[News] Maximum Danger: How 'Israel' can sabotage the Iran-US deal

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.almayadeen.net
<https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/maximum-danger--how--israel--can-sabotage-the-iran-us-deal>
Maximum Danger: How 'Israel' can sabotage the Iran-US deal
Ali Halawi
June 22, 2026
------------------------------

The Islamabad MoU's 60-day implementation period is the window of maximum
danger, with the Israeli aggression on Lebanon threatening to derail an
Iran-US agreement before it can take hold.

   - [image: How 'Israel' can sabotage the Iran-US deal.]
   <https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2026/6/21/4772c8d6-cfee-4247-9dab-5fc1736fbe61.png?width=1000>
   An illustration shows a rocket shattering an hourglass perched atop a
   contested ridge in southern Lebanon, as a barrage of rockets streaks toward
   their targets, symbolizing Israeli military aggression threatening to
   derail the fragile Iran-US deal. (Batoul Chamas; Al Mayadeen English)

The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding survived its first week, just
barely. And the manner in which it nearly didn't reveals that the rift
between Washington and Tel Aviv is no longer a matter of insider reporting
or anonymous officials hinting at friction. It is now loud, public,
personal, and conducted in the open by the two governments themselves.

The 60-day negotiating period sanctioned by the MoU is the period of
"maximum danger" our earlier piece warned about
<https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/escalation-to-capitualtion--what-the-mou-means-for-iran--reg>.
The danger centers around "Israel" doing everything it can to sabotage a
final agreement and the US potentially taking advantage of Hormuz's
reopening to calibrate global energy markets before re-escalating. It is
"Israel" possibly abandoning restraint on its own patron, and in doing so,
handing Iran and the Resistance Front an opening that three years of war
failed to produce.
A ridge held on a five-month clock

Within hours of Trump signing the MoU, the Israeli military command
published its own deployment map; troops confirmed up to 10 kilometers
inside Lebanese territory, holding ground around Ali al-Taher and Kfar
Tibnit. The official release was a direct challenge not only to the
Resistance Front, but to Washington, as Tel Aviv signalled that what it
views as "security" for its northern settlements is not for anyone else to
decide.

Headlining the reporting that accompanied that map is a statement that
changes the entire calculus. Israeli officials told *Ynet* they intend to
preserve "the foothold" at a minimum until November, after the US midterms,
when Tel Aviv believes a new window will open for renewed aggression on
Iran. The working assumption among Israeli decision-makers, reported on the
record, is that the 60-day MoU window will not produce a final deal at all.

That single detail converts the Lebanon front from a tactical dispute into
a declared strategic horizon. Ali al-Taher
<https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/iof-infiltration-at-ali-al-taher-mid-ceasefire-thwarted--hez>
was not an isolated overreach by Netanyahu's government or military
commanders. It was the leading edge of a position "Israel" intends to hold
for five months, against a clock that has nothing to do with the MoU's own
negotiating calendar and everything to do with American electoral politics.
Analysts frequently scrutinize Iran for employing delaying tactics to
strengthen its leverage in international negotiations. However, media
coverage rarely applies the same critical lens to "Israel", even when Tel
Aviv explicitly states its intent to stall.

The hill itself tells the story of what "Israel's" position costs.
Hezbollah killed the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade's 52nd
Battalion and three crew members when their tank was struck attempting to
advance past Kfar Tibnit. A second strike later
<https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/hezbollah-attack-kills-israeli-soldier--wounds-13-commando-t>
killed a Commando Brigade soldier and wounded 13, which reportedly included
the brigade's deputy commander. Israeli media described it as one of the
harshest blows the military has suffered on the Lebanese front in recent
weeks. The Israeli military persisted in its attempts to hold the hill
anyway. Three years of American-made bombs had already failed to dislodge
whatever sits beneath it, leaving Israeli planners with no option other
than physically taking control of the area, despite accumulated losses.

The 60-day window is the active danger period for Lebanon and Iran-US
talks. November is a separate, later contingency tied to Iran, not a
continuation of the same threat.
When the patron turns on the client

What happened next is the part that matters most for understanding where
the region stands.
Trump, Vance have had enough of 'Israel'

Trump's own envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, were largely blamed by
Israeli commentators for getting the president's signature on the MoU.
Within days of the signing, prime-time hosts on Netanyahu-aligned *Channel
14* were calling them "losers," accusing the two Jewish officials of
selling out "Israel at the moment of truth." Trump told *Axios* that
Netanyahu had "no f***ing judgement" for ordering a strike on Beirut that
nearly collapsed the deal. At the G7 summit, Trump described the
relationship in terms no Israeli prime minister has heard publicly from an
American president in decades: "We are the big partner and he is the very
small partner."

Then came US Vice President JD Vance. In a *New York Times* interview, the
vice president named "Israel's" far-right ministers directly, Bezalel
Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir
<https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/ben-gvir-s-genocidal-rhetoric-on-lebanon-draws-international>,
and challenged them by name to produce an alternative to the deal they were
attacking.

"You're a country of nine million people," he said, adding, "You can't just
kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that
you have."

Hours later, at a White House briefing, he went further, "If I was in the
cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only
powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world." Commentators
across the political spectrum called it the bluntest public criticism an
American administration has leveled at "Israel" in a generation.
United in opposition

The response from "Israel's" own political class confirms how deep the
rupture runs. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir publicly declared "Israel" would not
consider itself bound by the agreement. Ben-Gvir told Vance directly, in
English, on social media, that the proper response to Iran was to treat it
the way the US "dealt with the Nazis of the 20th century."

