Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first American broadcast interview since the onset of the war with Iran, acknowledged that Israel has achieved only half of the postwar objectives he had previously outlined for Gaza, proposed an independent commission to investigate the failures that allowed the Oct. 7 attack to occur, and revealed that Israel killed 20 Iranian nuclear scientists – 12 of them in the opening minute of the operation – as part of its campaign to cripple Tehran’s atomic program.

The interview was recorded Saturday and broadcast Sunday on CBS News’s “60 Minutes.”

In a candid exchange with CBS anchor Major Garrett, Netanyahu was asked to assess four commitments he had made roughly a year earlier regarding Hamas: disarmament, demilitarization, the elimination of weapons factories and the halting of arms smuggling into Gaza. He said that weapons factories had been “reduced a lot” and smuggling “really curtailed,” but that Hamas had failed to voluntarily disarm or demilitarize as it had promised under the terms of the cease-fire agreement.

“Two out of four, largely achieved,” Netanyahu said. “But the first two was supposed to be done by Hamas. That was part of the deal.”

He said Hamas had reneged on its pledges and that Israel would complete the disarmament by force if necessary. “Could be done the hard way, could be done the easy way,” he said. “I always prefer the easy way.”

On the question of personal accountability for Oct. 7 – the Hamas-led attack that killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and set off the regional conflict now in its eleventh week – Netanyahu said responsibility extended across the entire security establishment, including himself.

“Everybody bears some responsibility, from the top, from the Prime Minister down,” he said.
He called for the creation of a bipartisan independent commission modeled on the American inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, and said he would testify before it. “I’ll be the first one to go there,” he said, while arguing that the more pressing historical verdict should rest on what had been accomplished since Oct. 7, not what had failed before it.

Nearly all of the senior officials responsible for Israeli security on that day have since left their posts – the defense minister, the military chief, the heads of military intelligence, the internal security service and the air force. Netanyahu, who has faced intense domestic pressure to resign, has not done so.

On Iran, Netanyahu provided an unusual level of operational detail. He said Israel had killed 20 of Iran’s top nuclear scientists over the course of the campaign, including 12 in the opening minute of the first military operation – referred to in the interview by the Israeli code names “Rising Lion” and “Roaring Lion.”

“Taking out that amount of know-how sets them back,” he said, while cautioning that it did not eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability. “It means that if they planned this arsenal of nuclear atomic bombs that they thought they’d have by now – that’s gone.”

He described what he characterized as the single most important strategic achievement of the conflict: demonstrating that Iranian territory was not beyond the reach of military force. “For 47 years, Iran has been bullying everybody in sight,” he said. “Everybody understood you cannot fight Iran on Iran’s territory. That was a given, and we changed it.”

On timing, Netanyahu avoided a firm timetable throughout the broadcast. But asked how long the conflict would continue, he offered a brief, unscripted moment of candor: “It better not take months.” He immediately hedged, saying outcomes depended on conditions he declined to specify.

Netanyahu also addressed Russia’s involvement in the conflict – an exchange that did not appear in the broadcast – saying that Moscow’s direct military support for Iran had not been a significant factor. “Direct military support – that’s not been a big issue,” he said, when asked whether Russian assistance could eventually draw Israel into confrontation with Russia. He declined to characterize the extent of any intelligence cooperation between the two countries.

On China, he said Beijing had provided “certain components of missile manufacturing” to Iran and said he “didn’t like it,” but suggested that China’s long-term strategic interests – including its dependence on energy flowing through the Strait of Hormuz – should ultimately align it against a destabilizing Iranian regime. The remarks came days before a scheduled summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping. “Not everything is a zero-sum game,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu also called Trump’s decision to impose a counter-blockade on Iran – reversing what had been an Iranian attempt to choke off the Strait of Hormuz – “actually a brilliant move,” saying Iran had badly miscalculated the consequences. “They should have figured out that’s what’s coming,” he said. The broadcast version referenced the blockade only briefly and without Netanyahu’s characterization of it.
He also cited a private remark by the British ambassador to Washington – which has since been reported publicly – to the effect that Britain no longer holds a special relationship with the United States and that the true special relationship is now between Washington and Jerusalem. “I don’t always find myself in agreement with British ambassadors,” Netanyahu said, “but enough to agree on this one.”

On the decline in American public support for Israel – a Pew Research survey cited in the interview found that 60 percent of U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up nearly 20 points in four years – Netanyahu largely attributed the shift to coordinated foreign manipulation of social media through bot farms he said could be traced to specific countries he declined to name. He acknowledged that Israel had made mistakes during the conflict but maintained that its ratio of combatant to civilian casualties was among the lowest in the history of modern urban warfare.

On his proposal to phase out the $3.8 billion annual American military aid package over the coming decade – a plan he said he had already presented to President Trump – Netanyahu framed the move as a shift from dependency to strategic parity, proposing that the two countries jointly fund defense technology projects and share the resulting benefits equally. He drew a parallel to a similar decision he said he had made regarding American economic aid when he first became prime minister in 1996. “I want to draw it down,” he said, “and then suggest joint projects – for intel, for weapons, for missile defense.”

The interview, conducted a day after Israeli strikes on Iranian-backed Hezbollah positions in Lebanon and amid continued hostilities in the Persian Gulf, also touched on Arab state attitudes toward Israel. Netanyahu said several Gulf governments – which he declined to name – had privately proposed strengthening alliances with Israel in ways he said were without precedent, spanning artificial intelligence, energy and quantum computing. “The degree of economic cooperation – on energy, on AI, on quantum – that’s happening right now,” he said.