This Tuesday, the day after the President of the United States, Donald Trump, announced an agreement to end the military confrontations in Lebanon, its nonexistence has been precisely demonstrated. There are hardly any changes compared to previous days. Israel is limiting itself to not attacking Beirut, the capital, and has already killed 12 people in various bombings. And the Hezbollah militia continues firing, although it has stopped targeting the Israeli localities it had recently made targets, the ones farthest from Lebanon.
The Israeli army has also issued its first evacuation order since Trump’s message. It was to the residents remaining in Nabatiye, a city in southern Lebanon that had 40,000 inhabitants before the war that started in 2024. They are forced to move, as has been done with the inhabitants of other localities, to the north of the Zahrani River, 40 kilometers from the border between the two countries.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has not only launched projectiles against troops inside Lebanon (killing three soldiers in the last two days) but also against the border localities of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government sets as a condition for not bombing Dahiye, the predominantly Shiite suburbs of Beirut, that Hezbollah does not attack those municipalities.
This was clearly expressed on Tuesday morning by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz: “If there is no calm here, there will be no calm there [in Dahiye],” he said. “The review of the defense policies of the [Israeli] localities is simple and will be clarified in the coming days: there will not be a situation where there is fire against our localities without a strong response against Dahiye,” Katz insisted, after clarifying that the US is aware of and agrees with this policy. The minister emphasized, in case there was any doubt, that at this moment “there is no ceasefire inside Lebanon” and “the army continues operating against Hezbollah.”
Criticism
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come out scorched, both inside and outside Israel, from his intention on the eve to launch a wave of bombings over Beirut, canceled by order of Donald Trump. In his country, both ministers of the governing coalition (with ultranationalists and ultra-Orthodox) and opposition leaders have criticized him for acting at the mercy of the US president, aborting the very mission he had announced with great fanfare hours after the jets could be heard over the sky of Jerusalem.
Netanyahu’s move also backfired outside Israel. According to the American digital media Axios published this Tuesday, Trump called the Israeli leader and, amid reproaches and insults, demanded that he suspend those planned bombings over the Lebanese capital—worried that they would derail the dialogue with Iran.
Axios cites two official US sources and a third aware of the conversation to point out that Trump told Netanyahu: “You’re a fucking crazy. You’d be in jail if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everyone hates you. Everyone hates Israel for this.” Trump was so angry—according to this media’s account—that at one point he shouted at the Israeli prime minister: “What the hell are you doing?” The reference to Netanyahu’s debt for being out of prison is apparently related to Trump’s efforts to have the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, grant him an extraordinary pardon for the three corruption charges he faces.
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Domestically, Netanyahu’s backtracking has earned him numerous criticisms, exacerbated by the pre-election atmosphere: Israel will go to the polls in October, perhaps in September if the dissolution of Parliament currently underway goes through.
After the cancellation of the attack on Beirut, his National Security Minister, the ultranationalist Itamar Ben Gvir, wrote: “Mr. Prime Minister, you said that a strong prime minister says ‘yes’ to the President of the United States when possible and ‘no’ when necessary. Now is the time to say ‘no’ to our friend, President Trump.” Ben Gvir has previously advocated leaving Lebanon in darkness, attacking energy facilities, as in Gaza.
“Puppet”
The opposition has also not missed the opportunity. Yair Lapid, former head of government and leader of the Yesh Atid Party, made a brief wordplay on social media with the expression usually used to describe the current government (“totally right-wing”) to present Netanyahu’s Israel as “a totally client state” of the US. Along the same lines, the leader of the right-wing opposition party Israel Beitenu, Avigdor Liberman, called the prime minister a “puppet” of Trump.
Netanyahu has tried to divert attention and defend the success of the war he launched against Iran together with the US with the aim of toppling the Tehran regime. “The price Iran has paid is very high, the foundations of this terror regime have cracked,” he said while bidding farewell to David Barnea, the outgoing head of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service. “It will never be what it was again, and I tell you: its end will come, it will fall.”
Israel has insisted in recent weeks that the mission in Iran is not over and is pressuring Trump to resume the war, going after civilian facilities until the regime is toppled or the country is plunged into chaos.
