US officials believed Israel may have planned to use the negotiations between the US and Iran as a window of opportunity to kill Iran’s top negotiators, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
According to the report, US officials were particularly concerned that Iranian Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi would be targeted during the cease-fire negotiations beginning in April.
While targeting high-level government officials was one of the goals at the start of the war, which began with the joint US-Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, after talks began, US officials feared that any attempt on Iranian leaders’ lives would reignite the fighting, the NYT wrote.
US officials were reportedly so concerned, they reached out to other Middle Eastern countries to warn Iran of the potential danger to Ghalibaf and Araghchi.
During the early days of the war, Israel had killed two other officials involved in negotiations with the US, Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, and Kamal Kharazi, a former Iranian foreign minister, according to the NYT.
In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that both Araghchi and Ghalibaf were on an Israeli target list, but that Israel had removed them as negotiations between the US and Iran were discussed.
A US official and a Middle East official said that the Trump administration had a more active role in at least Ghalibaf’s removal from the list, with the US directly asking Israel not to target him, the NYT wrote.
Ghalibaf was almost killed both in the 12-day war in June 2025 and during the 2026 war, needing to be rescued from beneath rubble in both incidents.
According to the NYT report, Ghalibaf was targeted again in April when he flew to Islamabad to meet with US Vice President JD Vance.
As an extra security measure, Pakistani fighter jets escorted the airplanes carrying the Iranian delegation from the border to Islamabad and back. However, on the way back to Tehran, Iran’s security forces reportedly notified Ghalibaf’s plane that they had intelligence that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its border near Iraq and intended on attacking Ghalibaf.
The plane made an emergency landing near the border, and the delegation traveled to the capital by land, the NYT cited multiple officials as saying.
