The U.S. and Iran Are Stuck in a Loop; Israel Is Stuck Out of It
While Trump and Iran repeat a pattern of escalation and failed negotiations, Netanyahu's declining leverage in Washington mirrors broader challenges facing his government before the next election
Among the many disappointments the Iranian front has dealt Donald Trump, he experienced at least one moment of satisfaction Thursday night in Washington. The U.S. president announced that an agreement had been reached between the international Board of Peace and the Hamas government under which the Israeli army would withdraw from the Gaza Strip in stages upon the disarming of the Palestinian organizations.
This framework, crafted after many weeks of negotiations in Cairo, was secured by the three mediating countries – Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey – which put heavy pressure on Hamas' leaders both in Gaza and abroad.
The U.S. administration will now strive to portray the agreement, which is expected to be signed next week, as a significant foreign policy achievement for the president. The Israeli government also has an interest in the deal, though for different reasons.
It seems that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to accept it, maybe even as a prerequisite for his visit to the United States this week. Before Netanyahu's departure, the security cabinet had already approved the entry of members of the technocratic government and the international stabilization force into Gaza.
From Israel's perspective, the agreement contains loopholes that could ultimately doom it, but Netanyahu can't afford to antagonize Trump at this point.
In principle, the Gaza agreement is a step in the right direction, much like the Israeli-Lebanese agreement signed at the end of June, whose future also remains uncertain. The Gaza deal could have been reached – and maybe in a better form – months earlier, but Netanyahu stalled.
Initially, this was because he opposed any involvement by the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. Later, both Israel and Hamas eschewed any steps to implement Trump's 20-point plan for Gaza, presented last October, whose main achievement so far has been the agreements that exchanged hostages for prisoners.
The current deal forms part of Nickolay Mladenov's 15-point plan. Mladenov, the head of the Board of Peace, developed a more detailed framework for carrying out Trump's plan. Hamas seems to have accepted it mainly because it buys time. Living conditions in Gaza are extremely difficult, the IDF controls around 60 percent of the enclave and Israel has been killing Hamas military leaders every few days.
At present, there is virtually no functioning, recognized leadership in Gaza; authority has shifted to the organization's leaders abroad, headed by the new chief, Qatar-based Khalil al-Hayya. Thursday's agreement could relieve the immediate military pressure on Hamas while outlining a political horizon, though it's unclear if the organization will ultimately accept all of the agreement's terms.
The cliché that the devil is in the details is apt here, too. Israel is demanding the surrender of both rifles and rockets, as well as the continued dismantling of tunnels. It also insists that the disarmament process be completed before the IDF fully withdraws from Gaza.
Hamas, though, has said little since reports emerged Thursday of a breakthrough in the talks, but it says the weapons will be handed over to the technocratic government, not Israel. The international stabilization force currently consists of only 200 soldiers from Uganda and Morocco and is expected to deploy near the Rafah crossing in the far south, initially focusing on facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid.
Mladenov's plan also envisions the dismantling of local militias that oppose Hamas. For those groups, surrendering their weapons would effectively mean a death sentence at the hands of Hamas. They might therefore seek protection from Israel.
Michael Milshtein, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center, told Haaretz Friday morning he seriously doubts that Hamas has fundamentally changed and is willing to abandon its ideology of resistance to Israel or surrender all of its weapons. He fears that implementation of the agreement will gradually stall.
Milshtein believes that the three mediating countries played a key role in persuading Hamas. He attributes this to concerns in Egypt, Qatar and Turkey – whose interests often diverge – about Netanyahu's threats to conquer all of Gaza and his policy of creating "security zones" that he's also pushing in Syria and southern Lebanon.
According to Milshtein, Trump's recent statements and actions may indicate a decline in Israel's influence in Washington and could foreshadow American demands for similar Israeli withdrawals from Syria and Lebanon.
