Donald Trump tells the BBC Israel did not defy him

**Will Chalk** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Will Chalk, and in the early hours of Tuesday, the 9th of June, these are our main stories. Tensions seem to have cooled in the Middle East, with Israel pausing its strikes on Iran for now. But did Israel ignore an order from Donald Trump by striking at all? A question our North America editor has put directly to the president. OpenAI has become the latest tech giant to reveal plans to sell shares to the public through a stock listing in the US. And in Sudan, despite four years of civil war, children have been returning to school but with deep psychological scars.
Also in this podcast, a leading football ref has been denied entry to the US for the World Cup despite having valid paperwork and a marine invasion of the coasts of Britain.

**Bryce Stewart** (0:52)
All the evidence is telling me that this is the biggest one ever and also what's very significant now is that they are breeding quite prolifically.

**Will Chalk** (1:01)
Why octopuses are showing up in numbers off England's coasts.
The last couple of days have been perilous for the truce in the Middle East, with Iran and Israel once again launching missiles at each other. But both sides have since agreed to pull back for now. Here is what the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address.

**Benjamin Netanyahu** (1:27)
Iran and Hezbollah are weaker than ever, and we are stronger than ever.
But our fight with them has not finished yet. If Iran's terror regime makes the mistake of attacking us again, we will respond forcefully, because Israel has a full right to self-defence, and we will implement it as much as necessary.

**Will Chalk** (1:48)
Even once tensions had calmed, though, a question that remained was whether Israel, when it attacked Iran, was directly defying an order from Donald Trump.
Well, we have been able to go straight to the source for an answer. Our North America editor, Sarah Smith, has been speaking to the US president on the phone. A short while ago, I spoke to her on the phone, and I started by asking her how long President Trump has had her on speed dial.

**Sarah Smith** (2:13)
Well, I took the chance of giving him a call at a point in his schedule where I knew he didn't have anything else booked in, and I was lucky enough that he first of all answered the call and was prepared to speak to me. This is not wholly uncommon in Washington, although it is extremely odd that you can call the president directly if you have his mobile phone number, and there's a reasonable chance he might choose to speak to you, even if not for very long. I mean, my conversation with him was a little shy of a minute. But nonetheless, I was able to ask him a couple of key questions about what's been going on in the Middle East over the last 24 hours, which has been a very crucial period.

**Will Chalk** (2:47)
Yeah, and crucially, you asked him about another phone call he had with Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu.

**Sarah Smith** (2:52)
Yeah, on Monday morning, he called the Israeli prime minister to ask him not to have any more strikes in Iran because Donald Trump is really concerned that these hostilities could derail the ongoing peace talks. And I was intrigued to know what it was that he had said to persuade Mr. Netanyahu to stop the attacks. And he told me, all I did is say that we have to use common sense. We're very close to signing a very powerful deal, a very good deal, he said. But I did point out, that wasn't the same as the conversation that they had had a few hours earlier on Sunday night, when Mr. Trump had specifically asked Israel not to retaliate against the missile strikes from Iran. And they had gone ahead and fired missiles at Iran nonetheless. So was that not Mr. Netanyahu defying Donald Trump's instructions, I asked him. And he said no, because by the time the two leaders spoke, they had already gone, he said, meaning the missiles. Which is something that we didn't know up until that point. And that convenient timing does explain why, if Israel was ignoring what the US had told it to do, had we not seen the kind of furious response that you would usually expect from Donald Trump if he felt that he had been slighted or ignored.

**Will Chalk** (4:02)
So do you think, if that convenient timing, as you put it, wasn't actually the case, that Donald Trump would even admit it? Or do you think he would save face and say exactly what he said to you?