Two top Iranian negotiators were reportedly removed from the U.S.-Israeli target list, but Israel remained bent on assassinating them, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in 2024 during confirmations of President Masoud Pezeshkian’s cabinet. (Mehr News Agency/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
Trump administration officials reportedly believed that the Israeli government intended to assassinate Iran’s top negotiators — including the country’s foreign minister — during peace talks with the U.S., in an effort to sabotage diplomacy.
The New York Times reported Thursday that
“American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament — spiked during delicate ceasefire negotiations that began in April.”
Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, Iran’s Parliament speaker, in December 2025. (Mehr News Agency/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
In response, the U.S. “went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials,” according to the Times, which cited unnamed current and former American officials.
The U.S. and Israel have killed dozens of top Iranian officials since launching their illegal joint war in late February.
But the allied countries reportedly removed Araghchi and Ghalibaf from their target list in late March, opening the possibility of high-level negotiations to end the war.
But Israel remained bent on targeting the negotiators, according to the Times, whose reporting was later corroborated by The Washington Post.
The Times detailed one dramatic incident in April, when Ghalibaf was planning to travel to Pakistan’s capital to meet with U.S. Vice President JD Vance:
“Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian airplanes carrying a delegation of more than 70 Iranians from the border of Iran to Islamabad and back again when the session was over.
But on the way back to Tehran, an Israeli security threat emerged.
Iran’s security forces notified the plane carrying Mr. Ghalibaf back to Tehran that they had picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq, the two officials said.
Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser for Mr. Ghalibaf, who accompanied him to Islamabad, confirmed this account on his social media page. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Mashhad, Iran’s closest airport to the Pakistani border, and the Iranian delegation traveled some eight hours by land back to Tehran, Mr. Mohammadi and the two officials said.”
The Post reported that “cracks emerged” between the U.S. and Israeli approaches to the war following Israel’s assassination of top Iranian national security official Ali Larijani in March.
“They’ve wiped out everybody,” Trump told reporters in late March, suggesting Israel’s assassination campaign was making it difficult to find potential negotiating partners.
Trump signing the memorandum of understanding with Iran at the Palace of Versailles on June 17 as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio looks on. (White House /Daniel Torok)
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in response to the new reporting that
“Israel is a state that, on paper, is a U.S. partner, but in reality is so extreme in its obsession to undermine U.S. diplomacy that it even tries to assassinate those the U.S. engages with in crucial negotiations.”
“I can’t recall a government as terrified of peace as the one running Israel,” Parsi added.
At present, the Israeli government — led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu— is endangering tenuous U.S.-Iran peace talks with its continued occupation of and assault on Lebanon, which Iran has highlighted as a key factor in the negotiations.
Visiting occupied southern Lebanon earlier this week, Netanyahu declared to Israeli troops that “our insistence is that we will not leave… until the threat is removed.”
Trump, or right, on Dec. 29, 2025, receives news at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, that Netanyahu, facing him across the table, will award him the Israel Prize, (White House /Daniel Torok)
Parsi wrote earlier this week that “beyond his long-standing desire to use American force to subjugate Iran to Israeli domination and achieve a regional balance favorable to Israel,” Netanyahu “now also has stark political and personal reasons to restart the war” with Iran.
“The [U.S. and Iran’s memorandum of understanding] has come at a steep political cost for Netanyahu,” wrote Parsi.
“His prospects for reelection in October are weaker than they have been in months. Once seen as the Israeli leader uniquely capable of delivering President Trump, he now confronts the prospect that both the war and the ensuing diplomacy will leave Israel in a strategically weaker position—undermining the very case he has made for his leadership.”
“And of course,” Parsi added, “if he loses the elections, he will likely spend the next few years in jail, as he will lose his immunity as prime minister and face trial over corruption charges.”
Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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On the Katie Halper Show, Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi and Dennis Kucinich were talking about the incident described in the NYT suggesting that peace negotiators from Iran be assassinated. I don’t think the conversation is biased and it comes from the participants of a volatile situation.
