The American VP does not want the Israelis dragging Washington into another conflict, the agency has cited sources as saying
US Vice President J.D. Vance does not support his country’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and Iran, Reuters has reported, citing two informed sources.
A Reuters article revealing his stance came out on Saturday, hours before US President Donald Trump ordered strikes on Iran’s Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan nuclear sites.
According to the sources, Vance made his opinion clear during a “tense” phone call between Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials from Washington and West Jerusalem on Thursday.
Netanyahu and his associates used the exchange to try to persuade the US president to give up on the two-week deadline that he had given to Tehran to reach a deal on the country’s nuclear program and immediately take part in the Israeli attacks on Iran, the report read.
The Israelis argued that there is only a limited window of opportunity to use the American bunker-busting bombs against Iran’s deeply-buried Fordow facility, it said.
During the call, the Iraq War veteran “pushed back” against West Jerusalem’s demands, insisting that Washington “should not be directly involved” in the conflict, the sources claimed.
His concern was that “the Israelis were going to drag the country into war,” they added.
Vance appeared beside Trump when the president delivered a televised address from the White House, in which he announced the US strike and claimed that the Iranian nuclear sites have been “completely and totally obliterated.” Tehran claimed that the attacks did not deliver any serious damage.
Social media users later shared screenshots of the vice president from the event, describing his facial expression as “confused” and “not happy at all.”
Later on Sunday, Vance gave an interview to NBC News ‘Meet the Press,’ saying that “we do not want war with Iran. We actually want peace, but we want peace in the context of them not having a nuclear weapons program.”
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Iranian media assesses damage from US attack
If Tehran refrains from targeting US troops in the Middle East in retaliation and gives up on their “nuclear weapons program once and for all, then I think, the president has been very clear, we can have a good relationship with the Iranians. We can have a peaceful situation in that region of the world,” he argued.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Sunday that the US does not have the ability to escape “heavy responses” by Tehran for its “illegal military attack on the peaceful nuclear facilities” in Iran. The IRGC claimed that it has already identified the locations where the planes that took part in the strikes are stationed.
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