Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a press conference on Monday evening, his first in three months, following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran to end the war, during which the prime minister asserted that the fighting was successful but admitted he still does not know what is written in the deal.
Israel was sidelined entirely throughout the negotiating process, a fact that was highlighted when Netanyahu informed a reporter that Israel does not yet know the details of the deal, which is to be formally signed in Switzerland on Friday after a digital signing on Sunday night.
Despite being forced by US President Donald Trump to halt fighting against Iran and acquiesce to demands from Washington when tackling Hezbollah, Netanyahu opened his press conference with an assertive defense of what he portrayed as the success of the six-week US-Israeli offensive against Iran, which he said had prevented Israel’s “annihilation” by a nuclear Iran.
“With an agreement or without an agreement, Iran will not have nuclear weapons — not today and not tomorrow. As long as I am prime minister of Israel, it will not happen,” he declared, insisting that this was his “life’s mission.”
The premier, who is facing mounting domestic backlash — including from within his own government — over the US-dictated terms for the apparent end of the war, reiterated his assertion that the nuclear threat from Iran had been an “immediate danger,” which Israel successfully removed “together with our American friends.”
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“We launched the largest attack operation in Israel’s history,” Netanyahu bragged, listing what he said were Israel’s accomplishments.
Vehicles move along a highway past a war memorial statue and a billboard depicting Iran’s late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with plumes of black smoke billowing, in Tehran on March 8, 2026. (AFP)
“We targeted the nuclear scientists; we eliminated the leaders of the terror regime; we crushed the nuclear facilities; we destroyed missiles and the vast majority of the factories that produce missiles,” he said. “We struck countless military industries and infrastructures. We destroyed their navy, their air force. We eliminated base commanders who massacred the Iranian people. We caused enormous damage — [some] estimate it in the hundreds of billions of dollars, some estimate it at even close to a trillion dollars — to Iran’s economy.”
His remarks echoed a previous speech he gave just under a year ago in June 2025, following the conclusion of Israel’s first, 12-day war with Iran.
At the time, the prime minister asserted that Israel had “sent Iran’s nuclear program down the drain,” and scored a “historic victory” that would “abide for generations.”
Less than 12 months later, Netanyahu declared that Israel had once again “removed, for years to come, this danger hanging over us of the elimination of Israel’s population.”
“This is what we did,” the prime minister continued, “we saved the State of Israel from annihilation.”
Iranians drive past a huge billboard carrying the image of the slain Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, killed in February 2026 in a military attack by the US and Israel on Iran, in a street in Tehran on May 5, 2026. (AFP)
Asked by a reporter about his declared objective of removing the threat “posed by Iran’s regime” — and why, three months later, the end of the campaign is being declared while that regime remains intact — Netanyahu rejected the premise that things went wrong and that a core goal of the campaign had gone unfilled.
“It did not go wrong at all. I defined the goals — and the cabinet defined the goals — differently from what you said,” Netanyahu told the reporter.
“We said we wanted to remove an existential danger from over us: first, the nuclear danger — and we did that. We said we wanted to remove from over us the [ballistic missile] danger — and we did that. And we said we wanted to create the conditions that would allow the Iranian people, should they wish, to remove from themselves this terror regime,” Netanyahu said.
“Iran is in a very difficult economic situation. We struck every possible infrastructure there. The damage is enormous. There are cracks within this regime as well,” he added. “Can I tell you when this regime will fall? I do not know. Could I have told you when the Soviet regime would fall? No. I cannot tell you.”
Both the US and Israel had been somewhat vague when laying out war aims at the outset of the campaign, but Israel consistently stressed the threat from Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, as well as from its proxy network, at times, adding the goal of “creating the conditions” for regime change in Iran.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds a press conference at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, June 15, 2026. (Olivier Fitoussi/POOL)
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