The United States on Friday distanced itself from the large scale Israeli strikes in Beirut that targeted Hezbollah’s main headquarters, stressing it was not involved nor given significant advance warning of the attacks believed to have targeted Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

Confirming a Channel 12 report, an anonymous US official said the Israelis “told the US government they were taking military action once the operation was already ongoing and they had planes in the air,” adding: “We had no advance knowledge of this.”

A White House National Security Council spokesperson also said that the US was not tipped off by Israel about any operation in Beirut on Friday, adding that Washington was still gathering more information.

An Israeli official with knowledge of the details said the US was told about the impending strike in Beirut a few minutes before it was carried out.

Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh added that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with his Israeli counterpart, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as the strikes were taking place.

“The United States was not involved in this operation and we had no advance warning,” the spokesperson said.

Singh declined to say what Gallant told Austin about the operation and whether it targeted Nasrallah, or to speculate on whether he was killed.

Austin and Gallant spoke as the Pentagon chief flew over the Atlantic after a visit to London.

The Pentagon statement was the US government’s first response to the Israeli operation that defied Washington’s calls for de-escalation and a ceasefire over the past week.

The US and France have proposed a 21-day truce between Israel and Hezbollah, after a week of almost non-stop Israeli strikes that have devastated the Lebanese terror group’s senior command, on the heels of a wave of detonations of Hezbollah operatives’ communications devices, widely blamed on Israel.

The initiative is also aimed at providing time for a hostage release and ceasefire deal to come together in Gaza, where Israel is fighting the Hamas terror group, and for the brokering of an agreement between Israel and Hezbollah that sees the Iran-backed group withdraw its forces away from Israel’s northern border in line with a UN Security Council resolution.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said late Thursday that Israel “shares the aims” of the US-led initiative for a temporary ceasefire with Hezbollah, after he was pilloried within his coalition for privately assenting to the plan and subsequently renounced it.

Netanyahu is in New York, having addressed the United Nations General Assembly around an hour before the strike. Following the strike, his office announced that he would return to Israel early, taking off on Friday night.

A short while after the strike, the White House said that US President Joe Biden had been briefed by his national security team on the strike.

“We’re still gathering information. I can tell you the United States had no knowledge of, or participation in, the IDF actions… I’ll have more to say when I have more information,” Biden told reporters.

The Biden administration has been seeking to contain the crisis from spiraling further. Austin has publicly warned that an all-out conflict between Israel and Hezbollah would be devastating. On Thursday, he warned that risk existed but added a diplomatic solution was still viable.

“We now face the risk of an all-out war. Another full-scale war [could] be devastating for both Israel and Lebanon,” Austin told reporters on Thursday.

Asked what Austin may have communicated to Gallant given the Israeli strike’s potential impact on US efforts to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, Singh declined to offer specifics, but said the defense secretary is always frank in his conversations with his Israeli counterpart.

“Look at just the engagements that the secretary and Minister Gallant have had over the last two weeks, speaking regularly. I think if there was any type of fracture in trust, you wouldn’t see those type of levels of calls and engagements occurring frequently,” Singh said when asked if the lack of advance notification by Israel indicated a lack of trust.

Jacob Magid and Lazar Berman contributed to this report.