Hormuz Deal Would Hand Iran an Unprecedented Geopolitical Victory
The agreement that is now emerging in the Gulf looks like another Iranian success, achieved by the regime in Tehran through a mixture of stubbornness, patience and planned provocations.
Although U.S. President Donald Trump continues to threaten to assassinate senior Iranian officials and declare that he'll prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, a White House spokeswoman said this week that nuclear arms will not be in Iran's possession "on Trump's watch" – meaning only until January 2029. Indeed, the main issue that's been under discussion in the past few weeks is a compromise arrangement in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran may now gain effective control of the waterway through which a large portion of the world's oil exports flow. Trump hopes that this will bring about a gradual calming of the oil markets. But even if understandings will be reached now, the mistrust between the sides will make it difficult to achieve a final and stable agreement in the coming two months.
Under the still-unsigned arrangement, Iran will be able to collect fees from vessels that navigate the northern route at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, and Oman will collect fees from vessels exiting the Gulf on the southern route, near its shores. In other words, as it stands now, Tehran will likely end the war with an accomplishment that wasn't even on the agenda when the United States and Israel went into battle, twice, in hopes of toppling the regime and terminating its nuclear and missile programs.
At present, the trajectory for halting the nuclear project looks tenuous and strewn with obstacles; as for the missiles, which Israel identified as a cardinal danger at the start of the second campaign that started on February 28, hardly anyone is talking about it now.
The bottom line is that Iran's leadership, security forces, military industries and economy have all been seriously battered since June 2025, but the system didn't collapse and those who survived are continuing to hold the reins of power. In mid-June the U.S. and Iran signed a Memorandum of Understanding that included a timetable to achieve a detailed agreement within 60 days. The new deal that's shaping up would secure an additional 60-day delay for the same purpose, and its chances of success don't look great. As Yitzhak Rabin noted astutely, in the Middle East there are no sacred dates.
Trump's repeated threats to tear the Iranians apart no longer inspire trust or even emotion. The breaking point may have been last weekend, when he called off a planned attack at the last minute, maintaining that Iran was begging for a deal. Still, that doesn't rule out the possibility that Trump will decide to attack in the end, despite his clear reservations about this course of action and the fairly well-founded feeling that the U.S. has nothing to gain from launching a short, limited military offensive.
The American press is portraying Trump as a president consumed with cementing his legacy and obsessed about the progress being made on the series of monuments he has built for himself in Washington, as though he were a Roman emperor from 2,000 ago. The Atlantic magazine maintains (again) that there is an evident decline in Trump's cognitive abilities and in his ability to grasp a complex reality, and that these developments are affecting the catastrophic management of the protracted Iranian crisis.
Yet it's precisely this description that leaves an opening for the possibility that the repeated Iranian provocations – which stem from the notion that the United States is weak and deterred – will ultimately give rise to a powerful response from the president.
Amid the latest developments, Israel again finds itself playing a secondary role. Trump's backtracking on the attack that had been planned for last weekend was influenced by pressure that came from the Sunni Gulf states, and above all by a direct plea from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. What Prime Minister BenjaminNetanyahu extracted from the president in their White House meetinglast week isn't yet clear. In the meantime, things don't appear to be progressing to the prime minister's liking.
There's a larger question here, which relates to Israel's regional strategy in the circumstances that were created after the October 7 massacre. The researcher and former journalist and politician Ofer Shelah wrote this week on the website of Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies that the new security concept, which Netanyahu is marketing only along general lines, reflects "flawed logic and constitutes a danger to national security."
That concept manifests on the ground as a proactive approach that initiates a direct confrontation in the event a new threat develops, and advocates a long-term approach of types of security zones across the border (currently in southern Lebanon, the Syrian Golan Heights and Hermon, and in more than half of the Gaza Strip). Shelah recalls Netanyahu's vision under which Israel will become a "super-Sparta" – a country "whose army is stretched thin in a war that has no end and whose borders are constantly expanding. The burden that this concept imposes is threatening its economy, internal cohesion, the model of the people's army and the desire of many to live in it."
The state, Shelah says, "is acting in a manner that threatens the Israel Defense Forces' combat values, placing in doubt its advantages over its enemies and moving it close to dangerous international isolation."
On the same subject, another INSS researcher, Brig. Gen. (res.) Assaf Orion, told Haaretz that the October 7 massacre in the western Negev "opened all the floodgates when it comes to the IDF's conduct in enemy territory. We are seeing destruction without incrimination and without an address in villages in Lebanon and Gaza.
