President Donald Trump opposed an Israeli plan to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to two sources, amid ongoing waves of tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and Iran as the US president is making publicly and privately clear he prefers to keep the United States out of the fray for now.

Israel’s devastating attack on Iran has put the Islamic Republic in existential peril and exposed deep vulnerabilities in the intelligence services that have kept Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in power for nearly four decades.