In a statement to The Washington Times early Sunday evening, a senior Obama administration official said that a Kuwaiti report, cited by Arutz Sheva, that President Obama threatened to shoot down a possible IAF attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities are “totally false.”
On Sunday, Arutz Sheva quoted the Bethlehem-based Palestinian news service Ma’an, which quoted a Kuwaiti newspaper – Al-Jarida – as saying that President Obama threatened, last year, to use the US military to shoot down Israeli fighter jets if they attempted to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities.
The Obama Administration, according to the Washington Times, “denounced” the Al-Jarida story later Sunday as “flatly untrue.”
Obama’s alleged threat reportedly deterred Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from dispatching warplanes into Iranian airspace, after Israel discovered that the US had entered into secret talks with Tehran and that the two countries had signed an agreement, according to the Kuwaiti paper.
Last August, Obama Administration officials, in response to a Wall Street Journal report that the White House was holding up the sale of Hellfire air-to-surface missiles to Israel, claimed that the White House’s July 2014 order to halt the Pentagon’s delivery of Hellfire missiles were “a mischaracterization of inter-agency procedure, and of a policy unchanged.”