American cruise missiles and warplanes struck targets across Iran again overnight into Thursday, hours after President Donald Trump vowed to hit the Islamic Republic “hard” for stalling at the negotiating table.
The latest wave followed Iran’s downing of an American Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week, an incident that drew dozens of Tomahawk missiles in response and pushed a ceasefire Tehran now calls “meaningless” to the edge of collapse.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the strait closed to all vessels, a claim U.S. Central Command swiftly denied, while Qatari mediators remained in Tehran searching for a diplomatic opening. Trump, for his part, warned he is getting closer to targeting Iran’s power plants and bridges.
“They had a chance to sign a deal and survive,” he said.
In Israel, the renewed bombing is being read as both a vindication and a warning.
“The fact that the president is willing to exercise force is an important message,” Eyal Hulata, who headed Israel’s National Security Council, said in an interview. “The Iranians started believing that they can play for time and continue to increase their demands. That’s not a proper way to have a negotiation with anyone, let alone the Iranians.”
Yet Hulata voiced unease over the leash Washington has placed on Jerusalem.
“What worries me is that the president at the same time is limiting Israel’s ability to operate,” he said. “It seems like he might not have the trust that I was hoping he would have in the prime minister. That worries me.”
Early this month, a phone call between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turned heated as the president, reportedly using expletives, pressed Israel to scale back its Lebanon offensive, and Washington said that it had instructed Israel to cancel planned strikes on Hezbollah’s Dahieh stronghold in Beirut. Israel hit Dahieh anyway on June 7, and Iran answered the same evening with nearly 30 ballistic missiles, its first barrage at Israel since the April ceasefire. This week, after the American strikes, Tehran has held that fire.
Iran’s retaliation, notably, has flowed mostly elsewhere. In response to the American strikes, Tehran fired at Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan, hitting Kuwait’s airport, while keeping its fire on Israel to a trickle.
Hulata offers an explanation for that restraint: “Iran understands that if they strike Israel, we will respond. They know Israel will do this, even if there’s a great tension with Washington. This is the lesson from this week. The Iranians wanted an open war with Israel. What they needed was to attack Israel. And indeed, they sent a few missiles to Israel, and the response was quite strong. And they understood that. It seems to me that they do not have an appetite to see Israel join this conflict at the moment.”
As Trump increases pressure, not in kinetic form, to press Tehran to concessions, some in Israel admit that the present standoff, no deal, serves Israel better than a rushed agreement would.
“This strategic limbo that we are currently hanging [onto] is not necessarily bad for Israel or the US,” said Eli Bar-On, a national security analyst who has served in a range of positions in the Israeli government. “It’s bad for Iran because Iran is struggling. Iran is under blockade. Iran is having an unbearable economic situation.”
Tehran’s negotiating style, he added, echoes the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement: “Iran has a very maximalist approach in order to later have a deal. The Iranians understand that there will be no deal without huge concessions on the nuclear file. And this is why we don’t have a deal.”
But there is a caveat. No deal works only as long as the Strait of Hormuz stays open, and that requires American military might and will.
“Everybody in Israel understands that it’s President Trump’s decision whether to go for a deal or not, and Israel will have to adjust,” said Michael Herzog, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington. “Israelis want to make sure that if there is a deal, it is a strong deal and not a weak one. Most Israelis will say that no deal is better than a bad deal, but, of course, the devil is in the details.”
Those details cluster around the nuclear file.
WHILE TEHRAN PROBES WITH MISSILES, JERUSALEM IS IN A BIND
“What mostly concerns Israelis, I think, is the state of the nuclear program, which has been set back very considerably, but there are still question marks about the details, what happens to the 60% enriched uranium Israelis would like to see destroyed, not merely downgraded, and that’s an open issue,” Herzog explained.
Trump reached for the military option after two months of talks that led nowhere. He hopes bombs will deliver what blockade and patience have yet to produce. If anything can bring the Iranians to make meaningful concessions, this is it. But will it?