Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed on Sunday that Iran was behind the two assassination attempts on President Donald Trump in 2024.
Netanyahu listed the alleged Iranian connection to the assassination attempts on Trump during an apparent defense of Israel‘s “Rising Lion” military campaign in Iran, which is designed to eliminate the regime’s nuclear program and ballistic missile capabilities.
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“These people who chant death to America, tried to assassinate President Trump twice, kill 241 of your Marines in Beirut, killed and injured thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, try to bomb a restaurant in Washington, D.C., chant death to America, burn the American flag, do you want these people to have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to your cities? Of course not. So we’re defending ourselves, but we’re also defending the world,” the Israeli prime minister said in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier.
Baier pressed Netanyahu on the claim, asking him, “Do you have intel that the assassination attempts on President Trump were directly from Iran?”
Netanyahu responded, “Through proxies, yes. Through their intel, yes. They want to kill him.”
Trump faced two assassination attempts on the campaign trail in 2024.
The first was at a July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired at Trump from the roof of a nearby building, grazing Trump’s ear. Seconds later Crooks was shot and killed by U.S. Secret Service.
While Crooks’s motive for the assassination attempt remains unknown, Secret Service increased protection for Trump weeks before the Butler rally after discovering an Iranian plot to assassinate him.
The second assassination attempt was a mere two months later. At Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh allegedly waited in bushes near the club with a semiautomatic rifle, planning to shoot Trump while he was out golfing. A Secret Service agent quickly spotted the rifle and fired shots at Routh, who fled before being arrested shortly after.
Routh has a more extensive online presence than Crooks did. He particularly rebuked Trump over the Ukraine war and believed the president was a threat to democracy, while also writing in a 2023 self-published book that Iran should “feel free” to assassinate Trump.
In a separate thwarted assassination plot against Trump, federal prosecutors revealed that a month before the November election in 2024, Iran ordered an operative to assassinate Trump within a week or wait until after Election Day to do so. Afghan national Farhad Shakeri was later charged with murder-for-hire and providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
Iran insists it has never attempted to assassinate Trump, with President Masoud Pezeshkian calling those plots “schemes” created by Israel “to promote Iranophobia.”
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Netanyahu, however, made clear on Sunday that Trump is the regime’s “enemy No. 1.”
“For them, [Trump is] enemy No. 1. They understand that President Trump is a great threat to Iran’s plans to weaponize nuclear weapons and use them,” he said.