US President Donald Trump recently told top aides that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “f–king me,” according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
The report said that despite the American leader’s frustrations with the Israeli premier, he is unlikely to publicly break with him.
The comment reportedly came as Trump spoke to senior aides, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, about how to respond to Israel’s strike against Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, earlier this month.
The US expressed disapproval of the attack, which apparently failed to kill at least some of the senior officials it was targeting. It said Israel only informed American officials once it was too late to avert the strike, though Axios reported earlier this week, citing Israeli officials, that this wasn’t true.
In the wake of the strike, Trump and top US officials met with the Qatari prime minister, and Rubio flew to Israel, then Qatar, to discuss it. Trump has also praised the Gulf emirate as a “great ally” and pledged that Israel won’t attack on its soil again.
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The Journal report noted, however, the US president is broadly accommodating of Netanyahu’s decisions, even when they appear to contradict the White House’s stated goals with respect to the war in Gaza and Middle East relations more broadly.
Illustrative: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu answers a question, as US President Donald Trump looks on, during a dinner in the Blue Room of the White House on July 7, 2025. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images via AFP)
Netanyahu said Wednesday that he was invited to join Trump at the White House next week, amid the UN General Assembly.
The premier said the invitation came during a phone call on Monday, and that he had held several conversations with Trump since Israel’s September 9 strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar, and all of them were “good.”
Unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, Trump has declined to put public pressure on Israel to reach a deal with Hamas for an end to the war.
In June, after the US brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Iran after a brief war launched by Israel to cripple the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, Trump told reporters both countries “have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
With respect to Gaza, however, the US president has opted to endorse Israeli military operations in Gaza and to issue threats against the terror group, demanding it turn over the hostages it abducted in its October 7, 2023, assault in Israel, which started the ongoing war.
US President Donald Trump, left, meets Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House, July 8, 2025. (Avi Ohayon/GPO)
“It’s slightly baffling and counterintuitive,” Shalom Lipner, a think tank fellow who served for decades in the Prime Minister’s Office, told the Journal.
“Netanyahu’s moves have prolonged the Gaza war, created trouble for Trump with other US allies in the region and made the expansion of the Abraham Accords excruciatingly difficult,” he added, referring to a series of normalization agreements between Israel and Muslim nations that the US brokered during Trump’s first term in office.
The White House declined to comment on the report.
A senior Israeli official told the Journal any reports of acrimony between Trump and Netanyahu are “fake news,” adding that American and Israeli interests are closely aligned.
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