US President Donald Trump called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war hero” on Tuesday and said he himself was also one for sending US bombers to hit Iran’s nuclear sites.
In an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin, Trump, who has no military history beyond attending a military school, said that Netanyahu is “a good man, he’s in there fighting.”
“He’s a war hero, ’cause we worked together. He’s a war hero. I guess I am too.”
“Nobody cares. I am too. I sent those planes,” Trump said, referring to his order to bomb heavily fortified Iranian nuclear facilities during Israel’s 12-day conflict with Iran in June.
He went on to claim that the US had “wiped out the Iran nuclear capabilities that they would have used against Israel in two seconds if they had the chance,” adding that while some tried to claim the damage to Iran wasn’t as bad as he said it was, it “turns out it was even more so. It was obliteration.”
The president has averred multiple times in recent months that the Israeli and US strikes in Iran obliterated its nuclear capabilities, comparing them to the bombs dropped on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
However, a leaked US report in late June stated that the attacks did not destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities’ underground components, and that much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium may already had been spirited out of the sites before they were bombed.
Israel and Iran entered open conflict on June 13 when Israel launched airstrikes targeting Iran’s top military leaders, nuclear scientists, uranium enrichment sites and ballistic missile program. Israel said the campaign was necessary to prevent the Islamic Republic from realizing its declared plan to destroy the Jewish state. On June 22, the US struck key Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan.
Iran retaliated for Israel’s attacks by launching over 550 ballistic missiles and around 1,000 drones at Israel. Iran’s missile attacks killed 28 people and wounded thousands in Israel, according to health officials and hospitals. Missiles hit apartment buildings, two universities, and a hospital, causing heavy damage. Iran also fired at a US base in Qatar after the American strikes.
During his interview with Levin, Trump again expressed support for Netanyahu in his corruption trial, in which he faces charges of fraud, breach of trust, and bribery across three cases.
“You know they’re trying to put him in jail on top of everything else, how about that?” he said.
Following the war with Iran, Trump slammed the trial as a witch hunt against Netanyahu, whom he called a “warrior” who “could not have been better, sharper, or stronger in his LOVE for the incredible Holy Land.”
In an unprecedented intervention in Israel’s justice system, Trump also demanded the trial be “canceled immediately or a pardon given to a great hero who has done so much for the state,” adding that the US was going to “save Bibi Netanyahu.”
Trump also told Levin that he had settled seven “big” wars during his time as president, “Including one that no one knows about” — a feat he claimed goes unrecognized as “nobody ever talks about it.”
But while the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza is not one of the conflicts he has ostensibly settled, he took full responsibility for the release of “all the hostages.”
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are still holding 49 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023, including the bodies of at least 28 confirmed dead by the IDF. Hamas is also holding the body of an IDF soldier killed in Gaza in 2014.
Hamas released 30 hostages and the bodies of eight slain Israeli captives during a ceasefire that Trump helped orchestrate between January and March, and one additional hostage, a dual American-Israeli citizen, in May as a “gesture” to the United States. However, the terror group also freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023 while former US president Joe Biden was still in office, and four hostages were released before that in the early weeks of the war.