Not only Israeli society, but also the government and the IDF went into trauma-induced battle shock – and the continuation of the war with no end date in sight is a numbing and addictive drug. Long-term damage has been caused here to society, to the regular army and to the reserve army. The IDF was accustomed to short wars, but now it has to cope with a race that resembles the Ironman [triathlon]: The body screams from stress fractures, but no one is tending to it."
As aggressive as it gets
The bizarre incident of the week, as part of what will perhaps be remembered in the future as the twilight of Netanyahu's rule, concerns the West Bank. A dispute over how to deal with a settler suspected of terrorism against Palestinians led to a blowup between Defense Minister Israel Katz and the IDF's top command. At its height, Katz announced the dismissal of the general who heads the Central Command on a live broadcast of the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, and his replacement by another officer.
Ostensibly, the sin of Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth was that he sided with the prosecution, which opposed the release of the settler from custody under restrictive conditions (contrary to Katz's stance). In reality, two other power struggles are underway here. First, the settlers' extremist wing isn't satisfied even with a head of Central Command like Bluth, who's "aggressive" and convenient for the settler movement; they're looking for an officer who will fall in line with all their caprices.
And second, Katz, who's fearful of being humiliated in the Likud primaries, is trying to forcefully dictate senior appointments in the IDF and ensure that candidates for promotion understand that they have to kiss his ass before they get the appointment. And if the General Staff is observing Katz's behavior with astonishment, the officers below them are watching the unfolding events and trying to figure out whether these are the new rules of the game.
Katz came under pressure after an assault by the panelists on the propaganda channel, who demanded that Bluth be fired. After replying in the negative, Katz quickly corrected himself and announced that Bluth would soon be replaced by Maj. Gen. Dado Bar Kalifa, "one of the officers from the victory generation." The distinction between these two groups is utterly foolish.
The failure of October 7 lies on the shoulders of the whole IDF, and it's impossible to draw a sweeping distinction between those who were major generals and those who were brigadier generals (especially since both Bluth and Bar Kalifa were division commanders at the time). More seriously, the appointment, although previously discussed between Katz and the IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir was not finalized, and no date was set for the changeover. Zamir was caught completely by surprise.
The peculiar event in the TV studio triggered a storm of condemnations, including by the leaders of the settler movement, who took Bluth's side. Zamir told the major generals the next day that he had decided to halt all senior appointments until the election. Netanyahu maintained a thunderous silence and Katz was forced to retreat. He did so with the help of the channel, which spent half a day celebrating its dubious achievement (an on-air dismissal) and whose staff now claim that our ears didn't hear what was perfectly clear to everyone who watched the broadcast.
Still, Katz is not the only injured party in the affair. Bluth suffered an unpleasant blow, and may have learned something of a lesson. It turns out that as the Central Command chief, one cannot receive a permanent embrace from Channel 14, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and the leadership of the Yesha Council of settlements, and think that one is immune for the long term. There will always come a moment when someone will castigate you for not being aggressive enough.
While Katz and Zamir were trading blows, another 15 or so settler outposts were established in the West Bank. The IDF, as Shelah and Orion pointed out, is stretched to the limit, particularly in the West Bank, in order to protect every new adventurist move by the settlers.
In the meantime, the army published the results of its investigation into the July 24 incident in the village of Tel, near Nablus, in which two Israeli security personnel and four Palestinians were killed. The findings don't add honor neither to the army nor to the semblance of the rule of law in the territories.
The investigation found that early that morning, dozens of settlers set out on a tour that passed through Areas A and B, including entering Palestinian villages without prior authorization (which would not have been granted). Similar jaunts, whose purpose is to demonstrate a presence, and often also to engage in deliberate provocation against the Palestinians, have been taking place throughout the West Bank almost every weekend.
Once the confrontation had started, the small force that was dispatched to the site tried in vain to separate the sides, until a Palestinian snatched the weapon of the security chief of Havat Gilad, a settler outpost, and opened fire. The investigation discovered flaws in the Israeli force's response, but the investigation refuted the settlers' claims that the problem lay in directives restricting the opening of fire, or in slowness of action by the company commander, Maj. Yuval Ezra, who was killed when a bullet struck him in the head during an exchange of fire with the Palestinian.
Losing touch with reality
The signs of distress from Likud and the other coalition parties were more desperate than usual this week. Not everything is connected to the security situation, but with less than three months until the election, the government's troubles start there: with the absence of a decisive triumph on the various fronts (notably Gaza) and with Netanyahu's and his associates' refusal to accept responsibility for the October 7 massacre.
