Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will likely try to undermine Donald Trump’s deal with Iran, U.S. intelligence officials have reportedly warned the administration.
Current and former U.S. officials told The Washington Post Netanyahu is intent on continuing operations in Lebanon despite an agreement signed by President Trump earlier this week.
The Israeli leader is facing intense political pressure to continue the conflict, that has run in parallel to the joint attacks on Iran he launched alongside the United States in February.
But continued strikes in Lebanon – the latest of which left 16 dead on Saturday – risk deepening the growing and increasingly public cracks in Netanyahu’s relationship with the Trump administration.
Both Trump and his deputy JD Vance have become increasingly critical of Netanyahu’s approach to the war, making a series of thinly veiled threats in the last week.
While insisting he still has a “good” relationship with Netanyahu, Trump has repeatedly claimed Israel would not exist without his support.
“Bibi Netanyahu worked well with me, but he will tell you, we’re the ones with the guns, we’re the ones with the whole deal, we’re the ones with the B-2 bombers, etc,” he told Axios on Friday. “If it weren’t for Donald Trump, Israel would have been eviscerated.”
Trump also suggested Netanyahu was going too far in his attacks on Lebanon when he announced his peace deal with Tehran at the G7.
“Too many people have been killed,” Trump said. “You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they’re not all Hezbollah.”
Nevertheless, Israel and Lebanon have continued to strike each other despite the 60 day interim agreement, which includes a complete end to Israeli military operations in Lebanon in its 14 points.
On Saturday, Lebanon’s National News Agency said Israeli warplanes and drones had hit multiple locations in the south and the Bekaa Valley.
An Israeli military official said Hezbollah had fired more than 50 projectiles at Israeli forces in southern Lebanon overnight, prompting strikes on what the official said were “Hezbollah targets”.
The Israeli military, which has occupied swathes of southern Lebanon, said in a statement that Hezbollah’s attacks constituted repeated violations of the ceasefire agreement.
Israeli strikes in Lebanon have killed over 4,000 people since the war began, according to authorities. The operation, which Israel says is to defeat Hezbollah, has been a major sticking point of an agreement between the U.S. and Iran.
According to the Post, Israel believes the Trump-Iran deal will undermine its ability to fight back against Hezbollah, as well as emboldening long-term adversary Tehran.
The tentative agreement was signed by Trump at the G7 summit in the French Alps this week and includes a range of concessions between the two sides including the end of a U.S. naval blockade and the reopening of the key shipping route the Strait of Hormuz.
But it has faced fierce backlash, both from Trump’s more hawkish supporters domestically and from the Israeli right.
Far right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir said in response to the news of a deal: “For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!”
“In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint – you need to go beserk. To obliterate.”
But despite the popularity of the war amongst Israeli voters, a recent poll by the Pew Research Centre finding 60 per cent of Americans have an unfavourable view of the country following Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza and the war with Iran and Lebanon.
And earlier this week Vance appeared to issue a thinly veiled threat over long-standing U.S. support for Israel.
“Over the last three months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars,” he said.
“The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the President of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.”
