According to a Reuters report on the call, Trump had already approved the idea of military action against Iran but had not yet settled the exact timing or conditions for direct U.S. involvement. Reuters said Netanyahu argued there might never be a better opportunity to kill Khamenei, answer earlier Iranian efforts to target Trump and possibly shake the Islamic Republic from the top down. Reuters also said it could not determine precisely how much that argument moved Trump, but people briefed on the conversation viewed it — together with the closing intelligence window — as a catalyst for the final order that launched Operation Epic Fury.
Trump Iran Operation timeline and what sources say
The reporting adds important caveats to an operation that has since been cast in sweeping terms. The White House, while not directly addressing the Netanyahu call, told Reuters the campaign was meant to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile capacity, weaken its navy and proxy network, and block any path to a nuclear weapon. But a Reuters report on pre-strike CIA assessments said U.S. analysts had also examined scenarios in which Khamenei’s death would not moderate Tehran, but instead strengthen even harder-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps figures.
That possibility now looks more relevant than theoretical. A separate Reuters analysis of who is running Iran after the strike said Mojtaba Khamenei has inherited the role of supreme leader while the Guards and surviving political elites continue to operate the state. That means the operation removed Iran’s top leader without producing any clear sign of a rapid political unraveling in Tehran.
The battlefield and diplomatic picture is also unsettled. In a Reuters update on Tuesday’s missile exchanges and disputed diplomacy, Iran was still launching waves of missiles into Israel while publicly rejecting Trump’s claim that productive talks were underway. The wider conflict has damaged infrastructure, jolted energy markets and kept the Strait of Hormuz at the center of global concern.
Iran’s next layer of leadership has proved unstable as well. AP reported on the later killing of Ali Larijani, the senior Iranian figure widely believed to have helped run the country after Khamenei’s death, before he too was killed in a strike. The sequence shows how quickly the war moved from a targeted blow against the supreme leader to a rolling campaign against Iran’s broader command structure.
Why the political gamble looks less certain
Netanyahu’s argument, as Reuters described it, was not only about military opportunity. It was also about political shock: remove Khamenei and create space for a different Iran to emerge. The reporting since then suggests that outcome is far from assured.
Iran’s ruling network has been damaged, but it remains capable of succession, retaliation and repression. That leaves the administration with its most visible tactical objective achieved, but with a strategic picture that remains unresolved as missiles continue to fly and the war’s costs spread across the region.
Older markers that show how this crisis built over time
This phase of the conflict did not emerge from nowhere. Iran’s April 2024 direct drone-and-missile attack on Israel showed how quickly years of shadow conflict could tip into open state-to-state confrontation. Months later, a Reuters report on the foiled 2024 U.S. murder-for-hire case linked to Iran deepened the personal and political stakes around Trump. Then the June 2025 Israel-Iran war and fragile ceasefire demonstrated both the scale of direct strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and the limits of any short-lived pause.
What the new reporting adds is a clearer view of the closing push behind a decision that reshaped the region. Sources say Netanyahu used the short intelligence window, the memory of alleged Iranian plots and the promise of historic change to make his final appeal. The strike killed Khamenei, but the wider war it helped unleash is still defining the answer to whether the gamble delivered stability or simply a more dangerous phase of confrontation.
