Israel will not withdraw from territory in Lebanon, defence minister says

On Sunday, an Israeli strike on Hezbollah targets in Beirut earned Netanyahu a further expletive-laden reprimand from the US president. The announcement of the interim peace agreement may have averted a new barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles aimed at Israel.

Neil Quilliam, of the Chatham House thinktank in London, said: “The personal relationship between Trump and Netanyahu has taken a hit but … the whole debate around Israel in the US is changing so Israeli-US ties are under some strain at the moment, both at the political level and the societal level.”

Netanyahu was instrumental in convincing Trump to launch the war against Iran and Israeli military forces have coordinated closely with their US counterparts throughout the conflict. An Israeli military strike killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then Iran’s supreme leader, on the war’s first day.

However, any achievements in the war have fallen far short of Netanyahu’s promises of regime change in Tehran as well as the destruction of both Iran’s nuclear programme and its ballistic missile capability.

Opposition politicians in Israel have been quick to attack the deal. An election is due in Israel before October and there is likely to be a close fight for power.

Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, a centre-left party, said Netanyahu had allowed “military achievements won through the courage of [Israel’s armed forces] to be erased.”

“Trump signs an agreement that funnels billions to the ayatollahs’ regime, leaves the nuclear infrastructure intact, preserves the ballistic [missile] threat as it is, and throws a lifeline to the murderous regime in Tehran,” Golan said.

Naftali Bennet, a former prime minister and a leading challenger in the forthcoming polls, said Netanyahu was “incapable of achieving a decisive victory” and had led Israel into wars of “stagnation and attrition”.

Far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government called for Israel to ignore the terms of the deal, saying Israel had not been involved in negotiations and so was not bound by the agreement.

“We are not party to this agreement. It does not safeguard our security,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, said on his Telegram channel.

“We must not settle for anything less than the dismantling of Hezbollah. We must not withdraw from a single inch of territory that our soldiers have captured and cleared of terrorist infrastructure,” he said.

Israel has seized swathes of territory in Syria and has occupied more than 60% of Gaza since the Hamas surprise raid into Israel of 7 October 2023 that triggered the series of recent conflicts. Airstrikes have continued into Gaza since a ceasefire arranged by Trump last year, killing close to 1,000 Palestinians.

Danny Orbach, a military historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said if Trump forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon then Netanyahu’s political career would be over.

“To withdraw from the border would be a repudiation of the basic lesson of October 7 … which is that if there is an enemy who want to destroy you, you do not withdraw from the border.”

Dahlia Scheindlin, a leading Israeli electoral analyst, said the situation in the north was undoubtedly problematic for Netanyahu but many supporters of the prime minister would see only a “blip in a long list of what they consider to be his accomplishments”.

“I don’t know if any of them are going change their minds because of the ceasefire,” Scheindlin said.