This interview is informative and true.
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPLsZnHHypM
This article, like so many others, shows how certain leaders create world instability by ignoring basic truths and relying on force instead of responsibility. When those in power remove the very people needed for dialogue, they block any real path to peace and deepen global disorder.
Humanity as a whole needs to return to the simple foundations of universal truth and goodwill, a code of behaviour encoded in every heart, because only by upholding these basic principles can we move past the destructive patterns created by those who refuse to see them. I believe this collective inner shift towards what is good and true is becoming more visible and obvious to many in the world.
Gives new meaning to Vance’s “harsh words” for the Israeli gov’t:
— that “you cannot kill your way out of solving every national security problem that you have” —
Ori Goldberg reports for +972: 7/3/26
+ As Iran and the U.S. talk, Israel chooses eternal war
hxxps://www.972mag.com/us-iran-talks-israel-eternal-war/
When asked when “the war” would be over, Netanyahu replied: “The pursuit of total victory will never be over. If you want to live in the world and in the Middle East you have to be very, very strong.”
This time, however, he made it clear that not even the world was safe from Israel’s wrath. Why? Because the world had abandoned Israel.
Israel’s resources will dwindle, and sooner rather than later it will discover itself friendless. The most important message sent by Israel — by its prime minister as well as the great majority of its Jewish citizenry — is that the country is bowing out of any international horizon. It no longer sees itself bound by any laws or rules other than those of the eternal war it claims to be fighting.
Netanyahu provided a paradigmatic articulation of Israel’s post-October 7 national security doctrine. The war will never be over. War is the condition of life — not of a good life, but of life as such.
bibi netanyahu is a maddog ancient rabbis studied rabies to protect their communities are they still looking for a cure?
Pepe Escobar was the first to reveal this information ab a week and a half ago.
Jew supremacy is basically a criminal ideology that says Jews can act with impunity when inflicting the most gruesome violence against us cattle. If you think that’s too hyperbolic, just pick up Israel Shahak’s incredible book “Jewish History, Jewish Religion” as it’s probably the most important book on the planet right now. Came out c. 1995 and is not necessarily a very long read.
Either we effectively deal with this problem humanely or the U.S. and most of the rest of the world is going to fall apart.
Pepe was talking about the assassination of Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir.
Read Pepe’s July 3rd Twitter post entitled “the price of being first is often being alone.”
July 3 was not before this article was published and a day after the NYT story.
This article is based on highly unreliable sources. The NYT, the WaPo, and an American government linked NGO. All published by the Democratic Party linked CD. The ‘news’ part of this article cites, as is typical for America, ‘unnamed sources.’
Not saying that it isn’t true. But, it requires verification from outside the normal American BS machine. It is also suspect because it appears to continue the obvious Trump campaign to put fake distance between himself and Netanyahu for Trump’s domestic political campaign. This has all the indications of being a part of the general manipulation of the American people in favor of supporting Israel. Today, given that the American people are reacting against Israeli horror, this is often done by misdirection. Fake differences revealed in fake exposes from fake news, often on a Friday “take out the trash day”. But, what does not change is the money flowing to Israel, nor the fact that the US operates with Israel closely on a military basis.
To see evidence of a real break between the USA and Israel, show me either the money being diverted to help Americans, or the American military keeping its planes and missiles on the ground refusing to defend Israel at American taxpayer expense. Until then, this is put in the same ‘unlikely’ category as the rest of the stuff from ‘unnamed sources’ that regularly flows out of the NYT and the WaPo and the ‘American government backed NGO’s’ which is usually a euphemism for “CIA”. Published by the tool of the CIA-Democrats.
THANK YOU. Best comment I have seen on this site in a long time. This article is like something you might hear on DemocracyNow or somesuch, not serious introspective or investigative journalism. The only interest the US in current form has in any “agreement” (“deal”, “mou”, “treaty”, etc) with Iran is when, where, and how it is to be broken. Period.