Iran Ceasefire? From Trump’s Nuclear Threats to Israel’s Gaza-Style Extermination in Lebanon
9.4.26
Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Iranian flag, as photographed during an event in Ankara, Türkiye on June 24, 2025. (Photo: Dilara İrem Sancar, Anadolu).Yesterday, as perceptive observers marked two and a half years of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel cemented its reputation as an unprecedented pestilential sickness on the face of the earth, contaminating everyone who comes into contact with it through its relentless barbarism, by launching almost a hundred devastating aerial attacks on Lebanon in the space of just ten minutes, rising to 137 in total in the space of just half an hour, in what the genocidal entity proudly proclaimed as “Operation Eternal Darkness.” Could the exercise of evil have a more transparently accurate name?
The attacks, in Beirut and across southern Lebanon, which rivalled in intensity the most violent attacks on Gaza in the early months of the Gaza genocide, were clearly indiscriminate — acts of terrorism, completely destroying numerous apartment blocks in Beirut, for example, and meant to kill as many civilians as possible, following the template established in Gaza, for which Israel has never been held accountable. At least 303 people were killed, and 1,165 wounded, and social media reports provided grim accounts not of murdered militants, but of unjustifiably slaughtered women and children.
Also, as In Gaza, the Israeli authorities sought to defend their actions by plying the complicit western media with unverified and clearly risible justifications for their actions, just as they have done so cynically and successfully in Gaza for the whole of their uniquely depraved descent into monstrous and devious inhumanity over the last 30 months.
The aftermath of an Israeli strike at the Corniche al-Mazraa neighbourhood in Beirut on April 8, 2026. (Photo: AFP).“Israel described it as the largest wave of air strikes in this conflict, hitting more than 100 of what it called Hezbollah command centres and military sites in 10 minutes”, the BBC’s stenographer, Hugo Bachega, its Middle East correspondent, reporting from Beirut, stated in a woeful atrocity-laundering article published on the most widely-read news website in the world.
The trigger for Israel’s barbaric attacks on Lebanon was, very evidently, not because it had suddenly located more than 100 “Hezbollah command centres” that needed to be immediately eliminated.
Even without asking for evidence that patently didn’t exist, it should have been blindingly obvious to the BBC, and to other pliant mainstream media outlets who parroted Israel’s lies, that the attacks took place because of three particular reasons: firstly, a sick, frenzied and totally transparent desire to derail a ceasefire deal in the war on Iran that Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Donald Trump to launch six weeks ago, which had just been brokered via Pakistan; secondly, a genocidal sense of petulance on Israel’s part, because it had not been included in the negotiations; and, thirdly, to cause as much carnage as possible in case the window of opportunity for its grotesque obsession with the ongoing Gaza-style erasure of the whole of Lebanon should come to an end.
Only someone startlingly complicit in Israel’s crimes could have failed to recognize these self-evident truths, and to report on them accurately.
Trump’s grotesque threats of nuclear annihilation in the run-up to the ceasefire deal
The two-week ceasefire deal, agreed to by “the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies”, and announced by Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, on the evening on April 7, followed three agonizingly long days of apocalyptic uncertainty, precipitated solely by one man, Donald Trump, who, as the president of the United States, is, by any objective measure, increasingly erratic and unhinged.
Compare footage of him from ten years ago to footage of him now, and the contrast is remarkable. So accustomed have we become, through the media’s default position of, for some inexplicable reason, suggesting coherence when there is none, that we’re encouraged not to notice that, even in short encounters with the media, he often contradicts himself from one sentence to another, while his longer, more rambling speeches, often lasting an hour or more in a variety of public settings, cannot fail to demonstrate quite how broken his mind is.
He is, in short, nothing but a lumbering, walking carcass of flatulent verbal diarrhoea, a national embarrassment on a scale that exceeds the public collapse of the mental faculties of his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden.
On the morning of Easter Sunday, Trump posted an alarming expletive-filled threat on his inaptly-named Truth Social account, telling the Iranian government, “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell — JUST WATCH!”, and adding, gratuitously and offensively, “Praise be to Allah.”
Donald Trump’s Truth Social post on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026.Criticism was swift from religious leaders, from prominent Democrats, and from former MAGA insiders Tucker Carlson and former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has seen the light and turned against her former idol.
In a post on X, she called out Trump for his bellicose un-Christian madness, stating, “Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians”, adding, “This [is] NOT what we promised the American people when they overwhelmingly voted in 2024, I know, I was there more than most”, and concluding, “This is not making America great again, this is evil.”
