Did Israel Fake The Iran Threats Against Trump’s Life?

By Mehdi Hasan|Zeteo Photos: YouTube Screenshots|Wikimedia Commons Did you know that all those Iranian threats against Trump’s life that we’ve been hearing about recently come from… Israeli intelligence? And did you know that they aren’t considered all that credible by the U.S. intelligence community? SURPRISE! Reuters dropped this blockbuster story from reporter Eric Banco yesterday: The U.S. has received several warnings from Israel over the past year that Iran intended to assassinate President Donald Trump, including before a secret Air Force One ruse in Turkey, that U.S. intelligence officials could not independently verify, according to a current U.S. official and two former officials. That Reuters piece came off the back of earlier reporting from the Washington Post, which revealed how “U.S. intelligence officials were skeptical of an Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump that was relayed by Israel.” According to the Post, one U.S. official described the intel on the threats against the president’s life as “Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.” So Trump secretly left Air Force One, hid in the back of a catering truck – with Natalie Harp – and got onto an alternative plane to fly to London from Ankara, as the Washington Post revealed on Monday, because of an “Israeli-derived” and “low confidence” piece of intel? Nor, apparently, is it the first time the Israelis have fed dubious reports of Iranian threats to a credulous Trump administration. According to the Reuters report: The warnings, passed to U.S. intelligence agencies and in some cases relayed directly by Israeli officials to ​senior White House officials, included possible plots to shoot Trump with a sniper or recruit someone to attack him with a knife at a ‌large public event, the sources said. The tips began in the lead-up to the 12-day war in June 2025 and intensified prior to the U.S. decision to go to war in Iran in February, the sources said. They “began” before Israel’s 12-day war with Iran in 2025 and “intensified” in the run-up to the Israeli-provoked 2026 war with Iran? How convenient! So what are the lessons of this latest PR debacle for Donald Trump, except for the obvious one, as outlined in yesterday’s ‘First Draft,’ that many of Trump’s own staffers and all of the members of the media traveling with the president are deemed to have “expendable status” and were therefore “left in the dark” aboard “Explosion-Decoy Force One”? Number one, Israeli intelligence simply cannot be trusted, especially when it comes to Iran, where the Israelis have their own warmongering agenda. In fact, the Benjamin Netanyahu government has been providing bogus intel to an easily manipulated Donald Trump from the get-go. Remember the reporting from the New York Times’s Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman about the White House Situation Room meeting on Feb. 11, in which Netanyahu apparently spun a war against Iran as a “near-certain victory” that would create “the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime”? The very next day, after being briefed by U.S. intelligence officials, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed the Israeli claims as “farcical” and “bullshit.” Trump, of course, ignored his two top advisers and joined Netanyahu in illegally attacking the Islamic Republic on Feb. 28. Almost six months later, and with no victory in sight, the U.S. president clearly regrets it and wants out – even as the Israeli prime minister continues to push for more confrontation with Tehran. Trump has spent the past few weeks bending over backward to try and find a way to sign an agreement with the Iranians to end the war and re-open the Strait of Hormuz. And guess what arrives at the exact same time? Uncorroborated Israeli intelligence suggesting Iran is trying to kill him. Like I said: SURPRISE! Number two, the only reason Iran might even want to assassinate the president of the United States is that the U.S., under Trump, began an assassination campaign against Iran’s leaders. As Reuters’s Banco pointed out: “The U.S. intelligence ‌community has ​long assessed that Iran wants to retaliate for Trump’s killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020.” Got that? As retaliation for our assassination of their top general. And, of course, the Soleimani assassination was in January 2020, six years ago. Less than six months ago, on Feb. 28, the first day of this current war, the United States and Israel assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. His killing was “the first time in modern history the U.S. – in this case working with Israel – openly killed the leader of a foreign country,” according to CNN presidential historian Tim Naftali. It was also a rare assassination of one country’s leader by another, and without even a declaration of war. And yet here we are, the president