The time loop again
Even before the agreement was announced in Cairo, fighting returned to the Middle East, though at a relatively low intensity for now. Less than a week after Trump announced a halt to U.S. strikes on Iran to give negotiations another chance, he resumed his bombing campaign on the back of Washington's accusations of escalating provocations by Iran.
The U.S.-Iranian conflict looks like it's stuck in a time loop, at least since April. Trump isn't hiding his desire to end the war and pull out U.S. troops and jets from the region. Yet the Iranian regime, which has demonstrated a high pain threshold throughout the war (i.e. total apathy towards its own citizens' suffering), considers the American approach as a sign of weakness, and is acting accordingly. Moreover, the Iranian leadership severely doubts the honesty of Trump's peace overtures, believing he doesn't really want a deal given his administration's delays in lifting sanctions and releasing frozen Iranian assets.
Thus, every time Trump declares that there's a chance of talks advancing, the Iranians interpret his statements as hesitation and fear of fighting, and renew and expand their attacks. Right after striking U.S. bases this week, Iran made a blatant threat, hinting at possibly assassinating First Lady Melania Trump during one of her shopping trips in New York.
In just the last few days, Iran fired several missiles at a number of U.S. bases across the Middle East (including Jordan but not Israel). The United States and Saudi Arabia then attacked Shi'ite militia bases in Iraq, and the U.S. went back to targeting the Revolutionary Guards in Iran itself. Meanwhile, the Houthis impede traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and threatened to toll it (similar to Iran's demand in Hormuz). They were probably involved in a drone attack that struck two containers at an Egyptian port.
Trump has many reasons to oppose returning to war. They include the congressional midterm elections in November, the fear that further airstrikes won't be enough to make the Iranians bow and the U.S.'s depleted interceptor stockpiles. And yet, the impasse could push him towards escalation again, despite its very low chance of making Iran fold.
Trump's political future isn't looking promising. CNN published a poll this week that show his approval rating at only 34 percent, and that 67 percent of respondents believe that Trump's decisions about military action in Iran have hurt the U.S. After the midterms, Trump might find himself facing an uncooperative Congress, with both parties busy preparing to choose their 2028 presidential candidates. It seems Trump's greatest fear is no longer being the center of the world's attention or having the power to dictate the political agenda.
Sen. Lindsey Graham's funeral in Washington allowed Netanyahu to get a White House meeting with Trump – something he's been struggling to do for quite a while. Netanyahu stressed the fact that this was their eighth meeting since Trump returned to office in 2025 (more than any other leader), and claimed that this meeting was the best so far.
It's hard to get a clear picture of what happened between the two leaders, but it's worth noting that the meeting was relatively short, and was held with a large group of people, not the two alone. Additionally, U.S. officials didn't go out of their way with friendliness or formalities, relative to previous meetings.
Trump also made a point by giving an interview a few hours before the meeting in which he expressed some disdain for Netanyahu's claims about the threat posed by Pickaxe Mountain, the Iranian nuclear site where Israel is saying Iran has transferred thousands of its advanced centrifuges.
The bottom line is, though Netanyahu has demonstrated clear influence over Trump in the past, he seems to be struggling more than ever right now to manipulate his host. So far, he's failed to get Israel a green light to participate in the attacks, as far as we know. And given Trump's frequent and contradictory statements about the Iranians, his intentions about continuing the war are a mystery, beyond his threat on Wednesday that the U.S. will "beat the fucking shit out of them."
Light-years away
The limited escalation against Iran is influencing some other fronts as well. After a few weeks of relative quiet, Hezbollah this week launched an explosive drone that hit an IDF bulldozer in South Lebanon, though it didn't cause damage. The IDF threatened a severe response, but is waiting for Netanyahu to advise when he returns. In the background, Israel has a plan to hit Hezbollah in the Ali al-Taher ridge area, despite the cease-fire. An Israeli reentry into the Gulf fighting would likely lead to the northern front reopening as well.
