U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee warned personnel at the American embassy in Israel on Friday to leave the country immediately if they wish to exit.
“Those wishing to take AD should do so TODAY,” Huckabee wrote in an email to employees at Washington’s embassy in Jerusalem, using an acronym for “authorized departure.”
The move comes as the Trump administration weighs strikes on Iran, which could usher in regional unrest, spreading to Israel. The ambassador said the decision to allow embassy departures was made out of “an abundance of caution, and that “there is no need to panic.”
The administration previously ordered an evacuation of nonessential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon.
“We continuously assess the security environment, and based on our latest review, we determined it prudent to reduce our footprint to essential personnel,” a senior State Department official confirmed to the Washington Examiner this week.
The United States has for months conducted peace talks with Iran related to its nuclear program, attempting to avoid military intervention in Washington’s aim to keep the country’s nuclear development at bay. The Trump administration wants a new deal to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. In June, the U.S. sent B-2 bombers to destroy three critical nuclear development facilities in Iran.
On Thursday, the most recent round of negotiations in Geneva ended without a diplomatic resolution.
The U.S. team, led by special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, was “disappointed” with the talks, according to Axios.
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Trump announced on Feb. 19 that there would be a short window of time in which he would allow negotiations for the complete denuclearization of Iran to continue, at “15 days, pretty much maximum.”
He warned that “it’s going to be unfortunate for [Iran]” if an agreement is not reached in that window, which would hypothetically expire between Sunday and Friday of next week.
In his State of the Union address this week, he only briefly touched on the situation with Iran, saying his “preference” would be to solve the problem through diplomacy, but added he will “never allow the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror … to have a nuclear weapon.”
“We are in negotiations with them,” Trump said in the Tuesday address. “They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’”
This week, the rest of his administration has been escalating its messaging about Iran, with Witkoff saying on Fox News that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material”.
Rubio also warned about the “great threat” Iran poses to the U.S., stressing its ballistic missile capacity is also cause for concern, in addition to the nuclear program.
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