She also, as a defender of the “America First” policies that Trump promised but has betrayed, pointed out the “regime change” lies about Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, explaining how, in the Middle East, only one nation, Israel, has nuclear weapons, and stating, “They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it.”
Two days later, on the morning of April 7, Trump shocked the world even more disturbingly, in another early morning post in which he declared, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Donald Trump’s Truth Social post threatening genocidal intent against Iran on April 7, 2026.This was a statement of clear genocidal intent, unprecedented and unforgivable from a world leader, and a sign of the total degeneracy with which Trump treats his role as the US president.
To the extent that Trump is capable of rationalizing and justifying his outbursts, it may be that he would have sought to explain it away as a superlative example of brinksmanship, but his mental processes are so fundamentally scrambled that it’s impossible to know, and, understandably, many of us across the US and around the world were so disturbed by this threat of nuclear armageddon, issued by a man who has the codes to the US’s vast nuclear arsenal, that we spent the rest of the day in a profound state of unease.
Again, responses were swift — condemnations from Pope Leo XIV, from UN Secretary General António Guterres, from Senate Democrats who called the threat “unconscionable”, and, again, from Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote on X, “Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”
Too little too late: calls for Trump’s removal
For many Democrats in Congress, and for Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump’s unacceptable behavior confirmed that he is unfit for high office, and should be removed by Congress, either through invocation of the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of the president if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”, or through impeachment proceedings.
Marjorie Taylor Greene began her post by declaring, “25TH AMENDMENT!!!”, and, by 10pm on April 7, Axios was reporting that 70 Democratic Representatives and two Democratic Senators had called for Trump’s impeachment or removal via the 25th Amendment.
Unfortunately, all of this outrage is, fundamentally, too little too late, and also largely impotent, as Trump still holds a majority in both the Senate and the House, at least until the midterm elections this November.
Republicans, in particular, bear a huge responsibility for, from the very beginning of Trump’s second presidency, disemboweling themselves en masse to placate a mad would-be king.
Where once political leaders — all “losers” in Trump’s opinion — required approval from Congress for their actions, both domestically and internationally, and also required approval from the UN Security Council for launching wars, Trump, with the indulgence of Congress, has been allowed to believe that he has the right to rule unilaterally by edict — delivered via social media, and, in the early days of his second term, via a tsunami of executive orders and presidential proclamations that completely excluded Congress.
Where was the resistance when, with his unelected Nazi supremo Stephen Miller, he turned ICE into his own personal Gestapo, terrorizing immigrants, and “disappearing” them into unaccountable detention centers? Where was the resistance when he defied a court order and sent a random group of hapless Venezuelan migrants to be imprisoned without charge or trial in the world’s most notoriously lawless prison fortress, the mega-Guantánamo of the CECOT prison in El Salvador?
Where were they when Pete Hegseth launched the first of many extrajudicial killings of unidentified individuals on boats in the Caribbean and elsewhere, labelling his war crimes as legitimate acts of counter-terrorism? Where were they when Trump’s forces illegally invaded Venezuela, and kidnapped the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, and brought them to New York on invented charges of drug trafficking? And where were they when Marco Rubio implemented a lawless siege on Cuba, copying Israel’s “complete siege” of Gaza?
And where, in particular, were they when, on February 28, Trump launched the entirely illegal and unprovoked war on Iran, capitulating to the wheedling of Benjamin Netanyahu, who soothingly assured him, over the complaints of most of his inner circle, that a war on Iran would be swift and decisive, decapitating the regime, taking out its military, and landing another supposed victory to add to all the other supposed victories that Trump believes he has achieved — including in the unresolved post-ceasefire wasteland of Gaza — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
While some Democrats have spoken out about these and other scandals (the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein, in particular), the Democratic Party as a whole, though outnumbered in Congress, has also failed to capitalize on the relentless chaos and lawlessness of the last 14 months by making clear, on a daily basis, that Trump’s entire way of operating fundamentally undermines the checks and balances in the US Constitution that were designed to prevent the transformation of the presidency into an unaccountable dictatorship.
The ceasefire deal
Shortly before the deadline for Trump’s apocalyptic threat to Iran, the ceasefire deal noted above supposedly came into effect, with Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, announcing it via the following unambiguous message: “With the greatest humility, I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”
Trump celebrated backing down via another Truth Social post, in which he stated that he had responded to Pakistani requests to “hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran” for two weeks, based on “the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz”, as part of proposals for “a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm peace with Iran”, involving a “10 point proposal from Iran”, which we “believe [is] a workable basis on which to negotiate.”
