Trump denies Israel dragged U.S. into Iran war, claims ‘I might have forced their hands’

US has sunk ‘the entire’ Iranian Navy, says CENTCOM chief Adm. Cooper: ‘We’ve just begun’

All Israel News Staff | Published: March 4, 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a global leadership summit on the end of the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas at the Tonino Lamborghini International Convention Center in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Monday, October 13, 2025. Photo by Daniel Torok –Flickr, Public Domain, Wikipedia

U.S. President Donald Trump denied that Israel had forced the U.S. into launching military strikes on Iran on Tuesday, claiming that, if anything, it was he who may have forced Israel, based on his belief that Iran was planning a preemptive attack.

Asked by a reporter if Israel had forced his hand into attacking Iran, Trump strongly denied the claim.

“No, I might have forced their hands. You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday during a meeting with Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“They were going to attack. If we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first,” Trump claimed. “I felt strongly about that.”

“So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he added. “But Israel was ready, and we were ready.”

President Trump’s comments came following political uproar in the U.S. after Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to say that the U.S. launched military operations in Iran after learning that Israel was planning to strike independently.

On Monday, ahead of a briefing of the “Gang of Eight” group of congressional leaders from both parties, Rubio told a group of reporters, “First, it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States.”

Rubio stated that the Iranian regime had already given instructions to target U.S. positions in the region, and that U.S. leaders assessed that “if we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties.”

However, additional comments by Rubio in that briefing were omitted from some reports. Answering a follow-up question, Rubio stated the operation in Iran “needed to happen.”

“That’s a question of why now?” Rubio stated. “This operation needed to happen because Iran, in about a year, or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it, because they could hold the whole world hostage.”

A report in Israel’s Channel 12 News claims that President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke around 15 times in the two months preceding the launch of strikes on Iran. According to the report, President Trump gave the strikes a green light after determining that Iran would not make any compromises in the nuclear negotiations.

Meanwhile, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) head Admiral Brad Cooper, in a briefing early Wednesday morning, said the operations in Iran are ahead of original planning.

“We are seeing Iran’s ability to hit us and our partners, is declining, while our combat power, on the other hand, is building. And my overall operational assessment is that we are ahead of our game plan,” Admiral Cooper stated.

Admiral Cooper referred to the joint strikes by the U.S. and Israeli air forces, saying, “Operationally, the two most powerful air forces in the world, the US and Israel, are dominating the skies of the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.”

He noted that the buildup of U.S. forces in the region is “the largest buildup by the U.S. in the Middle East in a generation.”

Referring to the war against Iraq in 2003, Cooper said, “Many of you may remember the ‘Shock and Awe’ strikes of 2003. The first 24 hours of this operation were nearly double the scale.”

“We’re less than 100 hours into this operation and we’ve already struck nearly 2,000 targets with more than 2,000 munitions,” Admiral Cooper noted. “We have severely degraded Iran’s air defenses and destroyed hundreds of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers and drones, and in simple terms were focused on shooting all the things that can shoot at us.”

He noted that the U.S. has devastated the Iranian naval forces in the Persian Gulf.

“We are also sinking the Iranian Navy, the entire Navy,” Cooper claimed. “Thus far, we’ve destroyed 17 Iranian ships, including the most operational Iranian submarine that now has a hole in its side. For decades, the Iranian regime has harassed international shipping. Today, there’s not a single Iranian ship underway in the Arabian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, or Gulf of Oman, and we will not stop.”

Cooper said the U.S. and Israel are “hunting Iran’s last remaining mobile ballistic missile launchers to eliminate what I would characterize as their lingering launch capability.”

He said that the Islamic Republic “has launched over 500 ballistic missiles and over 2,000 drones,” while “ indiscriminately targeting civilians.”

Echoing comments by President Trump that the war in Iran could take weeks, Admiral Cooper concluded by saying, “We’ve just begun.”