Just hours after the United States and Iran announced a ceasefire in the war that has dominated news headlines around the world and pushed oil prices to new heights, Israel bombarded Lebanon on Wednesday, killing hundreds, injuring thousands and prompting Iran to reimpose its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
The bone of contention: whether or not Israel’s relentless strikes on Lebanon were included in the ceasefire at all. Pakistan, which brokered the agreement, said they were. Israel said they weren’t.
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Later on Wednesday, the US sided with Israel, with President Donald Trump calling the violence in Lebanon “a separate skirmish” even though Hezbollah had entered the war in defence of Iran.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under intense political pressure since the US and Iran signed the ceasefire, which had little or no active involvement from Israel.
None of Israel’s war aims, which Netanyahu had assured his country were the basis for what he framed as an existential battle with Iran, had been achieved, angering those who supported the war.
Furthermore, under the terms of the truce published yesterday, a 10-point peace plan put forward by Iran has been accepted as a starting point for negotiations due to begin this weekend in Islamabad.
Under early descriptions of the Iranian plan, Iran would retain its nuclear stock and could benefit financially from levies charged on shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and from tariffs and sanctions relief promised by Israel’s ally, US President Donald Trump, on his Truth Social account.
This is far from the 15-point list of demands the US previously put forward to Iran, which would have seen the strait completely reopened without conditions, and Iran giving up its enriched uranium stocks, ending its ballistic missiles programme and promising to stop arming proxy groups in the region, such as the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and a flurry of armed groups in Iraq.
Arguing that Lebanon is exempt from the ceasefire agreement, Israel launched the most extensive bombardment on its neighbour in recent months on Wednesday. In the space of about 10 minutes, the Israeli military carried out more than 100 strikes on what it claimed were Hezbollah targets, hitting Beirut, southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley, killing at least 254 people, 91 of them in the capital, Beirut, alone.
The attacks have been condemned by numerous nations and international organisations, including Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the United Nations and Pakistan, which brokered the ceasefire deal and stated explicitly that Lebanon was included.
Responding to the strikes, Iranian state media announced that its government was now considering walking away from the truce and has already announced that restrictions on the economically vital Strait of Hormuz will be reimposed.
For its part, Israel says it is not trying to kill the ceasefire by launching strikes on Lebanon. Charles Freilich, Israel’s former deputy national security adviser, told Al Jazeera that the motivation for the strikes arose solely from the “opportunity to hit numerous mid to high-level Hezbollah fighters, not spoil the ceasefire, which both the US and Israel maintain does not include Lebanon”.
‘Provocateurs-in-chief’
Some analysts are sceptical, however.
“Israeli officials will no doubt claim that this was a super sophisticated operation against necessary security targets, perhaps embellishing those arguments with claims of deep intel and technological penetration and sophistication, and you will probably have the usual mainstream Western media outlets slavishly parroting the Israeli line,” former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy told Al Jazeera, before explaining that such operations typically combine two principal features.
“The first is, sadly, an Israeli devotion to death and destruction, largely for its own sake, to spread terror and upend state capacity in various places in the region, and to upend civilian life,” he said. “And, secondly, a very transparent attempt to prolong the broader war against Iran, to collapse any ceasefire prospects, and to act as provocateurs-in-chief.”
Politically, support within Israel for the war may have weakened, however. Many of those who initially supported the war on Iran have been unsparing in their criticism of a potential pause in the conflict negotiated by the other two parties at Israel’s apparent expense.
Posting on X, opposition leader Yair Lapid claimed that Prime Minister “Netanyahu has turned us into a protectorate state that receives instructions over the phone on matters pertaining to the core of our national security”.
Democrats leader Yair Golan was equally scathing. “Netanyahu lied,” he wrote on X. “He promised a ‘historic victory’ and security for generations, and in practice, we got one of the most severe strategic failures Israel has ever known.”
“Netanyahu is in real trouble, and he thinks he has to wreck the ceasefire to get out of it, just as he did previously in Gaza,” Member of the Knesset Aida Touma Sliman of the left-wing Hadash party, which has opposed the war from the start, told Al Jazeera. “The ceasefire has lost him a lot of support, even among those who backed the war. None of his war aims have been achieved and it looks like he is losing control to the Trump administration,” she said.
“Don’t forget, we’re heading towards elections,” she added, referring to the vote currently slated for October, “and Netanyahu’s dropping in the polls. He needs something he can claim is a victory.
“And that’s why he did what he did,” she said, of Wednesday’s barrage on busy Lebanese neighbourhoods that killed hundreds, including women, children and medical workers, according to emergency workers on the ground. “He conducted a massacre in Lebanon.”
