US officials attempted to warn Iran of fears that Israel would assassinate mediators

U.S. officials attempted to warn Iran of fears they had that Israel would assassinate mediators during talks this spring, two U.S. officials said.

Related video above: US and Iran continue discussions to end war following meeting in Qatar

The officials said the U.S. worried that Israel might assassinate Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Iranian parliamentary speaker who is leading negotiations with the U.S., or Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who has also been a public face of the talks. The warnings were communicated through intermediaries, the officials said.

The New York Times first reported on the warnings.

There were no immediate indications Friday that U.S. intelligence had knowledge of a specific plot that prompted the warning. The top Israeli defense official has been public about Jerusalem’s desire to kill senior Iranian leaders, and President Donald Trump has in the past made clear that those efforts were complicating negotiations.

In March, he declined to tell reporters who in Iran the U.S. was negotiating with because “I don’t want them to be killed.”

“You know, it’s a little tough,” he said. “They’ve wiped out everybody.”

A spokeswoman for the Israeli embassy in Washington declined to comment. CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have at times had intense disagreements on the war with Iran, with Netanyahu frustrated by the ongoing negotiations and Trump believing his Israeli counterpart is too eager to upend a nascent peace.

In one particularly heated exchange in June, Trump used expletives to convey his disapproval of a planned military operation in Lebanon by Israel, according to two people familiar with the conversation. Trump officials have also been closely watching Israel’s spying network, which has ramped up its intelligence and spying on Iranian and U.S. officials in recent months, a U.S. official said.

In the early days of the war, Israel assassinated scores of top political and religious leaders in the country, including the country’s supreme leader and, perhaps even more significantly for potential negotiations, its top national security official, Ali Larijani.

But as it became clear that the campaign was not successfully ushering in a new regime in Tehran, the Trump administration appears to have backed away from supporting that strategy in favor of negotiations with Iran.

Targeting Ghalibaf or Araghchi might have upended very tenuous talks — the future of which is uncertain even now.

While the U.S. and Iran have signed a memorandum of understanding calling for a 60-day ceasefire, the agreement leaves the thorniest issues — like the fate of Iran’s nuclear stockpile — for later talks. And even with the 60-day agreement in place, Iran has fired on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. has retaliated with strikes on Iranian targets.