Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Tuesday that Iran no longer poses an existential threat to Israel after what he described as a month of joint U.S.-Israeli operations that crippled Tehran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, while President Donald Trump said the war is nearing its end and “won’t last much longer.”
In a recorded statement released ahead of Passover, which begins Wednesday night, Netanyahu said Israel has “achieved immense, enormous accomplishments” in its campaign against Iran and its regional terror proxies, casting the operation as both a battlefield success and a strategic turning point.
“On the eve of this Festival of Freedom, Israel is stronger than ever,” Netanyahu said. “Iran can no longer threaten our existence.”
He said the campaign had fundamentally altered the regional balance.
“We created a strategic reversal,” Netanyahu said. “Iran sought to suffocate us. Today, we are suffocating them.”
“The Ayatollah regime in Iran is weaker than ever, and the State of Israel is stronger than ever,” he added.
Netanyahu said the joint campaign with the United States systematically targeted Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile capabilities, regime infrastructure, internal security forces, and senior leadership, while also battering Tehran’s regional terror network.
Over the years, he said, Iran poured nearly $1 trillion into its nuclear program, missile production, and armed proxies.
“That trillion has gone down the drain,” Netanyahu said.
Framing the operation in Passover terms, Netanyahu said Israel and its allies had delivered “ten plagues” to the “axis of evil” — from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen to what he described as five direct blows against Iran itself, including strikes on its nuclear program, missiles, regime infrastructure, security apparatus, and top officials.
Most significantly, Netanyahu said the campaign had removed two threats that long defined Israel’s strategic calculus: Iran’s race toward nuclear weapons and its effort to build a massive ballistic missile arsenal.
Iran, he said, had been moving to bury the industrial capacity behind those programs “deep, deep underground” in order to place it beyond Israel’s reach.
“When I realized this, I brought it before the Cabinet and said: ‘We must act, because otherwise, we will not be able to reach these instruments of destruction and the means that produce them,’” Netanyahu said. “We had to act and we acted.”
He said Israel’s earlier operation, Rising Lion, pushed back the immediate threat of Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons and large numbers of ballistic missiles, while the current campaign delivered what he called a “complementary achievement” by crushing the regime’s industrial capability to produce them.
In outlining the broader results of the fighting, Netanyahu said the campaign had degraded Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, including efforts to move those capabilities underground, and that action was taken to prevent those assets from becoming inaccessible.
He also said Iran-backed terror groups still retain some residual capability, but “can no longer threaten our existence” or carry out the kind of mass missile barrages once envisioned against Israeli cities.
Netanyahu further argued that the operation had destabilized the regime itself.
“We have shaken this regime,” he said. “And I tell you, sooner or later, it is destined to fall.”
He added that Israel is now fighting “shoulder to shoulder” with the United States in what he called an “unprecedented, historic cooperation” between himself and Trump and between the U.S. military and the Israel Defense Forces.
Trump struck a similarly confident tone throughout a series of remarks Tuesday, repeatedly signaling that the operation’s core objectives had largely been achieved and that the campaign could soon wind down.
Speaking to CBS News, Trump said Operation Epic Fury is “two weeks ahead of schedule,” adding that there is “not much” left before the United States reaches the point of declaring victory.
“We are ahead of schedule actually,” Trump said. “They’ve got no military might anymore. They are down on everything they had. They’re a mess.”
In separate remarks, Trump said the United States would likely wrap up the war in “two or three weeks,” or possibly sooner.
“I think two or three weeks; we’ll leave, because there’s no reason for us to do this,” Trump said, later adding, “Within maybe two weeks — maybe a couple of days longer.”
Trump also made clear that, in his view, ending the operation no longer depends on Tehran agreeing to a diplomatic settlement.
“No, they don’t have to make a deal,” Trump said when asked whether Iran must agree to terms for the war to end. “When we feel that they are … put into the stone ages and won’t be able to come up with a nuclear weapon, then we’ll leave whether we have a deal or not.”
“It’s irrelevant now,” he added.
That language tracked with Trump’s broader explanation of the war’s purpose.
“I had one goal: They will have no nuclear weapon and that goal has been attained,” Trump said. “They will not have nuclear weapons.”
Trump underscored that point in comments about Iran’s surviving stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, saying he no longer sees them as an immediate concern because they are buried too deeply to be readily recovered.
“I don’t even think about it,” Trump said. “I just know that it’s so deeply buried it’s going to be very hard for anybody” to reach.
“It’s down there deep,” he added. “It’s pretty safe.”
The conflict followed failed diplomacy in which, according to Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, Iranian negotiators made clear they would not relinquish their enrichment program and would not surrender diplomatically what the United States could not take militarily.
Taken together, the remarks from Netanyahu and Trump suggested both leaders now believe the core aims that drove the campaign — neutralizing Iran’s nuclear threat, crushing much of its missile and military infrastructure, and breaking the strategic pressure Tehran built through its proxies — have largely been met.
Even so, Netanyahu stressed that the campaign is not formally over.
“We will continue to crush the terrorist regime, we will fortify the security zones around us, and we will achieve our goals,” he said.
Trump, meanwhile, is set to address the nation Wednesday night with an update on the war, as both leaders increasingly signal that the operation may be entering its final phase.
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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