'War Not Over': Netanyahu Says Iran's Enriched Uranium 'Must Be Taken Out'

Last Updated:May 10, 2026, 22:43 IST

Netanyahu said Iran still possessed enriched uranium and operational enrichment facilities despite months of military escalation involving Israel and the US.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the war involving Iran cannot be considered over until Tehran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is removed and its remaining nuclear infrastructure dismantled.

In excerpts from an interview with CBS released on Sunday, Netanyahu said Iran still possessed enriched uranium and operational enrichment facilities despite months of military escalation involving Israel and the United States.

“It’s not over, because there’s still nuclear material — enriched uranium — that has to be taken out of Iran. There’s still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled," Netanyahu said.

Asked how the uranium could be removed, the Israeli Prime Minister replied: “You go in and you take it out."

The Israeli leader also said he believed US President Donald Trump broadly shared the same objective, though he declined to discuss specific military options. “I’m not going to talk about military means, but the president, what President Trump has said to me — ‘I want to go in there,’" Netanyahu said.

However, the Israeli PM’s remarks appeared to go further than Trump’s recent public comments on the issue.

In a separate interview aired on Sunday, Trump said Iran had already been “militarily defeated" and insisted that Washington had the situation under surveillance.

“We’ll get that at some point, whenever we want," Trump said, referring to Iran’s uranium stockpiles. “If anybody got near the place we will know about it and we’ll blow them up."

The US President is facing growing political pressure at home to avoid deeper military involvement and move towards ending the conflict.

‘There’s work to be done’

Netanyahu also indicated that Israel’s broader objectives in the conflict had not yet been achieved. In addition to Iran’s uranium stockpile, he pointed to Tehran’s regional proxy networks and ballistic missile capabilities as continuing threats.

“There’s still proxies that Iran supports, their ballistic missiles that they still want to produce," he said. “We’ve degraded a lot of it, but all that is still there and there’s work to be done."

While stressing that a negotiated arrangement to remove the uranium would be preferable, Netanyahu said the mission remained “terrifically important" and declined to rule out further action.

(With inputs from AFP)

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