President Trump acknowledged on Thursday that there was a significant risk that Israel could soon attack Iran, but he said that “I don’t want them going in” while some progress was still possible on an agreement to shut down Iran’s easiest pathway to building a nuclear weapon.
Mr. Trump said that an attack was likely to destroy the chances for a diplomatic solution. “I think it would blow it,” he said, before arguing the other side of the equation, saying it “might help it actually, but it could also blow it.”
His statement came just hours after the administration announced that Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, planned to meet the Iranian foreign minister in Oman on Sunday for another negotiating session.
The somewhat contradictory signals from the White House came amid growing signs that Israel was preparing for a strike of unknown proportions against Iranian sites. Mr. Trump refused to give details of a conversation he held on Monday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or to say whether, in that conversation, he had offered any kind of go-ahead to the Israeli leader to proceed with a strike. In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has said that he has urged Mr. Netanyahu to hold off on any military action while negotiations were underway.
Nonetheless, when asked on Thursday if an attack could happen very soon, he said: “I don’t want to say imminent, but it’s something that could very well happen.” Several hours later, in a social media post, he wrote that the administration was “committed to a Diplomatic Resolution of the Iran Nuclear issue.”
Mr. Trump’s statements left American and European intelligence officials searching for any signs that Israel was getting ready, including evidence that it was massing the aircraft and missiles that would be needed for any sustained assault on Iran’s remaining air defenses, its missile stores and its nuclear sites.
But there was also speculation among many officials that Israel and the United States may be engaged in coercive diplomacy. If Mr. Witkoff’s meeting goes ahead, officials said, his message to Iran would most likely be a simple one: Tehran will lose its ability to enrich uranium one way or the other, either in a negotiated settlement that would gradually turn the making of fuel over to a multination consortium operating outside of Iran, or through an Israeli strike.
Hours before Mr. Trump spoke, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body that inspects nuclear programs to assure there is no diversion of fuel for weapons use, condemned Iran in a resolution for failing to answer questions that have mounted in recent years about possible past military nuclear activity at several sites around the country. In response, Iranian officials vowed to produce even more near-bomb-grade uranium and to open a third nuclear enrichment site, deep underground.
“The process to equip the machines will begin, and once it is completed, we will begin enrichment,” Mohammad Eslami, the leader of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, declared after the vote.
He did not say where the new underground site was. But intelligence officials and outside experts said they assumed he was referring to a site south of Iran’s long-existing enrichment facility in Natanz, where satellite imagery has documented the digging of new tunnels. American and Israeli intelligence officials have believed that was Tehran’s newest and biggest effort to construct new nuclear facilities that are so deep in the mountains that they could withstand bunker-busting bombs, sabotage efforts on the ground, and cyberattacks.
Mr. Eslami also said that Iran was replacing a generation of old centrifuges in another underground site, called Fordow, with new nuclear centrifuges that can enrich uranium far more efficiently. “They are constantly threatening us, they must know that our nuclear industry is now part of Iranian lives,” he said.
But just as important is what Iran did not say or do on Thursday. It did not declare that it was withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bars it from building nuclear weapons. (Israel, which is believed to possess about 100 nuclear weapons, has never signed the treaty, nor have India and Pakistan. North Korea withdrew two decades ago.) No inspectors were expelled or more cameras turned off, officials said.
In recent days, Iran has rejected the Trump administration’s central demand: that its vast infrastructure for enriching uranium, one of two pathways to building a nuclear weapon, must be shut down and ultimately dismantled. Under a proposal Mr. Witkoff sent to his Iranian counterparts two weeks ago, the country would be able to make that transition slowly, continuing to produce fuel until the international consortium was ready to take its place. That could take upward of a decade, some nuclear experts say.
Mr. Netanyahu, with his shaky governing coalition showing new signs of unraveling, has made it clear he has little interest in such solutions. Three times over the past decade or so he has gone to the edge of ordering military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, only to pull back at the last moment. In recent days he has shown every sign of being eager to pull the trigger, even if it risks Mr. Trump’s wrath.
The signs of preparation in the Middle East were everywhere, but they also seemed to lack an air of urgency.
The 40,000 U.S. military personnel in the Persian Gulf and broader region were on higher alert Thursday amid reports of a possible imminent strike, and the inevitable retaliation that would follow.
At bases around the region, U.S. troops were conducting “bunker dive” drills — essentially air raid drills should U.S. bases come under retaliatory Iranian fire. Military planners were weighing how and when to move some military aircraft out of the immediate area, to reduce the chance of being attacked.
In Iraq, where Iranian influence is strong, some diplomats were withdrawn, “nonessential personnel” at the embassy were preparing to leave, and U.S. forces authorized the voluntary departure of dependents, mostly Navy and Marine families in Bahrain. But if commanders had thought an attack was truly imminent, several officials said, they probably would have ordered a mandatory evacuation.
Pentagon officials reported they have made no major changes to U.S. forces in recent days. The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, with 60 aircraft, including F-35 fighters, currently in the Arabian Sea, appeared to be staying in its position. The United States also has several dozen attack and fighter jets deployed around the Gulf region and Middle East. Those aircraft were used extensively in the defense of Israel during the two Iranian missile strikes last year, which failed to do much damage.
But in Jerusalem, the U.S. Embassy restricted the movement of employees on Thursday, in a directive to employees and their families that reflected growing concern about potential Iranian retaliation should Israel proceed with a strike. The restrictions bar travel outside the greater Tel Aviv area, Jerusalem and Beersheba, with some exceptions, the embassy said on its website.
The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, told an Israeli news outlet this week that he did not believe it was “likely” that Israel would strike Iran without receiving a “green light” from the Trump administration.
The office of Mr. Netanyahu of Israel did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday about the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran. The Israeli military declined to comment.
Reporting was contributed by Farnaz Fassihi in New York, and Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer in Jerusalem.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
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