U.S. President Donald Trump called himself a “war hero” on Tuesday for approving airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Calling into conservative host Mark Levin’s radio show, Trump said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “a war hero ‘cause we worked together.”

“He’s a war hero. I guess I am too,” Trump said. “Nobody cares. But I am too. I mean, I sent those planes.” The president appeared to be referencing an attack he ordered on Iran’s subterranean nuclear facilities in June in a bid to obliterate Tehran’s nuclear program.

Netanyahu has been the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant since last November for alleged war crimes in Gaza. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the besieged coastal enclave during the Israeli military’s offensive, which began after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel killed some 1,200 people.

Trump has never fought in an actual war, nor served in the military. He received five deferments from the Vietnam War draft, including a medical exemption after a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels when he was 22.

In 2015, Trump made headlines when he argued that Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, was “not a war hero” because “I like people who were not captured.” 

And in 2020, The Atlantic reported that Trump had privately disparaged dead service members, calling them “losers” and “suckers,” allegations he strenuously denied.