industry to the ground,” he claimed in a video posted to his social media accounts. “It will be totally again obliterated. We are going to annihilate their navy.”