The next few days are expected to be crucial in assessing the sustainability of the ceasefire that US President Donald Trump announced in the early hours of Tuesday, a few hours after Iran launched limited and casualty-free attacks on US military bases in Qatar and Iraq.
The fact that it only took a few hours for the ceasefire to be breached, as Trump said, by both sides, undermined hopes for this most recent chapter in regional instability to be closed, as some Cairo-based and Egyptian diplomats said on Tuesday afternoon.
Acknowledging the breaches, Trump said that he was “unhappy” with both Iran and Israel but particularly with Israel. He added that he had told Israel “do not drop these bombs” on Iran.
Both Iran and Israel said that they had not started the breaches in the ceasefire. But both said they would retaliate. However, the Israeli press reported that at the demand of Trump during a telephone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Israel had decided to scale down its attacks.
An informed Egyptian source said that both Oman and Qatar had been stressing to Tehran the need to shrug off the upcoming Israeli strikes as insignificant and to refrain from retaliating in return for some accommodating statement from Washington.
Effectively, Trump said that Israel should not have conducted the attack that hit the north of Iran on Tuesday afternoon.
According to the source, the basis of the ceasefire deal, “which was negotiated through back channels with the help of the Qataris and the Omanis,” was for Iran and Israel to almost simultaneously suspend their tit-for-tat strikes.
Iran, he said, was asked to stop “just a few hours earlier”.
But “Netanyahu will try to keep up the sorties against Iran for as long as he can. He will only stop when he feels that Trump’s patience is wearing thin,” the source said.
This chapter of regional tensions started on 13 June, when Israel hit Iranian nuclear and military facilities and individuals in what opened a 12-day trade of attacks with missiles and drones that continued until the US bombed three key Iranian nuclear facilities on 20 June.
On Monday evening, Iran launched missiles at US facilities in Qatar and Iraq, later expressing regret for its attack on the Al-Udeid US military base in Qatar, according to an official statement from Doha.
“Neither the US nor Iran wants to be engaged in a confrontation for much longer,” said Ahmed Morsy, a visiting fellow at the Middle East Council in Qatar. He said that the regime in Tehran is well aware that “it cannot put up for long” with a military confrontation with the US.
He added that Trump’s decision to attack Iranian nuclear facilities was not the result of a consensus within the American establishment. The fact that Trump ordered the attacks without Congressional authorisation makes it mandatory for any act of war to be contained.
“Had it not been for the lobbying that Netanyahu exercised, Trump would have preferred to give diplomacy a chance and work for a deal with Iran on its nuclear programme, which was far from being impossible,” Morsy said.
“Iran too was seriously negotiating for a deal.”
With the current settling of scores, Morsy said, both the Americans and the Iranians will want to move forward towards resuming negotiations for a nuclear deal.
“The trouble now is Israel. Netanyahu, who might be suffering from his multiple wars, may not wish to end the confrontation with Iran, despite the damage that Iranian missiles have inflicted on Israel, before either getting a regime change in Tehran or making this change one or two steps away,” he added.
Morsy said that since the assassination of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut in September last year, and the previous and subsequent elimination of other leaders of Hizbullah and Hamas, Netanyahu has been moving ahead with the plan that he has been openly talking about for some time — change across the Middle East.
During the past year and a half, Netanyahu has gone a long way in securing a crucial element of this plan, Morsy said, namely the elimination of the resistance camp that was headed and managed by Iran.
Today, he argued, there are two key questions. The first is about the time that Netanyahu needs before he decides to really end the confrontation with Iran, especially as he has eliminated the core of Iran’s top military leaders, “notably those on the radical side,” and the scientists who stood behind Iran’s nuclear programme.
The second is what Netanyahu’s second step will be in his plan to change the picture of the Middle East. “It is obvious that this will be to displace the Palestinians from Gaza and to annex the West Bank,” Morsy said, territories that have been under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) since the mid-1990s after the launch of the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process in the wake of the September 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords.
According to Ayman Zaineldine, Egypt’s former ambassador to Spain who has accumulated much first-hand experience of regional politics, any sound forecast of Netanyahu’s next move will have to answer a key question: Which deal would give Netanyahu the image of a victorious leader?
Zaineldine argued that it is an established fact that Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to stay in power in order to avoid litigation over claims of wrong-doing that could take him from the office of the prime minister to an Israeli jail.
This means that Netanyahu needs to stay in power and come across as the one Israeli leader who has forced all the powers of resistance in the region to succumb.
Already, he added, Netanyahu has gone a long way in achieving this objective. However, this does not mean that beyond the confrontation with Iran he will pursue regional policies that are less hostile.
“Netanyahu has been working on this target of [changing the dynamics in the Middle East] since he first came to power in 1996. Today, he will be deciding his next set of targets and will start working on them,” Zaineldine stated.
He said that there is the obvious target of the displacement of the Palestinians both from Gaza and the West Bank — “not an easy thing to deliver” despite possible US support.
He added that even if Netanyahu just ends up reducing the Palestinians in Gaza to one quarter of the land and the Palestinians in the West Bank to one third of the land, he could still claim that he has successfully achieved his objective of reversing the negotiations that were put in place upon the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993.
However, Zaineldine argued that even before moving on with his plan to displace the Palestinians from Gaza, Netanyahu “has already created a regional situation in which Israel is perceived as a hard-to-deter power.”
“Much will depend on the regional and international political dynamics in the coming weeks and also on the political dynamics inside Israel and inside Netanyahu’s own coalition, which seems today [to be overtaken by disagreements] and much weakened,” Zaineldine concluded.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 June, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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