President Trump said on Monday that Iran and Israel must “stop shooting,” comments that came after Israel bombed Iran following Iranian strikes on northern Israel in response to Israel’s strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs.
“Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting.’ President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
Israel launched strikes in several Iranian cities after Trump said that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to respond to the Iranian strikes on northern Israel.
“I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate. Each of them had their fun. Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike. We don’t need another one,” Trump told Axios reporter Barak Ravid a few hours before Israel bombed Iran.
The Wall Street Journal reported that when Trump spoke with Netanyahu on Sunday, and it became clear the Israeli leader wouldn’t call off his plans to strike Iran, Trump asked him to keep it limited. The two leaders spoke again on Monday, and Netanyahu later said publicly that he would not launch further attacks.
The US tried to distance itself from Israel’s strikes on Beirut, but sources told the Journal that Israel informed the US of the planned attack ahead of time, and the US also helped intercept Iranian missiles fired at Israel in response.
Following the Israeli attacks on Iran, which wounded at least 15 people, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said that it targeted air bases in northern Israel, and Iran’s central military command, the Khatam al-Anbia, later announced that it was “halting military operations” against Israel. Though the command did warn it would respond to Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon, which continued on Monday.
The Iranian military command said in the “event of continued aggression and provocations, including in southern Lebanon, much stronger and more crushing actions will follow.”
Netanyahu said in his statement that Israeli attacks on Iran were halted for now. “At the moment, we are holding our fire, because after we struck the terror regime in Tehran, it ceased attacking us. In the event that the terror regime in Iran makes the mistake of resuming attacks on us – we will respond with overwhelming force,” he said.
The Israeli leader suggested in the same statement that Israel won’t halt its attacks in southern Lebanon, saying that “We continue to destroy all of [Hezbollah’s] terror infrastructure in the security zone,” referring to a large swathe of Lebanon’s territory that Israel has declared a “buffer zone.”
