Channel 12 reports Netanyahu asked Trump to restart the Iran war before Israel votes

Channel 12 reported on Tuesday 13 October, citing officials familiar with the talks, that Netanyahu urged Donald Trump last week to renew fighting against Iran before Israel’s 27 October election and the 3 November US midterms, citing Iranian steps in the nuclear field. US officials told the network they came away believing Netanyahu wanted a strike before the Israeli vote. An American source said Netanyahu “has discussed the issue… several times” and that Trump told him he could “go ahead and prepare” without committing — the source said Trump could order an attack now, later or never. A senior Israeli official said Trump initially appeared ready to green-light it and then backtracked. Netanyahu has told Israeli security chiefs it was Trump who raised the idea. The PMO’s on-the-record reply addressed process, not content: “The prime minister maintains an ongoing dialogue with President Trump and senior US administration officials, and does not address the content of the conversations between them.” Trump, the same cycle: “We’ll make a decision on Iran very soon.”

The same report said Israeli security officials see no change in the intelligence picture on Iran that would justify a joint operation in the next two to three weeks, and that IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir has warned that renewed fighting before the vote could lead to the election being postponed. Zamir, speaking Wednesday at Central Command headquarters, said that “in light of the numerous alerts across all fronts and the sensitivity of this period, the potential for escalation has increased,” and that the IDF is “at a high level of readiness to transition to broad offensive operations.” Haaretz framed him as echoing Netanyahu, who repeated this week the claim that Israel’s enemies are seeking to attack before the election. On the Lebanese Yellow Line the same morning, Defence Minister Israel Katz said that if Hezbollah joins an Iranian attack it “will lose additional territory in southern Lebanon, in the areas of Nabatieh and the Litani, which will become part of Israel’s permanent security zone,” adding that Dahiyeh “will also be evacuated” and “more than one million Shias will become displaced in Lebanon.”

Assessment: The most useful scepticism on Katz came from the Jerusalem Post’s own defence desk, which noted this is the first time in months an Israeli official has named Nabatieh specifically — an objective shelved when Trump imposed the ceasefire — and wrote that many of Katz’s election-season threats “have been for political consumption and few, so far, have led to actual new major military action.” Read the three statements together and the pattern is a campaign need for an imminent threat and a military establishment declining to supply one. Zamir’s warning that war could force a postponement is the sharpest item here: it is a chief of staff putting the electoral consequence of escalation on the record before it happens.