Israel handed the United States fresh intelligence indicating that Iran was weighing a new plan to assassinate President Donald Trump, according to a report published Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the exchange. The warning, relayed to Washington in recent weeks, arrives in the middle of an active war between the two countries and only days after Trump declared a fragile ceasefire effectively finished. Neither the White House nor Israel’s government offered an on-record account of the specific threat, and Iran has repeatedly insisted over the past year that it has never sought to kill the American president.

The disclosure fits a pattern that has trailed Trump since the 2024 campaign, when federal prosecutors charged Iranian operative Farhad Shakeri with a murder-for-hire scheme aimed at the then-candidate. In March, a Brooklyn jury convicted another man, Asif Merchant, on terrorism and murder-for-hire charges tied to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plot against U.S. officials. Israeli outlets, including Channel 14, reported earlier this week that Iran’s Quds Force had stood up a new unit, dubbed “Mukhtar,” to target American leaders — claims that surfaced alongside the multi-day funeral for former Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed on Feb. 28 in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike. Chants calling for revenge dominated that procession, which ran through Thursday.

The report also cuts against the diplomatic track the administration has struggled to keep alive. Washington and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding earlier this summer calling for a 60-day ceasefire and reopened talks over Iran’s nuclear stockpile and security in the Strait of Hormuz. That framework frayed this week: after Iranian forces fired on ships in the Strait, the U.S. struck back, reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil sales, and Trump told reporters at a NATO summit in Ankara that the truce was, in his words, over. Iran’s military answered with strikes on U.S. installations in Bahrain and Kuwait. Trump has left little doubt about how he would respond to a successful attempt on his life, telling reporters earlier this year he had issued standing instructions that Iran would be “obliterated” if it killed him.

For all the weight of the headline, Wall Street treated the news calmly. The S&P 500 rose 0.7% on Thursday, more than erasing the prior session’s loss, while the Nasdaq Composite climbed 1.2% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added roughly 119 points, or 0.2%, in late trading. That steadiness held even as the fresh U.S. strikes and Iranian counterstrikes played out — a sign that traders have, for now, learned to price the war as a running condition rather than a new shock.

Oil told the clearest story. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 2.2% to about $76.30 a barrel, surrendering much of the previous day’s jump, when it had settled near $78 after Trump called the truce dead. U.S. West Texas Intermediate had spiked above $73 on Wednesday. The swings ran straight to the pump: the national average for regular gasoline reached $3.85 a gallon Thursday, up a nickel overnight and 68 cents higher than a year earlier, according to auto club AAA. Energy producers were the obvious winners of the earlier surge — ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips all climbed Wednesday as crude ran higher — before prices eased back.

The deeper worry sits beneath the water. A genuine return to full conflict threatens tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint that moves a large share of the world’s seaborne crude. That fear is sharpened by thin cushions at home: U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks fell this week to their lowest level since 1983, leaving Washington less room to blunt a supply shock. Gold and silver, which had jumped on Wednesday’s escalation, gave back ground as the panic bid faded.

Attention is now shifting to earnings. The largest U.S. banks begin reporting second-quarter results next week, the first hard read on how corporate America fared from April through June with the war as a backdrop. PepsiCo offered an early, uneven signal Thursday, falling 3.8% despite slightly better-than-expected revenue, as softening trends in its North American food and drink businesses showed through.

The market’s message, for now, is that a reported plot against the president — however grave — has not shifted the calculus that has governed trading since the war began: watch Hormuz, watch the barrel, and wait for the next move from Washington or Tehran. Whether that composure survives contact with a real escalation is the question every trading desk will carry into next week.

JBizNews Desk | Washington © JBizNews.com All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or distribution without written permission is prohibited.

Body runs ~780 words. One note on sourcing: the plot itself is a WSJ exclusive built on unnamed people familiar with the matter — there’s no on-record official statement attached to it yet, so I anchored paragraph one on the named parties (Israel’s government, the U.S., Trump) and flagged the denial rather than inventing an official. If a named White House or IDF spokesman goes on record later today, send it and I’ll re-lead on that.