{"id":204715,"date":"2026-03-20T01:59:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T01:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/strike-on-iran-gasfield-exposes-us-israel-rift-as-trump-claims-he-did-not-know-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T01:59:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T01:59:21","slug":"strike-on-iran-gasfield-exposes-us-israel-rift-as-trump-claims-he-did-not-know-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/strike-on-iran-gasfield-exposes-us-israel-rift-as-trump-claims-he-did-not-know-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Strike on Iran gasfield exposes US-Israel rift as Trump claims he did not know – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

US president says he told Netanyahu \u2018don\u2019t do that\u2019 as he distances himself from attack that has angered Gulf allies
The US-Israeli war<\/a> against Iran has exposed further divisions between the two countries after an Israeli strike on Iran\u2019s largest gasfield angered US allies in the Gulf <\/a>and prompted Donald Trump to say he knew nothing in advance about the attack \u2013 a claim that Israeli officials disputed.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said he had spoken to Israel\u2019s Benjamin Netanyahu following the strikes on Iran\u2019s South Pars gasfield \u2013 part of a reserve shared with Qatar \u2013 and had told the Israeli prime minister to refrain from further attacks that could escalate a regional war on energy infrastructure.
\u201cI told him, \u2018Don\u2019t do that,\u2019 and he won\u2019t do that,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t discuss [the strikes]. We do independent, but get along great. It\u2019s coordinated. But on occasion he\u2019ll do something, and if I don\u2019t like it \u2026 and so we\u2019re not doing that any more.\u201d
Israeli attacks on the South Pars gasfields have opened a Pandora\u2019s box of retaliatory strikes<\/a> on Gulf energy infrastructure, including pipelines and natural gas processing facilities that serve LNG (liquefied natural gas) to economies around the world, particularly in Asia.
While the US has focused on targeting Iran\u2019s military, navy and ballistic missile complex, Israel has instead carried out targeted assassinations and bombed civilian infrastructure. Those strikes led to severe ecological concerns following the bombing of oil depots in Tehran<\/a>, and prompted Iran to launch retaliatory attacks on Qatar\u2019s Ras Laffan Industrial City, as well as Saudi Arabia\u2019s Samref refinery, near the Red Sea port of Yanbu, the country\u2019s only outlet for crude exports given the current closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Seeking to distance himself from the Israeli strikes without condemning them outright, Trump claimed on Truth Social that he had known nothing about the targeting of Iran\u2019s gas reserves in advance, and would oppose them in the future \u2013 unless Iran<\/a> launched further attacks on Qatar\u2019s energy infrastructure.
\u201cNO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to South Pars unless Iran unwisely decides to attack Qatar \u2014 in which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen before,\u201d Trump wrote in the message.
Israeli officials disputed that claim, telling US and Israeli media that Washington had in fact been informed of the South Pars gasfield attack before it took place.
Israel\u2019s efforts to bring about regime change and its attacks on critical infrastructure have increasingly raised criticisms among US allies that Washington has effectively allowed its foreign policy to be hijacked by Netanyahu\u2019s government.
\u201cThe American administration\u2019s greatest miscalculation, of course, was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place,\u201d wrote Badr Albusaidi, the foreign minister of Oman. \u201cThis is not America\u2019s war, and there is no likely scenario in which both Israel and America will get what they want from it.\u201d
Late on Thursday, Netanyahu denied he had dragged the US into the conflict, telling reporters: \u201cDoes anyone really think that someone can tell President Trump what to do?\u201d
He also claimed that thanks to the US-Israeli attacks, Iran could no longer enrich uranium or make ballistic missiles.
His comments came a day after Tulsi Gabbard, Trump\u2019s director of national intelligence, told lawmakers that Iran had not carried out uranium enrichment since Israel attacked its nuclear infrastructure last year.
\u201cAs a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran\u2019s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,\u201d Gabbard said in written testimony to the intelligence committee \u2060in the House of Representatives.
Gabbard \u2013 who until this year had publicly and repeatedly stated her opposition to a war with Iran \u2013 also said that Israel and the US have different goals in the war.
\u201cThe \u200cobjectives that have been laid out by the president are different from the objectives that have been laid out \u2060by the Israeli government,\u201d Gabbard \u2060told the intelligence committee \u2060in the House of Representatives.
\u201cWe can see through the operations that the Israeli government has \u2060been focused on disabling the \u2060Iranian leadership. The \u2060president has stated that his objectives are to destroy Iran\u2019s ballistic missiles \u200claunching capability, their ballistic missile production capability and their \u200cnavy.\u201d
Anger over the Iran war has led to one prominent defection from within the administration. Joe Kent, the former director of the United States national counterterrorism center and an ally of Gabbard\u2019s, resigned from his post<\/a> earlier this week.
\u201cI cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.\u201d<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US president says he told Netanyahu \u2018don\u2019t do that\u2019 as he distances himself from attack that has angered Gulf alliesThe US-Israeli war against Iran has exposed further divisions between the two countries after an Israeli strike on Iran\u2019s largest gasfield angered US allies in the Gulf and prompted Donald Trump to say he knew nothing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":204716,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-204715","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}