No wonder Donald Trump swore at his supposed friend and ally Benjamin Netanyahu recently. Within days of that June 1 phone call, Israel and Iran were back on track for the kind of military escalation that can no longer be explained away as a ceasefire breach, presenting a potentially fatal threat to the U.S. president’s attempts to end the war.
The cause of their dispute is, on the surface, simple. Israel says the April ceasefire between Tehran and Washington did not cover Lebanon and that its troops would therefore go on fighting Hezbollah so long as the Shiite group posed a security threat to Israel’s northern border communities. Iran says the deal did cover Lebanon, which is just another front in the same war — and of course it is.
It’s precisely because it sees Hezbollah as a tool of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that Israel wanted the war in the first place. Israelis correctly blamed the IRGC for having orchestrated an entire proxy network of militias — from the Houthis in Yemen, to Hamas in Gaza, to Hezbollah in Lebanon — against the world’s only Jewish state. That Iranian strategy contributed directly to the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.
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