The New York Times reported on Thursday that the US was concerned Israel might try to assassinate Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf during negotiations that were taking place in April.
The report, which cited US officials, said that the US agreed that Araghchi and Ghalibaf could have been targets for Israel during the full-scale war, as the US has strongly backed Israel’s assassinations, but that it was concerned that killing them during negotiations could have derailed the diplomatic process.
Some officials told the paper that the US went as far as telling other countries to warn Iran about the potential Israeli assassination plot.
The report said that Iran was concerned that Israel might have tried to kill Ghalibaf when he traveled to Pakistan for negotiations in April, and that on the way back, Iran’s “security forces notified the plane carrying Mr. Ghalibaf back to Tehran that they had picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq.”
Ghalibaf’s plane then landed in the Iranian city of Mashhad, and the officials traveled by land back to Tehran. The account was confirmed by Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior advisor to Ghalibaf.
Israeli officials have made clear that they’re eager to restart the full-scale war against Iran despite the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding and would likely want to start with another round of high-level assassinations. At the end of May, Capital & Empire reported that Israel was pressing the US for the resumption of large-scale strikes on Iran that would involve the targeted killing of Ghalibaf.