On the backdrop is a daily volley of headlines and revelations that reflect the depth of the corruption in which the coalition is mired, and the scale of the government's detachment from reality. Among the striking examples this week were the investigation of the president of Likud's internal court on suspicion of smuggling assets and large-scale fraud, and the visit by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman to Ketziot Prison, where they marketed the delusional project to dig a ccrocodile-filled canal around the facility. As with the bizarre AI video released by Katz ("A minister of the right wing with a smile that's dazzling!"), the scriptwriters of the right's campaign seem to be losing touch with reality.
In recent weeks, in connection with the election campaign, the watchdog FakeReporter has discerned what its investigators describe as a significant and rising trend to disseminate conspiratorial content dealing with the "internal treason" theory that supposedly occurred on the eve of the massacre and made it possible. Allegations of collaboration among the highest ranks of the security establishment or among "the refuseniks who demonstrated on Kaplan [Street in Tel Aviv against the judicial coup]" were heard from Likud and the far-right coalition parties from the first weeks after the massacre.
Among the disseminators were prime minister's son Yair Netanyahu, Likud lawmaker Tally Gotliv, activists on social networks and media personnel who support Netanyahu and work in his propaganda channels.
According to FakeReporter, the content is spread mainly on TikTok, via anonymous accounts or by those that aren't recognized as major influencers. The research turned up hundreds of videos on the subject, which together have accumulated tens of millions of views. The main accounts spreading the conspiracy content have some 100,000 followers in total. The findings show that the videos are not random or specifically targeted, but are part of a network of accounts that consistently and systematically promote the "internal treason" theory and echo conspiratorial content to a wide audience.
FakeReporter writes that the timing of the phenomenon, the fake content that's promoted and the broad scale of dissemination are threatening to disrupt public opinion when it seeks to make a rational, democratic decision at the polling station. The watchdog noted that Israel's president, the state comptroller and the Shin Bet security service have all warned that Israel is not prepared to cope with a threat of fake news that is disseminated by foreign influence networks.
Here, though, we're talking about Israeli networks, which are fueled at the inspiration of right-wing politicians and influencers. "An immeasurably effective internal influence campaign is being conducted under our noses," FakeReporter writes. "The campaign began organically and authentically on October 7, but very quickly the allegations of treason by the security establishment, the judiciary and the protest movement became like clay in the hands of the potter, and malicious political use of them was made. Now we are seeing an attempt to leverage these lies to disrupt the election in Israel.
The organization detects a rise in the phenomenon, but also in the gravity of the allegations themselves. "The videos don't stop at hints and raising doubts, but include unequivocal accusations that elements in the security establishment, the judiciary and the state's institutions were deliberate partners to the events of October 7, or acted to cover up the truth. We identify a growing use of false information, misleadingly edited clips and conspiracy theories presented as facts. Unlike other social networks, the TikTok content consists mainly of short clips, well edited and carrying sharp messages and an emotional appeal, enabling rapid dissemination and broad exposure."
The "internal treason" theory doesn't make do with a general claim that October 7 was the result of "treason," but attributes purposeful responsibility to the Shin Bet and its head at the time, Ronen Bar, the judiciary and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, the High Court of Justice and the top ranks of the IDF, along with political rivals of Netanyahu.
"In many, cases the theory is expanded to encompass also families of hostages, protest activists and media personnel, who are presented as part of an extensive apparatus of concealment or collaboration. The common denominator of all the content is the attribution of malicious and deliberate intent, and not the presentation of the events as the result of a professional failure, mistake or blunder," the report states.
In contrast to campaigns that rely on a small number of well-known influencers, the TokTok phenomenon is based on an extensive network of small and intermediate accounts, which create a ceaseless flow of conspiratorial content. As such, it's more difficult to monitor the flow and block it.
According to Israel Internet Association data, TikTok continues to be one of the major content platforms in Israel. A full 59 percent of the adult population use it – an increase from the previous year. Among young people, the numbers are even higher: 70 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 use TikTok, of them 56 percent on a daily basis.
"TikTok's recommendations algorithm exposes the clips organically to new audiences and broadens their dissemination. As a result, users – especially adolescents and young people – may be exposed over and over to the same falsehoods, almost with no exposure to contradictory material. In addition, the fact that the content is ostensibly spread by regular users and not by means of well-known public figures, lends it a semblance of authenticity in a manner that may enhance its credibility for viewers," the report says.