In the first interview since launching Operation Rising Lion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News that Iran had tried to assassinate US President Donald Trump because they perceived he would not allow them to produce a nuclear bomb.

“They want to kill him. He’s enemy number one. He’s a decisive leader. He never took the path that others took to try to bargain with them in a weak way, giving them basically a pathway to enrich uranium, which means a pathway to the bomb, padding it with billions and billions of dollars,” the prime minister told Fox News’s Bret Baier during a special Sunday edition of “Special Report.”

During his election campaign, Trump was targeted in several assassination attempts, once getting shot on the outside of his ear during a rally.

The Biden Administration had warned Trump of “real and specific threats” of an assassination plot by Iran, part of a larger campaign to “sow chaos.”

Netanyahu continued to explain why Iran aimed to target Trump, “He took up this fake agreement and basically tore it up. He killed Qasem Soleimani (a top officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). He made it very clear, including now, ‘You cannot have a nuclear weapon, which means you cannot enrich uranium.’ He’s been very forceful, so for them, he’s enemy number one.”

Netanyahu also said he has been a target of Iran’s attempts to assassinate him after his home in Caesarea was struck by a drone last year and added that he considers himself a “junior partner” in preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.

Defending the preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear and defense capabilities, Trump said Israel was facing an “imminent threat,” and it was “the 12 hour” regarding Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon.

We were facing an imminent threat, a dual existential threat,” he said.

“One, the threat of Iran rushing to weaponize their enriched uranium to make atomic bombs with a specific and declared intent to destroy us. Second, a rush to increase their ballistic missile arsenal to the capacity that they would have 3,600 weapons a year…. Within three years, 10,000 ballistic missiles, each one weighing a ton, coming in at mach 6, right into our cities, as you saw today… and then in 26 years, 20,000 [missiles]. No country can sustain that, and certainly not a country the size of Israel, so we had to act.”