This all sounded very promising, allowing Trump to withdraw while claiming a victory in re-opening the Strait of Hormuz, to belatedly address a growing global energy crisis of unparalleled proportions, while glossing over the inconvenient truth that the Strait had been open before he launched his senseless war.
Immediately, however, Israel showed its defiance via its gut-wrenchingly violent assault on Lebanon, after Netanyahu insisted that Lebanon was not included in the ceasefire deal, directly contradicting Shehbaz Sharif’s statement.
In response, both Trump and JD Vance supported Israel’s position, even though it endangered the ceasefire, with Iran responding to Israel’s sickening violence by immediately shutting the Strait of Hormuz once more, and explicitly condemning Israel’s attacks as a violation of the ceasefire agreement.
Today, there appears to have been progress, as Netanyahu has said that Israel is seeking “to open direct negotiations with Lebanon as soon as possible,” with NBC News reporting that, according to an unidentified senior administration official, “Trump asked Netanyahu in a phone call yesterday to scale back the strikes to help ensure the success of the Iran negotiations.”
In a post on X, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, warned that continued Israeli attacks on Hezbollah would bring “explicit costs and STRONG responses”, and it seems clear that Iran’s position is being taken seriously, with the Associated Press noting that Qalibaf “has been discussed as a possible negotiator” for talks scheduled to begin on Saturday in Islamabad, with JD Vance leading the US delegation.
As Israel continues to be sidelined, chafing with genocidal indignation, the question now is whether Trump will succeed in restraining Netanyahu.
Is this the end for Trump and Netanyahu?
Whatever comes next, it seems pretty clear that Iran has won, and that both Trump and Netanyahu have suffered spectacularly resounding defeats.
Trump, of course, will try to spin it as a win, but he has dealt an almost immeasurably heavy blow to his own reputation within the US, and to the US’s standing internationally, from which I doubt he can recover.
It may be that the New York Times’ account of the lead-up to the war, in which Trump was persuaded by Netanyahu, while JD Vance, Marco Rubio Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA director John Radcliffe were opposed, indicates a way forward, whether or not the account, by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, is strictly accurate.
Vance and Rubio emerge unscathed, while Hegseth, “the biggest proponent of a military campaign against Iran”, will be axed, as Trump is nudged aside.
For Netanyahu, the fallout must be worse, as his self-confessed 40-year dream of destroying Iran has been revealed as a catastrophic strategic miscalculation, with Israelis cowering in shelters for the last six weeks, at all times of the day at night, as Iranian missile and drones have effortlessly pierced Israel’s supposedly impenetrable defences, causing significant damage to around 5,000 buildings.
Leading the criticism has been Yair Lapid, the opposition leader in the Knesset, who wrote on X, “There has never been a political disaster like this in our entire history. Israel was not even close to the table when decisions were made concerning the core of our national security. The army carried out everything that was asked of it, and the public showed remarkable resilience, but Netanyahu failed politically, failed strategically, and did not achieve any of the goals he himself set. It will take us years to repair the political and strategic damage that Netanyahu caused due to arrogance, negligence, and lack of strategic planning.”
For Amos Harel, Haaretz’s military affairs correspondent, “Many of the weaknesses shared by the current US administration and Israel’s system under Netanyahu came into view” during this monstrously hubristic war: “a tendency to gamble based on unfounded wishful thinking, shallow and half-baked plans, disregard for experts, or the aggressive use of pressure to make them align their views with the wishes of the political leadership.”
Harel added, “This is now the fourth time in a row — in Gaza, once in Lebanon and twice in Iran — that his boasts of total victory and the removal of existential threats have been exposed as empty promises.”
With elections later this year, it must surely be the time for Netanyahu, the primary architect of Israel’s incalculably horrific policy of total war, extermination and genocidal destruction forever to be removed from power, along with his fanatical defense minister, Israel Katz, and his two far-right coalition partners, the monsters Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
For Iran, of course, regime change in Israel and the US would be sweet revenge, but while new leadership in Israel and the US wouldn’t fundamentally change the juggernauts of horror in either country, it might be enough of a break to pull us back from what, otherwise, looks like nothing less than an ever-growing and all-compassing darkness of bottomless depravity.
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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.
Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.