Trump ‘respects’ me, and I ‘respect’ him, says Netanyahu after ‘f***ing crazy’ phone call rebuke

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview on Wednesday, did not deny having a difficult conversation with President Donald Trump during a phone call on Monday but downplayed the significance of the matter. In an interview with CNBC, Netanyahu dismissed Trump calling him “f***ing crazy” during a heated telephone conversation earlier in the week as the kind of “tactical disagreements” typical of even “the best of families.”

“I’m not going to get into details of our conversations. We’ve had thousands, well, a lot of them,” he said.

“Sometimes, as in the best of families, we have these tactical disagreements. We always find a way to work them out. We can disagree in the morning, and we have a common action by the afternoon,” the Israeli leader said.

“My relationship with Trump is the same. He respects me, and I respect him. We always find a way to work out our differences,” Netanyahu said.

The Israeli PM did not back diplomatic efforts to end the US-Israeli war on Iran but said Trump believed he could “solve the enrichment problem” – referring to Iran’s nuclear programme – “with diplomatic pressure and tough negotiations. I think he should be given a chance.”

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‘We have to disarm Hezbollah and demilitarise Lebanon’

Netanyahu, however, did not back down on his country’s plans to ensure that Iranian-backed Hezbollah no longer poses a threat to his country.

“If we want to save Lebanon, if we want to get a Lebanese-Israeli peace – as I do – we have to disarm Hezbollah and we have to demilitarise Lebanon. This is a goal Trump and I share,” he said.

“You can’t have these genocidal terrorists taking over this poor country of Lebanon, using it to try to invade Israel — the way that Hamas invaded us, murder our civilians, kill our men, rape our women. No country would accept that.”

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Lebanese and Israeli officials were set to meet for another round of direct talks in Washington on Wednesday, aimed at bolstering a US-brokered ceasefire they agreed to weeks ago but which both accused each other of violating daily.

Trump confirms he called Netanyahu ‘f***ing crazy’

Meanwhile, President Trump confirmed that he called Netanyahu “f***ing crazy”, saying he was “perturbed” by Israel’s actions in Lebanon

In an interview for a New York Post podcast released Wednesday, President Trump confirmed an earlier Axios report that he had criticised Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as “f***ing crazy” in a Monday phone call, saying he was “a little bit perturbed” that Israel’s fighting of Hezbollah in Lebanon was holding back peace talks with Iran.

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“We’ve worked very well together. I like Bibi a lot. And I work very well with him,”. Trump told the Post’s ‘Pod Force One’, using a common nickname for the Israeli leader.

“I’m a wartime president,” Trump said. “He’s a wartime prime minister.”