The war with Iran accomplished a great deal but is not yet over, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CBS News’ Major Garrett in an interview on 60 Minutes, which aired overnight on Sunday.
“There is still nuclear material, enriched uranium, that has to be taken out of Iran,” he explained.
“There are still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled. There are still proxies that Iran supports. There are ballistic missiles they want to produce. Now we’ve degraded a lot of it, but all of that is still there, and there is work to be done.”
When asked how Iran’s supply of enriched uranium could be removed from the country, Netanyahu replied simply that “You go in, and you take it out.”
He added, “If you have an agreement, and you go in and you take it out, why not? That’s the best way.”
Earlier on Sunday, US President Donald Trump said that the US Space Force has the site under surveillance. is surveilling Iran’s enriched uranium and is prepared to react if it receives intelligence that action is being taken at the site, in an interview with Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson, produced by the Sinclair Broadcast Group.
When asked where the US is in the war without acquiring the uranium, Trump responded that the US would attain it “at some point.”
Iran, Netanyahu said, is not truly interested in a ceasefire in Lebanon, because it wishes for Hezbollah to remain there to “hold [the Lebanese] people hostage.”
“If this regime is indeed weakened or possibly toppled, I think it’s the end of Hezbollah,” he suggested.
“It’s the end of Hamas, it’s probably the end of the Houthis, because the whole scaffolding of the terrorist proxy network that Iran built collapses if the regime in Iran collapses.”
The toppling of the regime is not guaranteed, Netanyahu clarified, but it was possible.
Netanyahu aims to eliminate US military support
Netanyahu also said that he intended to wean Israel off of military support from the United States.
“I’ve said this to President Trump, I’ve said this to our own people,” he said. “Their jaws dropped.”
The current amount Israel receives from the US, he said, was $3.8 billion dollars, and he intends to reduce that amount to zero over the next decade, beginning immediately.
“I don’t want to wait for the next Congress,” Netanyahu insisted, “I want to start now.”
“Before October 7, I was considered perhaps the most restrained prime minister in Israel’s history,” Netanyahu said at the conclusion of the interview. “Obviously, it changed on October 7, because they were going to annihilate us.”
“I didn’t think it was just an attack by Hamas. I saw it as it was, an attack by the Iran axis to try to annihilate us through a noose of death,” he noted.
“And I said on the second day of the war, I said, ‘We’re going to change the Middle East.’ We’re going to change this condition where they’re ganging up on us, thinking they’re going to wipe out the one and only Jewish state, wipe out 3,500 years of Jewish history. It’s not gonna happen, not on my watch. And I said to the Israeli citizens, ‘Not on your watch.’”
Danya Saperstein contributed to this report.