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President Donald Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday that the United States would press ahead with nuclear negotiations with Iran, pushing back against Israel's efforts to broaden the scope of diplomacy with Tehran and adopt a harder line.
The two leaders met behind closed doors at the White House for roughly three hours in what Trump described as a "very good meeting," though he acknowledged that "nothing definitive" was reached. It was Netanyahu's seventh visit to the Trump White House since the president returned to office last year, and the most consequential coming just days after American and Iranian negotiators met in Oman for the first time since U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear sites during Israel's war with Iran last July.
"I insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether or not a Deal can be consummated," Trump wrote on Truth Social after the meeting concluded. "If it can, I let the Prime Minister know that will be a preference. If it cannot, we will just have to see what the outcome will be."
Netanyahu had traveled to Washington seeking to press Trump on widening any deal with Iran beyond its nuclear program to include limits on Tehran's ballistic missile arsenal — a concern that intensified during last year's unprecedented conflict, when Iran launched waves of missiles and other projectiles at Israeli military and civilian targets.
His office said the prime minister "emphasized the security needs of the State of Israel in the context of the negotiations" and highlighted Iran's missile capabilities during the talks, which also covered Gaza and broader regional developments. Netanyahu told reporters before departing Israel that the Iran negotiations would be "first and foremost" on the agenda.
But Iran has so far rejected any expansion of the talks beyond the nuclear issue, even as Washington has pushed for Tehran's ballistic missile program and its support for regional militant groups to be included. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Wednesday that Tehran would "not yield to excessive demands" on its nuclear program while insisting that Iran was "not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."
Even as he insisted diplomacy would continue, Trump kept the threat of force firmly in play. In an interview with Axios on Tuesday, he said he was "thinking" of sending a second aircraft carrier strike group to the region, warning: "Either we will make a deal or we will have to do something very tough like last time."
Trump has previously threatened strikes on Iran if no agreement is reached, while Tehran has vowed to retaliate — raising fears of a broader conflict in a region already scarred by overlapping wars.
Netanyahu arrived at the White House through a side entrance without the traditional honor guard. The two leaders were seen shaking hands in a photograph released by the Israeli prime minister's office.
The meeting came at a moment of acute political vulnerability for the Israeli leader. Netanyahu faces voters this year for the first time since the 2023 Hamas attack that shattered public confidence in his security leadership, and successive opinion polls since late 2023 have shown him losing.
Analysts say the Iran crisis may be central to salvaging his legacy. Udi Sommer, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University, said Netanyahu's top goal "would be to make sure that this regime is gone either by the time this term is over, or if not then, then in the next term."
Netanyahu is also standing trial on corruption charges and contending with fractures in his right-wing coalition over a military conscription law that prompted ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties to leave the government. Without them, he controls fewer than half the seats in Israel's 120-member Knesset. His government faces a deadline to pass its state budget by the end of March; failure to do so would trigger a snap election roughly 90 days later. Many Israeli political commentators expect a vote as early as June.
Trump said the two leaders also discussed what he called "tremendous progress being made in Gaza, and the Region." But conditions on the ground remain dire.
Under the U.S.-brokered ceasefire that took effect in October, Israeli forces still control more than 53 percent of the territory, including ruined cities along the Israeli and Egyptian borders where remaining buildings have been demolished and residents ordered out. Gaza's more than two million people are confined to a narrow coastal strip where Hamas has reasserted control, with most living in damaged buildings or makeshift tents.
Palestinian groups and aid agencies say Israel is not allowing supplies into Gaza at the rate agreed under the ceasefire, a claim Israel disputes. Satellite imagery indicates Israeli forces have in some areas unilaterally advanced the "Yellow Line" demarcating their zone of control by hundreds of meters, though Israel's military says such claims are "incorrect." The Rafah crossing into Egypt reopened on February 2, allowing some Palestinians to leave for the first time in months.
Israel continues to bar foreign journalists from Gaza, a ban in place since October 2023. Reporting for international outlets, including Reuters, is carried out solely by journalists living in the territory, hundreds of whom have been killed.
Separately, Netanyahu officially signed on as a member of Trump's "Board of Peace" during an earlier meeting Wednesday with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The initiative was originally conceived to oversee the Gaza ceasefire but is now being positioned by Trump as a potential rival to the United Nations. A U.S. security firm that previously guarded Gaza aid sites, North Carolina-based UG Solutions, is in talks with the board about a new role in the enclave, a prospect that has alarmed Palestinian groups. "The GHF and those who stand behind it have Palestinian blood on their hands; they are not welcome to return to Gaza," said Amjad al-Shawa, head of the Palestinian NGOs Network.
The visit also unfolded against the backdrop of growing international criticism of Israeli measures to tighten control over the occupied West Bank by allowing settlers to purchase land directly from Palestinian owners.
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