The last 24 hours have seen a direct confrontation revolving around Trump’s agreement that Israel get out of Lebanon and Netanyahu’s vow that they won’t. Last night, it began modestly with the Times of Israel challenging a senior U.S. officer, who was briefing journalists on the U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, that the U.S. had promised Iran would not get relief from sanctions before making concessions in the nuclear talks—but the officer had just reported that sanctions waivers were immediate. The officer explained that the sanctions weren’t working anyhow, and a second officer offered that the U.S. and Israel had “caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damages to Iran,” so what difference does less than $10 billion in sanction waivers amount to?
Then they denied Israeli media reports that Netanyahu had requested access to the MoU, to no avail. They claimed: “Nothing has been requested of us. We’ve always shared with them some of the concepts of what it was. We’ve had consultations with [the Israelis] along the way.” But Netanyahu “has not asked us for a copy of it. Maybe he hasn’t seen the final document, but he can’t say that he’s not up to speed on what’s occurring.”
Today, it escalated. A senior Israeli official ‘close to’ Netanyahu reported to Reuters that Israel was now “conducting stubborn negotiations” with Washington over continuing its deployment of troops in southern Lebanon. The official said Israel would not back down on its positions. Yet they are aware that Trump could apply muscle that he has been unwilling to before. A second Israeli official told Reuters that the outcome of the talks would ultimately depend on whether U.S. President Donald Trump “decides to force the issue” by threatening repercussions if Israel does not abide by the agreement.
Then the IDF published a new map, as reported by Reuters, showing an expanded military control zone in southern Lebanon. While they had, weeks ago, gone beyond the previous (April) map marking its declared “buffer zone,” their new map incorporated those advances, including areas north of the Litani River. Further, they declared that they “will continue to remove threats [to] soldiers and the civilians of the State of Israel that are identified beyond the security zone.” That is, the farther that the IDF advances, the farther they have to advance.
