When Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, announced that the US and Iran, along with their allies, had agreed to an immediate ceasefire on Tuesday night, he made clear that the truce applied “everywhere including Lebanon”. But hours later, the Israeli government insisted that the deal did not include halting its attacks on Lebanon, which had become one of the deadliest fronts of the regional war instigated by the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran.
By Wednesday afternoon, Israel had launched its largest and most destructive attack on Lebanon in years, killing at least 300 people and wounding more than 1,100. Dozens of Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on 100 targets across Lebanon within 10 minutes, with the Israeli military claiming it was targeting Hezbollah “command centers” in an operation it called “Eternal Darkness”. But Israeli warplanes leveled several buildings in crowded residential neighborhoods of Beirut, spreading panic in the Lebanese capital and overwhelming hospitals with hundreds of casualties. Israel also continued bombing Lebanon’s infrastructure, destroying the last remaining bridge that linked southern Lebanon to the rest of the country.
Israel’s escalating attacks on Lebanon could unravel the two-week ceasefire even before negotiations between the US and Iran, which are expected to start on Saturday in Islamabad. Iranian leaders are accusing the US of failing to uphold the truce and threatening to back out of it unless Washington restrains its ally. “The U.S. must choose – ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, wrote on Twitter/X on Wednesday. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”
We’ve been here before, where a US administration has allowed the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to sabotage negotiations and ceasefire agreements so that he could prolong wars that enable him to stay in power. Once again, Donald Trump is on the verge of squandering a ceasefire that serves US interests – and the world’s larger interests – for the sake of an unreliable ally in Israel.
On Thursday, Netanyahu announced that his government would start direct negotiations with Lebanon on disarming Hezbollah, but he insisted that Israel would continue its attacks. “There is no ceasefire in Lebanon,” he said in a recorded message to residents of northern Israel. The Israeli military launched a new wave of air strikes shortly afterward.
For two years after the October 2023 attacks, Netanyahu undermined ceasefire talks with Hamas in Gaza and blocked potential deals by adding new conditions or changing his mind at the last minute. He also tried to stall negotiations by assassinating Hamas leaders involved in the talks, and even ordered a brazen Israeli airstrike on Hamas officials meeting in Qatar, a US ally, to consider a ceasefire proposal that had been submitted by Israel and Washington.
Despite Netanyahu’s obstinance, Israel continued to receive unconditional political support and tens of billions of dollars in US weapons, under both Joe Biden’s administration and Trump’s. Is it any surprise that Netanyahu concluded that Israel can bomb virtually anyone and anywhere in the Middle East, with impunity? By late 2025, Israel had attacked Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Qatar and Yemen that year – without losing the flow of US weapons or Washington’s political cover at the United Nations and other international institutions. Of course, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which killed at least 70,000 Palestinians and instigated a famine, paved the way for Israel to flout international law.
With unwavering US support under both Biden and Trump, Netanyahu clearly realized that he has little incentive to avoid escalating conflicts and taking risks that could engulf the Middle East in a devastating war. In fact, Netanyahu sought to expand the conflict out of Gaza, into a wider war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which enabled him to maintain power and avoid investigations into his government’s intelligence failures that led to the Hamas attacks of October 2023. Netanyahu also feared that if he was forced out of office, he would face a long-delayed trial on corruption charges related to one of his previous stints as prime minister.
Hezbollah had also miscalculated in its confrontation with Israel. The Iranian-backed group, which was the most powerful military and political force in Lebanon, began firing rockets and drones into northern Israel on 8 October 2023, a day after the Hamas attacks. Hezbollah’s leaders said it was an effort to support Palestinians and divert Israeli military resources from the onslaught against Gaza. But Israel retaliated by killing Hezbollah members across the country and with heavy airstrikes on southern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley, largely Shia Muslim areas from which Hezbollah draws its base of support.
The group’s leaders insisted they would end their attacks only when Israel stopped its war on Gaza. For 11 months, Hezbollah tried to calibrate its strikes on northern Israel to avoid instigating a wider conflict with a far more powerful Israeli military. But by September 2024, Netanyahu had threatened an all-out war against Lebanon, saying he would destroy Hezbollah and enable more than 60,000 displaced residents of northern Israel to return to their homes. That month, Israel detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers and handheld radios of Hezbollah members, killing dozens and wounding more than 3,000 people.
On 23 September 2024, Israel carried out one of the most intense aerial bombardments in modern history, attacking nearly 1,600 targets across Lebanon and killing more than 550 people. That marked the start of a large-scale war, where Israel used the same playbook as it did in Gaza: unrelenting air strikes that caused a massive displacement of civilians, followed by a ground invasion. Over two months, Israel assassinated most of Hezbollah’s top leaders and destroyed a large portion of the militia’s arsenal of more than 100,000 missiles and rockets.
The Biden administration criticized some of Israel’s tactics, but it largely supported Netanyahu’s war in Lebanon – and it continued the flow of weapons that make the US deeply complicit in Israel’s actions. Eventually, Biden and other western leaders pressured Israel to accept a ceasefire in late November 2024.
But as with other ceasefires adopted by Netanyahu and his government, Israel continued its attacks on Lebanon long after the truce started, arguing that the Lebanese government had failed to disarm Hezbollah. By November 2025, a year after the ceasefire went into effect, the UN documented that Israel had committed 10,000 violations. (Lebanon’s health ministry reported that Israeli attacks on Lebanon had killed 397 people between the ceasefire in November 2024 and 1 March.)
After Trump returned to office last year, Netanyahu spent months convincing the US president to unleash an even bigger and more destructive regional war – against Iran. And once the joint US-Israeli attack started on 28 February, the conflict quickly expanded to Lebanon.
On 2 March, Hezbollah fired a salvo of rockets against Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. That led to a massive Israeli attack, instigating a renewed war that has forcibly displaced more than 1.1 million people, many of whom are living on the streets. Israel also invaded southern Lebanon again and tried to cut it off from the rest of the country. Meanwhile, Hezbollah has shown that it’s not as weak as Israel and the US had thought. Over the past five weeks, the militia fought pitched battles with invading Israeli troops and fired hundreds of rockets and drones at northern Israel, often in coordination with Iranian missile strikes.
On Wednesday, Trump told a PBS reporter that the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah was “not included in the deal” and he viewed it as a “separate skirmish”. That could mean the unraveling of the entire ceasefire with Iran – thanks to Trump’s failure to restrain his friend and ally Netanyahu.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University