In Gaza, Netanyahu gave into pressure from Trump to compromise. This week, the security cabinet approved entry into Gaza for the Board of Peace and UN's International Stabilization Force. Israel previously conditioned their entries on Hamas' disarmament, but now it's forced to be flexible.
Most of said entries will be executed partially or even just for show – the stabilization force will number in the hundreds at most. And though the U.S. is trying to calm things down by promising that Hamas will disarm anyway, it seems to be referring to high-trajectory rockets, not the tens of thousands of Kalashnikov rifles that Hamas will use to keep control of Gaza even if the technocratic government starts to operate. In every direction, the solutions under discussion are light-years away from the total victory in Gaza that Netanyahu promised for over two years.
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Meanwhile, tension is reemerging between the army and residents of Gaza border communities. More and more residents are returning to the communities, including to the kibbutzim directly on the Gaza border that suffered the most during the October 7 massacre.
It's an especially sensitive time for returning families, as kids are preparing to return to school. And at this critical juncture, some residents are complaining about the army – about both its daily communication with residents about security incidents, and its considerations in deploying forces.
This week's award
The award for jaw-dropping quote of the week, an increasingly competitive contest, goes this time to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. In an interview he gave on the Geekonomy podcast, he said that he considered resigning after the October 7 massacre, but "couldn't find anything I did that wasn't ok."
The leaders of the Religious Zionism party are on par with Netanyahu and his Likud colleagues, and even with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit party, when it comes to displaying intentional, infuriating insensitivity to the feelings of the majority of the public (and, essentially, to reality itself).
We can put his statements down to trolling or gaslighting, but the truth is deeper: The near-total denial and rejection of the massacre's horrors are part of an organized campaign for the coming election. Simultaneously, the coalition is busy methodically delegitimizing the possible election results and the next government's authority, in case the opposition wins on October 27.
That's the context for Likud MK Boaz Bismuth's attack on Central Elections Committee chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg this week. And it's the reason that Smotrich issues a warning every few days that the "left-wing government" will evacuate the settler farms and outposts that he took great pains to plant all over the West Bank over the past four years, in a calculated bid to thwart once and for all the possibility of a Palestinian state.
Eisenkot's star rising abroad
People abroad read polls, too, and the international media has noticed the rise of Gadi Eisenkot as the leading candidate of the anti-Netanyahu bloc in the upcoming elections. This week, David Remnick wrote a feature about him in the New Yorker magazine. As admiration of and interest in Eisenkot grows, Netanyahu's burning tone against him gets sharper.
Netanyahu was belatedly forced this week to comment on the AI video published by his official accounts depicting Eisenkot hugging the United Arab List's Mansour Abbas. In the video, Eisenkot runs past a young man that many people said looked strikingly like Gal Eisenkot, his son who fell in combat in the Gaza Strip in December 2023. Netanyahu, under the guise of a senior diplomatic official, of course claims that he never saw the video at all. In his response, he wondered aloud why the press isn't talking about the incitement against the Netanyahu family. Some things never change.
I have no idea who among the two would win an intelligence contest, but it's fairly clear what happens when you try to gauge emotional intelligence. Eisenkot was interviewed this week in an unexpected location, on Shir Reuven's "How To Do Things" podcast. Eisenkot spoke on the podcast openly and honestly about how his family coped with bereavement. When asked what he had learned in retrospect about his visits as a commander to hundreds of bereaved families over the years, he answered simply: "Maybe I should have shut up more." A week earlier, Netanyahu was hosted by Avi Shoshan on another podcast. When the interviewer gave him a softball question about his feelings on October 7, the prime minister fled to a discussion about children with cancer. He then talked about the excitement he experienced when he watched soccer star Lionel Messi cry at the end of the World Cup.
