Israel has been threatening a preemptive military strike on Iran as the Trump administration tries to negotiate a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic.
But current and former US and Israeli officials say the Israeli bluff is becoming stale and that Trump has effectively boxed Netanyahu into towing his line as talks continue.
On one hand, current and former US officials say there is little the US can do to prevent Israel from unilaterally bombing Iran if it chooses to do so.
Unlike other American partners, Israel is less dependent on American intelligence for such an operation, especially in Iran, where it has operated for decades, assassinating scientists and senior officials.
One senior US official, speaking to Middle East Eye on the condition of anonymity, said that the Trump administration has been impressed by plans Israel shared with it that lay out unilateral strikes against Iran’s nuclear programme without American direct involvement.
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The plans were discussed in April and May with CIA director John Ratcliffe.
“The Israelis have pinpointed everything they can take out that supports Iran’s nuclear sites down to the water supply and power generation, etc,” the US official told MEE, referring to a process called Target Systems Analysis, by which militaries assess specific nodes to attack, which support a bigger main target.
Israel has also discussed combining cyberattacks and precision military strikes.
“Can Israel go it alone? Yes, course,” Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official in the first Trump administration, told MEE.
“They definitely can disrupt large parts of the programme without destroying all of it. They have demonstrated that by rehearsing similar contingencies. You can also get some clues from the tit-for-tat with Iran last year when they (Israel) took out air defence systems,” he added.
Israeli and US officials say that Israel took out many of Iran’s surface-to-air missiles and radars, like the Russian-made S-300 systems, during unprecedented strikes on the Islamic Republic in October and April 2024.
However, in April 2025, Iran displayed an S-300 at a military parade.
‘Netanyahu is plain scared of Trump’
Iran’s nuclear facilities are buried deep in fortified bunkers in the Natanz desert and inside a mountain called Fordow.
Defence analysts often say one reason Israel has refrained from bombing Iran’s sites alone is because they lack the B-2 stealth bombers the US has stationed at Diego Garcia military base and the 30,000lb GBU-57 bunker buster bombs the warplanes could drop on those sites.
But current and former officials say that, should Israel want to attack, it has other options. “They have the capabilities to set the Iranians back for at least a few years,” the US official said.
The strikes would likely include ballistic missile attacks and a combination of F-35 stealth fighters dropping 2,000lb precision bombs and F-15s dropping 4,000lb GBU-28 bombs, experts say.
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Combined with the degradation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, hawks in Israel have cited all of these factors to advocate for a preemptive attack.
But Aaron David Miller, a former US Middle East negotiator who is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told MEE that even accounting for Iran’s weakening over the past two years, Israel is still unnerved by the unknown.
“We lived for eight years in a situation where there had been no restraints on Iran’s nuclear programme without a major strike by Israel on its nuclear sites,” Miller said, referring to the period starting in 2018 when Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and Iran responded by ramping up its enrichment of uranium.
“That tells me a unilateral Israeli strike is risky and the implications are uncertain.”
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, said US President Donald Trump is perhaps the biggest obstacle to Netanyahu crossing the Rubicon on striking Iran. In May, Trump said that he told Netanyahu it would be “inappropriate” to attack Iran when he believes “we’re very close to a solution” on its nuclear programme.
“Netanyahu is plain scared of Trump,” Pinkas said. “If Trump concludes that Israel attacked Iran in defiance of his request, he could leave Israel to face Iranian retaliation alone. That is what Netanyahu is thinking.”
Israel afraid of blame?
Understanding how Netanyahu views the American backstop following any unilateral military strike is key to assessing the Israeli leader’s risk appetite, analysts and former officials say.
Trump’s mercurial governing style makes it difficult to predict how he would respond to an act of Israeli defiance. Even officials briefed on Israeli war plans simply don’t know.
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“There is a strain of thought that says it would be political suicide for a US president not to defend Israel. There could be political rhetoric, but not shooting down missiles fired at Israel from Iran is a stretch,” the US official said.
While the Biden administration came to Israel’s direct defence twice in 2024 amid Iranian attacks, Trump has shown he relishes tearing up the foreign policy establishment’s playbook.
He sidestepped Israel to negotiate directly with Hamas on the release of a US-Israeli captive and cut a truce with Houthi rebels in Yemen as they continued to bomb Israel. Trump did all that before he spurned Netanyahu on a whirlwind trip to the Gulf in May.
Cristopher McCallion, a fellow at Defense Priorities, a think-tank that taps into Trump’s “America First” foreign policy instincts, told MEE, “I can imagine Trump breaking with Israel, not over a nuclear deal per se, but over avoiding US involvement in a war with Iran more generally.”
Pinkas said that Israel’s threats to launch preemptive strikes on Iran are also constrained by the Gulf states.
When tensions with Israel soared in October 2024, Iran threatened to shut down the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and strike American military bases.
“If Israel acts alone, it will be blamed in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for Iranian retaliation on the Gulf,” Pinkas said.
‘Wiser to wait’
Netanyahu would much rather share the political responsibility for attacking Iran jointly with the US.
“As long as the possibility exists of a joint military strike with the US, with Washington concluding that negotiations are hopeless, it is wiser for Israel to wait. But that time window is not unlimited,” Eran Lerman, a former deputy director at Netanyahu’s National Security Council, told MEE.
Lerman said that a deal that allows Iran to enrich uranium on its soil is a red line for Israel. He believes we could be “weeks away” from that moment.
The Trump administration itself has been unclear on enrichment, the most contentious part of the negotiations. Reports in Axios and The New York Times this week said the White House may concede to a low level of enrichment by Iran, perhaps temporarily.
But Miller said, given Israeli restraint over all of these years, even that might not be enough to provoke a unilateral strike.
“The situation would need to be one where the Mossad and the CIA come to very different conclusions about the advanced state of Iran’s weaponisation and the Israelis were persuaded they had entered a zone of inevitability where Iran would have a bomb,” he said.
“Short of that, even Netanyahu has limits. He is not going to preemptively strike Iran without an American green or flashing yellow light,” he added.