Reporting in the Israeli press described War Minister Israel Katz and
Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir as viewing the MoU as a strategic
disaster, alongside the rest of the security establishment, not merely the
far-right flank Washington tried to isolate.

A senior member of Netanyahu's own security cabinet told Israeli
television, "Israel must be prepared to act alone... our baseline
assumption is that Trump has lost interest, regardless of what the Iranians
will or won't do." A subsequent poll found 71% of Israelis do not trust
Trump to look out for their interests in the deal.

What has emerged since is something categorically different: an Israeli
political and media establishment turning, openly and at full volume,
against the patron whose strategic cover made the entire war against Iran
possible in the first place. Not only did Washington make that war
possible, but it also facilitated and directly participated in genocide,
war crimes, and massacres from Gaza to Tehran
<https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/israeli-bombings-massacre-civilians-in-nabatieh-villages>
.

Washington normalized choosing to "kill your way out of solving every
single national security problem."
What Washington loses when Tel Aviv won't listen

The strategic risk to Washington
<https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/us-intelligence-warns--israel--may-undermine-iran-us-mou>
is not abstract. Every cycle of Israeli strikes in Lebanon has directly
cost the United States negotiating leverage with Iran, especially when Iran
responds and meets that escalation. Vance canceled his trip to Switzerland
once already because Israeli aggression made the optics of signing
untenable. Technical talks were postponed. The Iranian delegation, led by
Ghalibaf, delayed its own departure pending guarantees Washington could not
immediately provide, because the guarantees depended on a government
Washington is not yet ready to impose its full control over.

Each derailment forces American officials to spend political capital
reining in their own ally rather than advancing the deal itself, capital
that should be going toward locking in the very outcomes Vance has been
selling publicly. This includes opening Hormuz, lifting the blockade,
Iranian economic reintegration, and regional de-escalation. Every Israeli
strike that nearly collapses the talks is, by definition, an attack on the
strategic project the Trump administration appears to have staked its
Middle East policy on.
The opening this creates

None of this is Iran's doing. That is precisely what makes it valuable.

Iran did not retaliate militarily when Israeli strikes killed dozens of
Lebanese civilians in their homes during the supposed ceasefire. It did not
need to. It closed the Strait of Hormuz instead, three days after reopening
it, citing explicitly the "clear bad faith" of the United States in failing
to enforce clause 1, and the "continuous and ongoing violations" by the
Israeli regime. On the escalation ladder, closing the Strait allows Iran to
retaliate economically, reverse the escalation, and better position its
action as self-defense under the MoU's own language.

It is also, notably, a tool no battlefield engagement in Lebanon can match
in strategic weight, deployed without a single additional Iranian or
Resistance Front casualty. But calibration is not a permanent strategy. If
Washington continues treating Israeli violations as a containable nuisance
rather than a breach it is obligated to enforce against, Iran will need to
signal, clearly, and before patience curdles into miscalculation, that
economic pressure is not the ceiling of its response.

The result would be a region in which "Israel" is doing the work of
isolating itself, and Iran does not have to lift a finger to benefit from
it. Every *Channel 14* broadcast calling Kushner a traitor, every Smotrich
statement rejecting Trump's deal, every military map confirming territory
held against the spirit of the MoU, all of it erodes the credibility of the
one actor that spent three years trying to convince the region Iran could
be isolated, decapitated, and replaced. Instead, Tel Aviv is demonstrating
in real time that it answers to no one, not even Washington, and Washington
is demonstrating in return that it is incapable of disciplining a
misbehaving client.
What the table below makes explicit

The methods are not improvised; they follow a pattern, and laying that
pattern out plainly is more useful than treating each individual incident
as a surprise.

Three methods, one strategy: hold ground, lobby Washington, and wait for a
clock that runs on American elections rather than Iranian negotiating
positions.

What unites all three methods is patience. "Israel" is not trying to
collapse the MoU outright, not yet. Officials in Tel Aviv appear to
understand, as well as anyone in Washington or Tehran, that neither side
wants to be the party that walks away from the table while normalizing
economic ties remains even theoretically possible. So the strategy is not
to rupture. It is attrition; hold ground, lobby hard, escalate just short
of the threshold that would force Washington to fully break with its own
ally, and wait for a clock that runs on American elections rather than
Iranian negotiating positions.
The region Iran did not have to fight for

US strategic retrenchment does not hand the region to Iran automatically.
That much should be said plainly. A vacuum has no preferred occupant. Gulf
capital, already courted by the MoU's $300 billion reconstruction clause,
could fill a crucial economic space. "Israel" itself, as the Israeli
military's own map confirms, is actively filling security space in Lebanon
by force, regardless of what any memorandum says.

But there is a difference between a vacuum Iran must compete for and a
vacuum an exhausted, internally fracturing rival is creating through its
own conduct. What the last week has demonstrated is not Iranian strength
alone. It is Israeli overreach, documented by "Israel's" own press,
criticized by "Israel's" own patron, and resisted by "Israel's" own
coalition partners turning the war's costs into a domestic political
crisis. The Hormuz closure proved Iran's economic deterrent still functions
under live pressure.

The danger has a date now, and Israeli officials put the number on it
themselves: November. Whether Iran and the Resistance Front are positioned
to convert five months of Israeli self-isolation into durable regional
gains, rather than simply waiting out the clock alongside everyone else, is
the question this window will actually answer.
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