On a roll
If Smotrich demonstrates chutzpah and Netanyahu unreceptiveness, Israel Katz covers the whole playing field. Nothing is too much. The slew of outbursts by the defense minister this week included an explanation about his refusal to recognize the phenomenon of Jewish terror in the territories (Katz did away with administrative detention for Jewish suspects in November 2024); ordering the release of a right-wing extremist who violated his restraining order; confronting and threatening Avi Bluth, commander of the IDF Central Command, after Bluth didn't respond to his demands quickly enough; ignoring the censor by publishing the fact that U.S. planes are taking off from Israel to attack Iran, ordering the army to demolish a West Bank refugee camp and expel its residents; and, for dessert, boasting about the methodical destruction of Lebanese villages. He made this boast while the IDF was claiming it was only demolishing terror infrastructure. This statement casts a shadow over all the military's operations in Lebanon in recent years.
There is probably a simple explanation to Katz's higher media profile and radical comments. As the Likud primary nears, there's not much enthusiasm for his achievements as defense minister (IDF brass is even less enthusiastic), and settlement leaders are privately lobbying every time they suspect he is deviating from an aggressive line in the West Bank. And Katz's revelation about Iran seems to open the possibility of a direct Iranian-Israeli escalation. Such a development, Netanyahu has said, would likely drive Likud to cancel the primary.
Making more radical statements about the West Bank is linked to the tension there, after the deadly incident in the village of Tell last Friday. Dozens of settlers, including children, entered the Palestinian village, and a confrontation broke out with residents. Two Israelis and four Palestinians were killed. The trip was not coordinated with the army, although the regional brigade likely knew of it.
Settlers are planning dozens of such trips across the West Bank this Friday. They will also pass through Area B (Israeli military authority, Palestinian civilian authority). They are dedicated to the memory of one of the fallen Israelis, Benayahu Mellet, a member of the Havat Gilad outpost's security team. As always, commemoration is a part of the ideological struggle and the attempt to control the territories, just as the original trip was not an innocent morning excursion.
At the same time, the extreme right-wing media is making sure to blemish the good name of Maj. Yuval Ezra, the artillery officerwhfaMaking more radical statements about the West Bank is linked to the tension there, after the deadly incident in the village of Tell last Friday. Dozens of settlers, including children, entered the Palestinian village, and a confrontation broke out with residents. Two Israelis and four Palestinians were killed. The trip was not coordinated with the army, although the regional brigade likely knew of it.
It's also worth dwelling on the affair involving Tal Yinon Dardik, the settler suspected of sexually abusing a Palestinian from the northernJistwith Katz. He petitioned together with the state prosecutor against Katz's decision not to renew the restraint order against Dardik.
Bluth is being considered for the role of the next head of the Intelligence Division. Now, Katz is furious and is threatening to disrupt Bluth's military career and to move up appointing in Bluth's place as commander of Central Command another officer, Gen. David Bar-Khalifa, who serves as head of the Manpower Division at IDF General Staff.
The process of selecting and appointing the top military brass was never clean and pure. However, we have here a case of methodical political intervention in the process. Katz is using pressure and placing officers in hopes that they will toe the line with the expectations of the settlers and the coalition. If Katz is given enough time, he is liable to try to copy the success of Ben-Gvir, who took total control over the appointments of senior police and prison service officials.
As the elections draw nearer, the question of senior appointments will become more sensitive. Petitions to the High Court of Justice are likely to be filed against last-minute, underhanded opportunistic appointments. (Similar questions arose around the appointment of Herzl Levi as IDF chief of staff during the Bennett-Lapid government.) Likud has two cards left in its bag as ways to pressure the army and as material that can oil its propaganda machine during the electoral campaign.
There is the threat of a Shin Bet investigation around the claims of an early leak to Channel 12 about the date of the opening of the second war on Iran at the end of February. And there remains the "Jericho Wall" affair. Last year, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir appointed, under pressure from Katz, Gen. (res.) Roni Numa to investigate the failure to properly handle the plan to attack the Gaza border communities, which was stolen from Hamas in 2018 and was ignored. It's an affair in which the fingers are pointed at the senior officers, both past and present, much more than at the political leadership.