In June 2025, after the United States struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in Operation Rising Lion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the Israeli people. “I promised you that Iran’s nuclear facilities would be destroyed, one way or another. This promise was kept.” On Sunday night, however, he was already speaking about enrichment facilities that still need to be neutralized.
"It's not over, because there's still nuclear material, enriched-- uranium that has to be taken out of-- Iran. There are still-- enrichment sites that have to be dismantled. There are still proxies that-- Iran supports. There are ballistic missiles that they still-- want to produce. Now, we've degraded a lot of it. But all that is still there, and there's work to be done,” Netanyahu said at the start of his interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Ynet asked Netanyahu’s office to explain the gap between the statements. And this is not the only contradiction in Netanyahu’s remarks between Operation Rising Lion and Operation Roaring Lion.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears in his internview on 60 MInutes
(Video: 60 Minutes)
At the end of the previous operation, Netanyahu said: “In the 12 days of Operation Rising Lion we achieved a historic victory, and this victory will be remembered for generations. We have removed two immediate existential threats to us - the threat of nuclear annihilation and the threat of annihilation by 20,000 ballistic missiles. Had we not acted now, the State of Israel would have soon faced the danger of annihilation.”
As he said after Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu also explained at the end of Operation Roaring Lion: “Had we not launched Rising Lion and then Roaring Lion, Iran would long ago have had nuclear weapons and many thousands of missiles to destroy Israel and threaten the existence of us all.” However, unlike his declarations last June that the threat had been removed, this time Netanyahu said: “We have pushed this double existential threat away from us. We set Iran’s terror regime back many years. We shook its foundations. We crushed it.”
Netanyahu’s promises after Rising Lion about removing the existential threat and achieving “a historic victory that will stand for generations” lasted only about eight months, before Israel was required to enter another round of fighting against Iran. After the ceasefire took effect, Netanyahu declared that, together with the United States, “we set out to remove an existential threat from the State of Israel and from the entire free world — and we are carrying out this mission stage by stage, target by target.”
In a statement issued by Netanyahu on behalf of the government after Operation Rising Lion, it said the prime minister had convened the Cabinet “to report that Israel had achieved all the objectives of Rising Lion — and far beyond that.” The government statement said at the time that “in light of achieving the operation's goals, and in full coordination with President Trump, Israel has agreed to the proposal for a bilateral ceasefire.” The government also made clear that “Israel will respond forcefully to any violation of the ceasefire.”
After U.S. President Donald Trump announced the ceasefire in Operation Roaring Lion, Netanyahu said: “We still have objectives to complete — and we will achieve them either by agreement or by renewed fighting. We are prepared to return to fighting at any moment required. Our finger is on the trigger.” He thanked Trump, saying: “The deep friendship between us, the deep friendship between the United States and Israel, is changing the face of the Middle East.” He stressed that the ceasefire had been fully coordinated with Israel, adding: “No, they did not surprise us at the last minute. Now I want to emphasize — this is not the end of the campaign. It is a stop on the way to achieving all our goals.”
Will the Iranians stop laughing?
Meanwhile, with the goals still incomplete, negotiations with Iran are at a dead end. On Sunday, after receiving Iran’s response to the U.S. proposal to end the war, Trump threatened that Iran “will not be laughing anymore.”
“I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called “Representatives.” I don’t like it — TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, effectively publicly rejecting the Iranian proposal.
Sources told Tasnim, an Iranian regime-affiliated news agency, in response: “Trump’s response changes nothing. If he is not satisfied, that is only better. No one in Iran drafts plans to please Trump. The negotiating team drafts them only for the Iranian people.”
Later, Iran regime-affiliated Press TV claimed that the U.S. initiative had been rejected because “it would mean Tehran surrendering to Trump’s excessive demands."