Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to fly to Washington on Saturday night, Israeli sources told ynet overnight Tuesday-Wednesday. Netanyahu is seeking a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump amid the renewed American blockade on Iranian ports, but no meeting between the two leaders has yet been scheduled.
The Prime Minister’s Office had already sought to arrange a meeting with Trump last week, after the leaders’ most recent meeting was held on February 11 in the White House situation room. One reason for Netanyahu’s desire to meet quickly with the U.S. president is to restore trust that has been shaken since the war with Iran, as statements have increasingly been heard from Trump’s circle suggesting that the prime minister’s assessments proved to be wrong. The concern in Netanyahu’s camp is that Trump blames him for the failure of the war.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is seeking a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump
(Photo: lev radin/shutterstock, REUTERS/Nathan Howard, KAWANT HAJU/AFP, shutterstock)
Another reason is that Israel wants to present Washington with all the intelligence information it has ahead of negotiations between the United States and Tehran on a permanent agreement. Israel wants the Americans not to settle only for reducing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile but also to insist on the red lines that have been set, including the removal of enriched uranium from Iranian territory. Israel also wants to prevent Iran from retaining any right to enrich uranium, an issue on which it appears the Americans have backed down. Another goal is to remind the Americans of the need to insist that any agreement include the threat posed by ballistic missiles and Iran’s support for its proxies.
In addition, the prime minister is expected to attend the funeral of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham next week. A memorial service will be held in Washington next Tuesday, and the following day Graham’s body will be flown to South Carolina. However, a final date for the funeral has not yet been set.
On Tuesday, Axios reported, citing American and Israeli officials, that Trump told Netanyahu in a phone call last Thursday that Israel should begin redeploying its forces from areas outside Syria and urged him to do the same in Lebanon.
According to an American official, the U.S. president told the prime minister that the presence of Israel Defense Forces troops in Syria is creating tensions and could lead to an escalation. The remarks came shortly after an unusual incident in the area in which fire was directed at an IDF post in Syria, prompting the military to respond by striking in the buffer zone.
“They don't want you there. You should redeploy,” Trump told Netanyahu, according to the American official, who added that the same applied to Lebanon.
The conversation between Trump and Netanyahu took place a day after the U.S. president met with his Syrian counterpart, Ahmed al-Sharaa, on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Turkey. The Trump administration had spent months trying to reach a new security agreement between Israel and Syria but ultimately concluded that Netanyahu was unwilling to make the concessions sought by the administration. According to American officials, one of those concessions was a gradual withdrawal of IDF forces from Syrian territory seized after the collapse of Bashar Assad’s regime in December 2024.