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Less than 48 hours before missiles struck Tehran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a pivotal phone call to President Donald Trump that would ultimately seal Iran's fate. According to three sources briefed on the conversation, Netanyahu pressed Trump on a closing window of opportunity — fresh intelligence had revealed that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian officials would gather at his compound earlier than expected, making them vulnerable to a decisive strike.
Trump had already signaled openness to a military operation against Iran, with U.S. forces having quietly built up a regional presence for weeks. But Netanyahu's closing argument — framing the moment as a historic chance to eliminate a leader who had allegedly orchestrated assassination plots against Trump himself — appeared to accelerate the president's final decision. On February 27, Trump ordered the launch of Operation Epic Fury. The first bombs landed the following morning, and by that evening, Trump announced Khamenei was dead.
The road to this moment had been building for months. A joint U.S.-Israeli strike in June had already targeted Iran's nuclear and missile infrastructure. But Netanyahu, visiting Mar-a-Lago in December, signaled dissatisfaction with those results. A February visit to Washington deepened the push, with the Israeli leader warning of Iran's expanding ballistic missile capabilities — including the potential to eventually threaten U.S. soil.
Despite CIA assessments warning that Khamenei's death would likely bring an even harder-line successor to power, Trump moved forward. That prediction has since proven accurate — Khamenei's son Mojtaba, regarded as more fiercely anti-American than his father, now leads Iran.
The operation has triggered Iranian counterstrikes, thousands of civilian casualties, disrupted global shipping lanes, and sent oil prices surging — consequences officials had warned about well before the first bomb fell.
