US officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Iranian negotiators

WASHINGTON – United States officials believed that Israel might have been plotting to kill Iran’s top negotiators while Washington was engaged with Tehran in delicate talks this spring to reach an interim peace deal, according to current and former US officials.

Killing senior Iranian leaders had been part of Israel’s strategy from the start of the war. But America’s concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials – Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of parliament – spiked during delicate ceasefire negotiations that began in April.

Fearful that an Israeli assassination effort would doom the negotiations, the US, according to some of the officials, went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials.

US officials acknowledged that during the intense phase of the war, Araghchi and Ghalibaf, as senior government officials, could have been legitimate targets for Israel, which was intent on toppling Iran’s hard-line government.

But after the negotiations started in earnest in April, US officials believed any attempt to kill the Iranian leaders would end the talks and reignite the fighting.

The war began on Feb 28 with an Israeli strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top officials, based in part on US intelligence.

While US strikes focused on Iran’s navy and missile forces, Israel prioritised targeting the leadership in the early phase of the war, intent on killing as many high-ranking officials as it could.

That included killing potentially more pragmatic leaders that the Trump administration had hoped to negotiate with, such as Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, and Kamal Kharazi, a former Iranian foreign minister. Both men were involved in the negotiations with the US when they were killed in Israeli airstrikes.

The Trump administration’s suspicions about the possible Israeli plot to kill the two top negotiators show how the US and Israeli war aims, which were close at the very beginning of the war, quickly diverged radically.

And while the US wanted a peace agreement, Israel has been sceptical from the initial cessation of hostilities in April.

The initial two-week ceasefire in April was met with grudging Israeli official support and broad public concern in Israel that the US was ending the war too early. Rather than being driven from power, the theocratic government of Iran had become even more hard-line, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had only consolidated its control over the country.

Araghchi and Ghalibaf have been the key officials negotiating with various countries in the region to reach a ceasefire and then a more lasting peace with the US.

In June, the US and Iran reached a framework agreement that sought to open the Strait of Hormuz and set the outline for follow-on talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Officials and commentators in Israel viewed the initial agreement as a disaster because it did not accomplish their country’s war aims of forcing regime change, destroying Iran’s proxy forces and seriously damaging its missile programme.

Israeli officials also worried the agreement would put billions of dollars into Iran, allowing it to quickly rebuild after the war and without meaningfully restricting its nuclear ambitions.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Asked about Israeli plans and the warning to Iran, a US official noted that talks between American and Iranian delegations continue and that Steve Witkoff, a special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had productive meetings in Qatar. President Donald Trump, the official said, wants the peace process “to play out”.

The Wall Street Journal reported in March that Israel had Araghchi and Ghalibaf on a target list, but temporarily removed them as the US discussed beginning negotiations with Iran.

A US official and a Middle East official said the Trump administration had learnt around that time that at least Ghalibaf was on an Israeli targeting list and asked Israel to refrain.

Ghalibaf was nearly killed in both the 12-day war in June 2025 and again in the 2026 conflict, when Israel targeted a secret meeting of senior government officials in a bunker under a mountain, according to three senior Iranian officials and public comments by officials. In both incidents, Ghalibaf was rescued from under the rubble, the officials said.

During the negotiations, Iran has taken precautions aimed at making it more difficult for Israel to strike at senior officials.

In April, Ghalibaf was set to travel to Islamabad to meet with Vice-President J.D. Vance. But Iranian security officials were concerned that Israel would use the opportunity to assassinate Ghalibaf or Araghchi to derail the talks, the officials said.

Iranians sought guarantees from the US, through Pakistani and Qatari intermediaries, that Israel would not carry out any covert operations targeting the Iranian delegation, the officials said.

Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian aircraft 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 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 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 travelled some eight hours by land back to Tehran, Mohammadi and the two officials said.

But the officials have continued to travel.

In late May, Ghalibaf and Araghchi flew to Qatar for talks and then travelled to Switzerland in June for a second in-person meeting with Vance and the American delegation. NYTIMES

• Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.