US officials believed Israel was plotting to assassinate Iranian negotiators: NYT

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - WASHINGTON — US officials believed that Israel was planning to assassinate top Iranian negotiators while Washington and Tehran were engaged in delicate talks to end the war in the Middle East, according to US media reports.

The New York Times reported on Thursday quoting American officials that the US was concerned that any assassination attempt could put the fragile ceasefire with Iran into jeopardy, and went as far as getting other countries to warn Iran of the possible attempt on their diplomats’ lives.

Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf were on Israel’s hit list, though they were temporarily removed from it when the US started negotiations, the Wall Street Journal reported.

US officials acknowledged that during the intense phase of the war, Araghchi and Ghalibaf, as senior government officials, could have been legitimate targets for Israel, which was intent on toppling Iran’s hard-line government. But after the negotiations started in earnest in April, American officials believed that any attempt to kill the Iranian leaders would end the talks and reignite the fighting.

The war began on Feb. 28 with an Israeli strike that killed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top officials, based in part on US intelligence.

While US strikes focused on Iran’s navy and missile forces, Israel prioritized targeting the leadership in the early phase of the war, intent on killing as many high-ranking officials as it could.

That included killing potentially more pragmatic leaders that the Trump administration had hoped to negotiate with, such as Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, and Kamal Kharazi, a former Iranian foreign minister. Both men were involved in the negotiations with the United States when they were killed in Israeli airstrikes.

With negotiations set to be held in Islamabad in April, Tehran sought assurance from the Americans, through Pakistani and Qatari intermediaries, that no covert operations against their delegation would be carried out by Israel.

The NYT reported that airplanes carrying the Iranian delegation for peace talks were escorted by Pakistani fighter jets on the way to Islamabad and back. On the way back to Tehran, Iranian security forces picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane carrying Ghalibaf and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq.

Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to the diplomat, who had accompanied him to Islamabad, said that the plane made an emergency landing in Pakistan’s Mashhad after being informed of the intelligence and the diplomat made the rest of the journey by land.

Israel sees the ceasefire as a threat to its aims, worrying that an agreement between them would put billions of dollars into Iran, allowing it to quickly rebuild after the war, without meaningfully restricting its nuclear ambitions.

Ghalibaf on Friday warned that Tehran will respond in kind if the US and Israel fail to uphold the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreed between Washington and Tehran last month.

“We will firmly demand the full implementation of the understandings that have been reached,” ISNA state media quoted Ghalibaf as saying during a meeting with his Belarusian counterpart Igor Sergeyenko.

“If the United States and the Zionist regime do not honor their commitments, the Islamic Republic of Iran will resume its proportionate measures,” he said.