Netanyahu tells settlers no deal is possible with Iran’s ‘savages’

Benjamin Netanyahu told an audience of West Bank settlers on Tuesday night that Israel cannot reach an agreement with the people who run Iran. “I doubt that you can make a deal with that bunch over there, with those savages. I’m telling you: You can’t make a deal,” he said, recounting a July meeting with President Donald Trump. His office later released the Hebrew video.

The event was organised by the Binyamin Regional Council. AFP placed it at a settlement gathering. Netanyahu said he had walked Trump through three choices. The first was a deal. Israel would not object to a good one, he said, but he did not believe one was available. The second was military action. “We are there, we will defend ourselves, and we will not allow Iran to attack us,” he said, adding that any Iranian strike would be answered more heavily than anything Tehran had already taken.

The third choice was to tighten the siege. He praised Trump for doing that “in a very, very, very strong way,” and for aiming not only at Iran but at “those who help that regime, that terrible dictatorship.”

What Washington did this week

On 24 August the US Treasury launched Operation Economic Outcast. Secretary Scott Bessent said the aim was to cut every economic line that still feeds the Iranian state. Trump called the campaign “economic D-Day.” On Wednesday he told radio host Glenn Beck that the pressure was “going toward a very big victory.”

The war opened on 28 February with joint US-Israeli strikes. A ceasefire in April followed public resistance in the United States and a spike in oil prices. Talks to turn that pause into a wider settlement, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lock in a nuclear limit have stalled for about ten weeks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told counterparts that new US strikes are not expected “for the time being,” while keeping the option if Iran hits first.

Netanyahu spent years attacking the 2015 nuclear deal. He has been more careful with Trump. Tuesday’s remarks drop that care on the diplomacy track while staying aligned on sanctions. He is telling his own base that a bargain with the current leadership in Tehran is not a real option, and telling Washington that the siege on third-country helpers is the path he prefers.

Where this leaves the file

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said this week that the new US sanctions will achieve nothing. Tehran is still talking to Oman about a commercial lane in the strait. Those talks and Netanyahu’s speech sit on opposite premises. One assumes a workable arrangement with the present Iranian government. The other assumes that government cannot be a counterpart.

The July White House meeting is now the reference point both men use. Netanyahu says he offered three options there. Trump has picked the third in public this week. The first option, a deal, is the one Netanyahu has now called impossible in front of a settlement audience. That sentence will be quoted in Tehran, in European foreign ministries and in any future hearing on who closed the diplomatic door.