Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have been reassured by the expected failure of the Islamabad talks between the US and Iran to open the door to negotiations that could have produced a deal to end the war that Israel and the US started against Iran on 28 February.
“This was the news that Netanyahu was expecting. Netanyahu is the main instigator behind this war,” said an Egyptian official who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly.
He added that the Israeli prime minister had been lobbying for the war for a long time, and he had finally got it. But “he would have wanted it to end not just with the collapse of the Iranian regime but with the total collapse of Iran into havoc as well,” he said.
In press statements made earlier this week, former US secretary of state John Kerry said that Netanyahu had tried but failed to get three previous US presidents, George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, to attack Iran.
Only US President Donald Trump had agreed, Kerry said.
However, according to several diplomatic sources who spoke to the Weekly over the weeks of the war, it might have taken Trump sometime to realise that the war that he started with Netanyahu would prove much more complicated and costly, politically, economically, and militarily, than he originally assumed.
He undertook it “against the best advice of some of the US top brass”, some have noted.
After 40 days of heavy strikes that started with the elimination of the country’s powerful supreme guide and the top leadership of the political structure and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), the joint US-Israeli war on Iran failed to achieve its objective of regime change in Tehran.
According to an informed Egyptian security source with expertise on the Gulf, “Netanyahu’s dream of erasing Iran from the regional map of leading powers has failed.”
“True, the Iranian regime has been weakened, but this does not mean that Iran is no longer a regional power,” he added.
According to the source, in the assessment of most Arab countries, especially Iran’s immediate neighbours in the Gulf, Iran is not coming out of the war too weak to stir up trouble again where and when it wants to.
He explained that this means that Iran could be a long-term source of unease for the Arab Gulf states that have already suffered from military strikes from Iran under the pretext of the US military bases they host.
The security source said that one thing that several Arab capitals are worried about is that once the war comes to an end, the US and Israel will be spared while the Arab Gulf countries will have to worry about future Iranian intentions.
Several diplomatic sources said that Saudi Arabia, in particular, is of the opinion that some sort of political arrangement has to be reached with Iran in order to cut the war’s losses.
“Clearly, this was not what Netanyahu was hoping for,” said another Egyptian security source with expertise on Israel.
He argued that Netanyahu had planned for the war to bring about the end of the Iranian regime. The objective, he argued, was to get rid once and for all of the main threat to Israel in the region.
“Of course, the history of Iranian-Israeli relations is very complicated, but for Netanyahu Iran was a military and intelligence threat that had to be eliminated, both because of its own capacities and because of its support for the militant resistance groups that defy Israel, particularly Hizbullah in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza, and the [Houthis] in Yemen,” he said.
Both security sources agreed that what Netanyahu had got after 40 days of war was not what he had hoped for.
They said that the Iranian regime has been weakened but that it was also more radicalised, that its intentions to invest in its nuclear programme, illicitly and openly, had increased, that its plans to consolidate the regional militant groups that are opposed to Israel had now become non-negotiable, and that its commitment to building its military capacities had at least doubled.
Both sources said that when the war finally ends, “and it has to be in a matter of weeks because Trump needs to get this highly unpopular war behind him and focus on the midterm Congressional elections” in November, Netanyahu will be faced with a more unpleasant reality than just his failure to be done with Iran.
They said that other disappointing realities will include the end of Netanyahu’s dream to expand the Abraham Accords normalising relations with Israel to include the other Arab Gulf countries and especially the so-called prize of Saudi Arabia.
“Netanyahu now has to forget about the full integration of Israel into the region,” said the security source with expertise on the Arab Gulf.
He said that none of the four Arab Gulf countries who did not join the UAE and Bahrain in the August 2018 signing of the Abraham Accords will be willing today to even contemplate the idea of doing so.
“As it is, the Arab Gulf countries are busy calculating the possible future issues that they might have to deal with on the Iranian front. None of them will want to aggravate an already bad situation through a possible normalisation with Israel, especially not with the end of Trump’s time in office in around three years’ time,” he said.
According to an Egyptian diplomat who has previously served in Washington, “what Netanyahu got with Trump is not something he should expect to get with any other US president.”
According to a US-based Arab diplomat, Netanyahu, who has often called Trump the “greatest friend that Israel has ever had at the White House,” was unhappy with the ceasefire decision “that Trump took and forced Netanyahu to accept”.
He added that Trump “effectively told Arab interlocutors that he had told Netanyahu to wind down military activities on the Lebanese front in order to accommodate the Iranian demand for a cessation of hostilities prior to the start of the two-day US-Israeli negotiations in Islamabad” on Friday last week.
Several diplomatic sources said that with the failure of the Islamabad talks to produce a positive outcome, Netanyahu will again be lobbying for the resumption of the joint US-Israeli war on Iran or at least a greenlight from Washington for Israel to continue its strikes against Iran and also against Lebanon where Hizbullah has been regaining ground.
Israel dealt the group a significant blow when it killed its powerful Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024.
According to a Lebanon-based diplomatic source, with or without a greenlight from Washington, it is likely that Israel will scale up its military activities on the Lebanese front, “if only to torpedo” the chances of any sustainable negotiations between Israel and the US.
Speaking on Sunday evening, hours after the announcement of the failure of the Islamabad talks, the diplomat said that Netanyahu will no longer be hoping for a bilateral peace deal with Lebanon to come out of direct talks in Washington.
“The direct Israeli-Lebanese talks might still take place in Washington as scheduled, but the chances of there being any significant concessions by the Lebanese government against the wishes of Hizbullah have become highly unlikely with the failure of Israel to remove Iran from the seat of power behind the group,” he added.
Meanwhile, regional diplomatic sources agreed that Netanyahu will also have to worry about Israel’s relationship with the countries it has established peaceful relations with, since his war choices in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran have come at a huge economic cost for them, particularly if they thought that normalisation with Israel would give them immunity against Iranian strikes.
In the words of one of the diplomatic sources, it is not just Trump that went unguardedly into a miscalculated war that has come at a huge political cost, but Netanyahu also thought that the day of Israeli regional supremacy was just around the corner before waking up to a different reality.
“It is true that this war is very popular in Israel, but it has really harmed Israeli regional relations,” he said.
Even worse, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz commentator Moran Sharir, the war has shocked American Jews who are opposed to the war and to Zionism as an ideology. It might have led some of them to deny any relationship with the state of Israel, he added.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 April, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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