Netanyahu: All Iranian Uranium Must Leave; MOU Covers Only 60%

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that any agreement ending the Iran war must remove all enriched uranium from Iranian soil and dismantle Iran’s enrichment program — a public marker that goes well beyond the one-page memorandum of understanding US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have put on the table in Muscat, according to Israel Hayom.

President Donald Trump told Tehran it has “one week” to accept the framework or face an escalated bombing campaign, Israel Hayom reported, citing officials briefed on the message. The deadline tightens an earlier 48-hour ultimatum Trump issued through back channels and lands at the moment the Israeli and US positions visibly diverge.

Netanyahu convened Israel’s security cabinet for a statement on the talks and said he would speak with Trump that night, per the Israel Hayom account. The statement reiterated what Israeli officials have said in private since the Muscat track opened last week: removal of the 60% stockpile is necessary but not sufficient. The full Israeli demand, as Netanyahu phrased it, is that “all enriched material” leave Iran and that the enrichment infrastructure itself — centrifuge cascades at Natanz and Fordow, and the feedstock pipeline behind them — be taken apart.

What the MOU actually says

The one-page memorandum drafted by Witkoff and Kushner runs to 14 numbered points, Axios reported Wednesday. On the nuclear file, the document commits Iran to shipping its stockpile of 60% enriched uranium out of the country — most likely to Russia or a third- party custodian — and to a 30-day window in which a fuller agreement would be negotiated. In exchange, the United States would lift the sanctions snapped back during the spring campaign, and Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic without the permit regime Tehran imposed last week.

The MOU does not, by Axios’s account, require Iran to surrender its lower- enriched material — the larger 20% and 5% stockpiles that under the 2015 JCPOA were capped but never removed — and it does not require Tehran to dismantle centrifuge halls or destroy enrichment equipment. It is, in effect, a freeze-and-ship arrangement on the most weapons-relevant material, with the harder questions deferred to the 30-day follow-on talks.

That gap is the gap Netanyahu addressed Wednesday. From Jerusalem’s vantage, shipping out the 60% stockpile while leaving the centrifuges spinning means Iran could rebuild a 60% inventory within months once the cascades are restarted, and could do so while sanctions relief is already flowing. Israeli officials have argued through the week that a credible end-state requires both removal of material and physical dismantlement — the model the United States imposed on Libya in 2003-2004, not the JCPOA model of capped but intact infrastructure.

Trump’s deadline

Trump’s “one week” message, delivered through Omani intermediaries per Israel Hayom, is the second public deadline the White House has set on Tehran in seven days. The first ultimatum tracked the pause of Project Freedom, the US naval escort mission in the Gulf that Trump suspended on Tuesday citing deal progress. The pause itself was conditional: officials told Israel Hayom that strikes would resume, and at greater intensity, if Iran rejected the framework or let the week lapse without a signed reply.

Iranian officials have not publicly confirmed receipt of the one-week deadline. Tehran has continued to press its own demands in parallel, insisting on a permit regime for Strait of Hormuz transits that the MOU would unwind. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who has led the Muscat delegation, has said Iran will respond to “the full text” rather than to public statements — language US officials read as a request for the follow-on details rather than a rejection of the one-page draft.

Where the deal could break

Three possibilities hang over the next seven days.

The first is that Tehran accepts the MOU as drafted, ships the 60% material, and banks the 30-day window to negotiate the harder questions. Under that scenario, Israel would face a choice between accepting an interim arrangement that falls short of its red lines or breaking with Washington publicly during a window in which US sanctions relief is already moving. Netanyahu’s Wednesday statement reads as an effort to set the Israeli position before that choice arrives.

The second is that Iran tries to rewrite the nuclear paragraph — accepting the Hormuz reopening and the sanctions schedule but pushing back on out-of- country shipment of the 60% stockpile. That would put the deal back into the moratorium-versus-removal dispute that held up the framework earlier in the week, and would test whether Trump treats a partial Iranian yes as a yes or as a rejection that triggers his threatened bombing escalation.

The third is that the deadline lapses. Israel Hayom’s account of Trump’s message left no ambiguity on the consequence: an escalated air campaign against the same target set hit in the spring strikes, with the option of adding sites the United States held back the first time. Israeli officials told the paper they have war-gamed a follow-on campaign with the assumption that the political ceiling on US strikes is higher now than it was in March, because the failure of a publicly offered deal would itself be the justification.

What Netanyahu’s red lines do, in practical terms, is narrow the diplomatic zone Witkoff and Kushner have to work in. The one-page MOU was designed to be small enough to be signed inside the deadline. The Israeli demand is for something larger — and the next move is Tehran’s.

Sources

• Israel Hayom, “Trump: Tehran has one week to reach deal; Netanyahu: uranium must be removed from Iran” — https://www.israelhayom.com/2026/05/06/trump-tehran-has-one-week-to-reach-deal-netanyahu-uranium-must-be-removed-from-iran
• Axios, “Iran-US deal: one-page memo” — https://www.axios.com/2026/05/06/iran-us-deal-one-page-memo