🇺🇸🇮🇷🇮🇱⚡- "U.S. 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.

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

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

While U.S. strikes focused on Iran’s navy and missile forces, Israel prioritized 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 United States when they were killed in Israeli airstrikes," - The New York Times, citing multiple U.S. officials.
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