Israeli officials shared intelligence with the United States on Thursday revealing a new Iranian plot to assassinate President Donald Trump, a disclosure that landed amid open threats from Tehran and a rapidly deteriorating ceasefire between the two nations.
The intelligence transfer, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Just the News, came the same day Trump spoke by phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister's office said the two leaders agreed to continue "coordination between the countries." The Israeli embassy in Washington declined to comment, and the White House referred reporters to remarks Trump had made the day before.
Details of the alleged plot were not immediately clear. But the warning arrived against a backdrop that left little to the imagination: Iranian mourners at the funeral of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei displayed banners reading "WE WILL KILL TRUMP" and chanted for the president's death. Other signs named Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Netanyahu.
Trump addressed the threat Wednesday while traveling from Turkey back to the United States. His tone was matter-of-fact, the language of a man who has faced this kind of danger before and expects to face it again.
"They want to take out the U.S. leader, me. I'm on every list. I saw this morning, I'm on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I've been a little bit lucky, but that maybe doesn't last very long."
The president did not appear rattled. He framed the threat as an ongoing reality of his position, not a fresh crisis. Fox News reported that Iran has repeatedly vowed retaliation against Trump over the 2020 U.S. strike that killed IRGC General Qasem Soleimani, and that this latest intelligence represented at least the third known Iranian government-linked plot against the president.
The Iranian regime's hostility toward Trump has escalated well beyond diplomatic posturing. The funeral banners alone would constitute an extraordinary provocation from any government. From a regime actively pursuing nuclear capability and attacking commercial shipping, they read as something closer to a declaration.
The assassination plot surfaced during a week in which the fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire collapsed entirely. Earlier in the week, Iran attacked three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump declared the ceasefire "over" on Wednesday, and the United States retaliated against Iranian targets.
The sequence matters. Tehran struck first, hitting commercial ships in one of the world's most critical shipping lanes. The U.S. responded with force. And while those strikes were still reverberating, Israel delivered intelligence that Iran was simultaneously plotting to kill the American president.
The U.S. military response to the Strait of Hormuz attacks signaled that the administration was not interested in absorbing provocations quietly. But the assassination intelligence adds a dimension that goes beyond conventional military escalation.
The president went further than acknowledging the threat. He revealed that he has left standing orders in the event Iran succeeds.
The Washington Examiner reported that Trump told reporters he has written instructions for a massive bombing campaign against Iran should he be assassinated. His words were blunt:
"I've left instructions, if anything happens, to just literally bomb them at levels that they've never seen before."
Trump also downplayed the specific Israeli intelligence as nothing new, telling reporters he has been "No. 1" on Iran's kill list "for a long time."
That posture, treating the threat as a known cost of leadership rather than an emergency, stands in sharp contrast to the diplomatic language still coming from some quarters. A memorandum of understanding with Iran was reportedly still in effect at the time of the latest plot, as National Review noted, raising the question of what exactly such agreements are worth when one party is simultaneously planning to murder the other's head of state.
The threat environment also exposed a practical vulnerability. National Review reported that Trump's new Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 Air Force One lacks the advanced antimissile capabilities and defensive countermeasures present on the older presidential aircraft. Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the gap was concerning given the Iran situation, adding that he was "surprised to see this plane used outside the U.S."
The Secret Service ultimately pushed Trump to return from Turkey aboard the legacy Air Force One, the more hardened aircraft. The U.S. Air Force acknowledged that "trades" had been made on "some of the less commonly used mission sets" in the new plane, though it insisted no risk was taken on core security or communications.
That a sitting president had to switch aircraft mid-trip because his new plane couldn't adequately protect him from a known state adversary is a detail that deserves more scrutiny than it has received.
Not everyone accepted the intelligence at face value. The Washington Free Beacon reported that CAIR executive director Nihad Awad promoted a conspiracy theory suggesting Israel itself had orchestrated the assassination plot to "ignite another war" in the Middle East. Awad, who previously said he was "happy to see" the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and claimed Israel "does not have the right to self-defense", has a long record of anti-Israel statements. He is also a financial donor to several "Squad" members in Congress.
The suggestion that Israel would fabricate an assassination plot against the president of its closest ally in order to start a war is the kind of claim that collapses under its own weight. But it circulated anyway, a reminder that some corners of American political life will reflexively blame Israel for anything, including warning the United States that its president is in danger.
Several important questions remain open. The specific details of the plot, its stage of development, the operatives involved, the method, have not been publicly disclosed. The channel through which Israel delivered the intelligence, and which U.S. agencies received it, are also unclear. The circumstances of Khamenei's death, referenced repeatedly in coverage of the funeral threats, have not been detailed in available reporting.
The funeral itself became a flashpoint, with Trump warning publicly about U.S. strike capability against Iranian leaders gathered at the event. That the regime's mourners responded with open death threats against the president, his vice president, and his defense secretary tells you everything about the nature of the counterparty.
Trump and Netanyahu's Thursday call, with its emphasis on continued coordination, suggests both governments view the threat as serious and ongoing. Whether that coordination translates into preemptive action or simply heightened defensive posture remains to be seen.
When a regime holds a state funeral where the crowd chants for your death, and your closest ally in the region tells you the regime is actively working to make it happen, the time for diplomatic patience has long since passed. The question now is not whether Iran means what it says. It's whether anyone still pretends otherwise.
