The war with Iran “accomplished a great deal, but it’s not over,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview aired on Sunday night.
Speaking with CBS News correspondent Major Garrett, Netanyahu listed Iran’s enriched uranium, enrichment facilities that are still operative, proxies in the Middle East such as Hezbollah and the Houthis and Tehran’s ballistic missiles as problems that have not yet been fully resolved.
“Now, we’ve degraded a lot of it. But all that is still there, and there’s work to be done,” Israel’s longest-serving prime minister told Garrett.
“I think it accomplished a great deal, but it’s not over,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells 60 Minutes about the war in Iran. Netanyahu says highly enriched uranium must be removed from Iran and believes “it can be done physically.” pic.twitter.com/N5XbvzpYa0
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 10, 2026
When asked how the enriched material can be removed via military means, Netanyahu refrained from answering, saying, “If you have an agreement, and you go in, and you take it out, why not? That’s the best way.”
The premier further stated that while toppling the Iranian regime cannot be guaranteed, it could lead to a positive chain reaction in the region.
“If this regime is indeed weakened or possibly toppled, I think it’s the end of Hezbollah, it’s the end of Hamas, it’s probably the end of the Houthis, because the whole scaffolding of the terrorist proxy network that Iran built collapses if the regime in Iran collapses,” he said.
“If this [Iranian] regime is indeed weakened or possibly toppled, I think it's the end of Hezbollah, it's the end of Hamas, it's probably the end of the Houthis,” says Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. He says it's possible to topple the Iranian regime, but it's not guaranteed.… pic.twitter.com/sIT3jWFMKg
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 10, 2026
Asked about his conversations with U.S. President Donald Trump preceding the war, Netanyahu minimized reports to the effect that the Israeli defense establishment was certain that a joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign would bring about regime change in Iran.
“We both agreed, you know, that there was both uncertainty and risk involved. And I remember that we—I said, and he said that the danger—there’s danger in action, in taking action. But there’s greater danger in not taking action,” said Netanyahu.
He went on to say that the Strait of Hormuz problem “was understood as the fighting went on.”
When asked if the strategic chokepoint was “misread,” the prime minister replied, “I’m not sure it was misread. But the—you know, there’s a great risk for Iran to do it. And it took a while for them to understand how big that risk is, which they understand now. No, I don’t claim perfect foresight, and nobody had perfect foresight. Neither did the Iranians.”
Netanyahu also discussed recent polls conducted in the United States indicating a decline of support for Israel among young Americans.
He said that the deterioration “correlates almost 100% with the geometric rise of social media.”
He added that by itself, social media is not what caused the decline, and that he does not support censoring online platforms, “but I’ll tell you what happened. We have several countries that basically manipulated social media. And they do it in a clever way. And that’s something that has hurt us badly.”
The war has also affected opinions, Netanyahu said, as “armies sometimes miss and civilians die. And these are mistakes, these are not deliberate things that happen. Israel is besieged on the media front, on the propaganda front, and we’ve not done well on the propaganda war.”
On future Israeli-U.S. relations, the Israeli leader said that he wants to “draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have. Because we receive... $3.8 billion a year. And I think that it’s time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining... military support.”
Watch the full interview below.
