This week, Israel went further in violating the terms of the ceasefire agreements it signed in November 2024 with Hizbullah and in October 2025 with Hamas, with increased military attacks against targets in areas that fall under them, namely western Gaza and southern Beirut.
While the Israeli violations of the Gaza ceasefire have been a daily affair, on Sunday Israel escalated them and killed over 20 Palestinians in Gaza beyond the Yellow Line that separates the east of Gaza, still under Israeli control, and the west of Gaza next to the Egyptian border.
On the same day, Israel attacked and killed a senior Hizbullah military leader, Ali Tabatabai, in a military air strike on Beirut. A Lebanese Ministry of Health statement said that the strike killed five people and wounded 28 others.
The attack was conducted less than 24 hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he would not halt his efforts to eliminate Hizbullah’s capacities.
Also on Sunday, Israeli air strikes in Gaza killed at least 20 people in the west of the Strip. Palestinian medical sources said that the strikes, which hit a densely populated neighbourhood, wounded at least 80 Palestinians.
The increased attacks on western Gaza and Beirut came days after Netanyahu and his top military aides visited the Syrian “buffer zone” amid growing scepticism about the chances of a possible new security deal between Israel and Syria’s Transitional Government.
Both Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accompanied Netanyahu during the visit.
“Netanyahu is still looking for a war to fight. This is not just about his own internal political agenda on the way to the next elections [scheduled for October 2026] or his own purposes to avoid a process of litigation that could send him to jail if indicted with corruption,” said an informed Egyptian source.
Netanyahu, he said, is convinced that this is the moment to completely eliminate all the militant resistance factions “or at least to render them too weak to be able to pick up the pieces before two or three decades,” he added.
“Netanyahu started with the assassination of the top Hamas and Hizbullah leaders [in 2024] and the aerial warfare against Iran [in 2025]. This has secured many of his objectives,” the source said.
“But Netanyahu is not done yet; he might have been pressured by [US President Donald] Trump to slow down, but he will certainly continue his attacks to the maximum possible tolerated by Washington,” he added.
On Sunday, Israeli media quoted American officials as saying that Washington was notified about the plan to kill Tabatabai in Beirut but was not notified of the exact timing.
According to an Egyptian diplomat who served in Washington recently, “this has become standard practice.” Israel, he said, either notifies Washington without sharing the exact date of a planned military attack against a high-level target or simply notifies the US capital at the very last moment, “just as the jet fighters are taking off to strike.”
The same source said that “Netanyahu knows exactly how far he can go without crossing what Trump would consider to be a red line. He knows how to space the attacks and how to get some [regional] support for some of them.”
The source spoke hours after Iran’s official news agency had quoted Esmail Khatib, the country’s minister of information, as warning “foreign adversaries” of attempting to target Iran’s Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei.
“The enemy seeks to target the supreme leader, sometimes with assassination attempts, sometimes with hostile attacks,” Khatib said.
According to two UN sources based in New York and the Middle East, the 12-day Israeli-Iranian military confrontation earlier this year could pick up again at any moment. “It might not be this week. It might not be until the end of this year. But it could certainly happen sometime,” said the New York-based UN source.
Both sources agreed that the war, which was conducted by rounds of aerial strikes and counter strikes, did not end but was rather paused at Trump’s request to Netanyahu.
The same New York-based source said that “I think the Israelis had convinced some in [the US capital] that together [with a regional player] they could start a regime change in Iran following the attacks on Iran’s nuclear targets” on 13 June.
He added that the fact that the US joined the attacks by hitting the Fordow nuclear installation in Iran on 21 June, just two days before the war stopped, was “a clear indication that irrespective of what is being said in public, the US is on board with any serious attempt to oust the Islamic regime in Iran.”
“This simply means that Israel’s next strike against Iran will not happen without an American greenlight,” the source said. “Whether or not there is consensus in Washington today about any plans to remove the regime in Tehran is a different story,” he stated.
According to several sources who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly, it is Iran that Netanyahu is really eyeing for his next big military campaign.
Some of these sources said that Netanyahu’s actions to significantly weaken the Iran-backed militant resistance groups, especially Hizbullah, and its tolerance of the ouster of the Iran-backed regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, are all about weakening Iran.
According to one Cairo-based European diplomat, it is hard to exclude a possible Israeli association with the “curious [helicopter] crash that killed” Iran’s former president Ebrahim Raisi, along with top diplomat Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and several other senior Iranian officials.
“To be honest, it always seemed that Israel was behind this crash,” the European diplomat added.
The crash that occurred on 19 May 2024 was qualified by Iranian sources at the time as an accident. According to an Arab diplomat who has served in Tehran, “it is not unusual for the Iranians to try to mask an Israeli assassination of a senior military scientist or official” in this way.
Cairo is not in favour of talk about any regime change in the region, especially in a country as influential as Iran. Egyptian officials say that this is not about the current good relations between Cairo and Tehran, including bilateral and regional cooperation, but is about the very fragile regional stability.
Egypt, the same officials say, is already worried about the many elements of instability in the region, especially in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza, along with the “volatile situation” in Sudan and in the Sahel and Sahara.
One of the officials added that a top priority for Cairo now is to avoid the collapse of the ceasefire in Gaza and to try to move to the subsequent phase of the deal that was signed according to the elements that Trump proposed to end the genocidal two-year Israeli war in Gaza.
This week, Cairo received a Hamas delegation to discuss ways of consolidating the ceasefire and moving forward with building its stability.
“We are also conducting talks on the same issue with Israel and the Americans,” the same official said. He added that Egypt has received assurances from the US that it will still do what it takes to keep Israel on board with the ceasefire.
In press statements, Khalil Al-Hayyah, head of the Hamas delegation, said that during the meeting with Egyptian officials the Hamas delegation had underlined its willingness to commit to the ceasefire. He insisted, however, that Israel needs to stop its violations of the deal.
He added that the delegation had asked Cairo to continue consultations with Israel on freeing Hamas fighters.
According to the Egyptian official, Egypt is trying “to resolve this matter” as it seems important for Hamas. The official added that Egypt is also trying to get Israel to honour its commitment to open the Rafah Crossing to allow Palestinians who need to exit to Egypt for medical or other purposes to do so.
In press statements on Sunday, Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said that Cairo is working closely with both Doha and Ankara, the two other guarantors of the Gaza peace deal, to consolidate the truce, move on to the following phase, and implement UN Security Council Resolution 2803. The UN resolution, adopted on 17 November, authorises the deployment of an International Stabilisation Force in Gaza.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: