Trump denies Israel forced US to join war against Iran

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Mar 3, 2026

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President Donald Trump on Tuesday denied that Israel forced the U.S. to join the war against Iran by planning to launch its own assault on Tehran.

Distancing himself from remarks made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump insisted that he alone was the driving force to launch the war against the Islamic Republic.

“It was my opinion that they were going to attack first (and) I didn’t want that to happen,” Trump said.

“If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” Trump added. “(Israel) didn’t pressure me to strike Iran — maybe I was the one who pressured them.”

Trump proclaimed the four-day joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign a rousing success during a White House meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

He predicted Iran would struggle to effectively resist the attack as its leadership is killed and its military capability is degraded, including the decimation of its navy and air force.

“Virtually everything they had has been knocked out,” Trump said.

Trump effectively denied the claim from Rubio on Monday that the U.S. launched strikes because Israel had informed the White House that it was preparing to attack Tehran with or without U.S. help.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio said. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

The shifting explanation for the launch of war came as the death toll and damage continued to rise from the war that threatens to engulf the Middle East.

The U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia came under attack by Iranian drones and the U.S. warned American citizens to leave the entire Middle East, although plane travel was still mostly shut down across the busy Gulf region and Israel.

At least six American service members have been killed so far.

Iran has fired dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel, setting off air raid sirens across the country for days. The pace of the attacks on Israel appeared to be slowing Tuesday, perhaps because of the impact of the attacks on Iran, but some missiles have landed, killing 11 people in all.

Nearly 800 people have been killed in Iran and more than 50 in southern Lebanon, where Israel is attacking the pro-Iranian militant Hezbollah group.

Israel claimed it struck a meeting of a high-level gathering of Iranian officials that had aimed to select a new supreme leader after the killing of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war Saturday.

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