Netanyahu announces that Iran can no longer enrich uranium or produce ballistic missiles / Denies that he influenced Trump to go to war – VIDEO
Iran no longer has the ability to enrich uranium or manufacture ballistic missiles, after 20 days of US-Israeli airstrikes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in a press conference on Thursday evening.
“We are winning and Iran is almost decimated,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, who said Iran's arsenal of missiles and drones had been massively degraded and would eventually be destroyed, Reuters and Agerpres news agencies reported.
“What we're destroying now are the factories that make the components needed to make these missiles and the nuclear weapons they're trying to make,” he added, without providing evidence to support his claims.
As for his and US President Donald Trump's goal of toppling the Iranian regime, Netanyahu estimated that, “despite almost three weeks of war, it is still too early to say whether the Iranians will take to the streets to try to overthrow their government.”
“It is up to the Iranian people to show this, to choose the moment and rise to the occasion,” he continued.
After the war has so far been waged solely through airstrikes, Netanyahu acknowledged that ground action is also needed and “there are many possibilities for this ground component,” but did not elaborate on the subject.
Trump: “I'm not deploying troops anywhere”
Trump vowed earlier Thursday not to deploy ground troops in the war against Iran. “No, I'm not deploying troops anywhere. If I did, I wouldn't have told you. But I'm not deploying troops,” Trump told reporters at the White House as he hosted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
It is not the first time that he expresses himself on this subject, but even in this case he is inconsistent. Thus, in a statement on March 2, two days after starting the war, Trump stated that he would not hesitate to send American troops on the ground in Iran “if necessary.”
In another discussion with the press on Tuesday, he was asked if he feared a new Vietnam, should he eventually decide on ground operations against Iran. “I'm not afraid of anything,” he claimed in his reply.
Netanyahu claims he did not influence Trump to start the war against Iran
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also claimed on Thursday that he did not “draw” US President Donald Trump into the current war against Iran
Moreover, he assured that Trump himself was the one who asked him in December, in a discussion at his residence at Mar-a-Lago, to do in such a way that Iran could not be equipped with nuclear weapons, reports the EFE agency, quoted by Agerpres.
“He said to me: Bibi, we have to make sure that Iran does not have nuclear bombs,” Netanyahu said, speaking at the same televised news conference.
NOW – Netanyahu: “I want to close these opening remarks with one other fake news, and that is that Israel somehow dragged the US into a conflict with Iran. Does anyone really think that someone can tell President Trump what to do? Come on!” pic.twitter.com/eYXzvqReJp
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) March 19, 2026
Oman's foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, who has mediated the negotiations between Iran and the US, reproached US President Donald Trump for “getting dragged” by Israel into the war at a time when a deal with Tehran looked “really possible”, AFP reported on Thursday.
In an opinion piece published in the British weekly The Economist, the Omani minister ditched his usual diplomatic restraint and directly described the war waged by the US and Israel against Iran as a “catastrophe”.
After nine months of negotiations, Washington and Tehran were “two steps away from agreeing to a genuine agreement” on Iran's nuclear program, said the Omani minister mediating the talks.
He reproaches the administration of President Donald Trump for “getting dragged into this war”, having been convinced by “Israeli leaders” that “an unconditional surrender (of Iran no) would have quickly followed the initial assault”. The foreign minister of Oman sees here “the biggest miscalculation of the US administration”.
“Friends of the United States have a duty to tell the truth” and to point out to their ally in Washington how much it has “lost control of its own foreign policy”.
“An immense blessing to Israel”
For his part, Britain's national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, who participated in the last round of US-Iranian negotiations held in Geneva on February 26, estimated that Tehran's proposals were “significant enough to avoid a hasty war”, the British publication The Guardian wrote on Tuesday.
For his part, an Israeli minister, Zeev Elkin, a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud party, said Thursday that every day of the US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran is “a huge blessing for Israel” and an opportunity to “deepen the damage done” to Iran. The same Israeli minister praised the “unique cooperation with the US, which we do not know when it will be repeated.”
US intelligence agencies estimated, in a document debated in the US Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, that Iran has not tried to restart its uranium enrichment activities destroyed in the US-Israeli airstrikes in June 2025, thus contradicting a justification invoked by Trump for the ongoing war against Iran.
A day earlier, the head of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Joseph Kent, resigned, saying he could not “in good conscience” support this war. “Iran is not an imminent threat to our country, and it is clear that we started this war because of pressure from Israel and its powerful lobby,” noted Joseph Kent in a letter addressed to Trump and published on the X social network.
