By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Israeli drone strikes killed eight people in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, hours after President Trump declared that Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to stop fighting — an announcement undercut almost immediately by renewed bloodshed and a torrent of conflicting statements from governments on both sides of the conflict.
The dead included a dentist, James Karam, who was traveling with two of his children on the road linking the southern town of Marjayoun to Nabatiyeh when an Israeli drone struck their car. All three were killed, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency. Two Syrians working at a plant nursery in the village of Jibchit, and two more people in the neighboring village of Toul, also died in separate drone strikes. A sixth person was killed when a drone hit a car near the village of Harouf. The Israeli military said it was unaware of any strikes in that area.
The violence came despite Trump’s assertion late on Monday that he had spoken directly with both sides and secured their commitment to stand down. “All shooting will stop,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. He said Israel would not attack Hezbollah, and Hezbollah would not attack Israel.
Neither appeared to have gotten the message.
The sequence of events that produced Tuesday’s chaos began Sunday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared his intention to strike Hezbollah targets in Beirut’s southern suburbs — a threat that sent waves of panic through a city already battered by months of conflict and sheltering thousands of people displaced from their homes in the south. Netanyahu later warned on social media that Israel would strike Beirut if Hezbollah’s attacks did not cease.
The threat reverberated quickly in Tehran. Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency reported Monday that the country’s negotiating team would “suspend talks and the exchange of texts through mediators” in protest of Israel’s military operations — a declaration that threatened to unravel an agreement between Washington and Tehran that Trump had described just days earlier as nearly complete.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, in remarks carried by the state-owned Islamic Republic News Agency, warned Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri that Iran might retaliate if the strikes continued. “Over the past two days, we have seriously pursued efforts to stop Israel’s attacks,” Ghalibaf said. “If these crimes continue, we will not only suspend the negotiation process, but we will also stand against the Zionist regime.”
The ultimatum placed Trump in an acute bind. More than three months after the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran on Feb. 28, a conflict that has killed thousands and shuttered the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas once flowed — had hardened into a stalemate. Indirect negotiations over a temporary agreement had produced no resolution. Oil prices edged up to a one-week high on Tuesday.
Trump responded by calling Netanyahu. What happened on that call depends on who is telling the story.
The political news outlet Axios, citing multiple sources with knowledge of the conversation, reported that Trump berated the Israeli leader in profane terms, asking him, “What the fuck are you doing?” and telling him, “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.” The White House and Netanyahu’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
A US official with knowledge of the call, as well as a separate source familiar with the conversation, told NBC News that while the call was tense, it was not as aggressive as reported. That source said two conversations took place between Trump and Netanyahu on Monday, that Trump does at times use strong language with the Israeli leader, and that the two men do not always see eye to eye. What is not disputed is the substance of what Trump communicated: Netanyahu needed to scale back attacks on Beirut, because they were endangering a potential agreement with Iran.
“There was a little glitch today, but I turned that one around very quickly,” Trump told ABC News.
Following the call, Netanyahu confirmed that Israel would not strike Beirut so long as Hezbollah refrained from attacking it — a formulation that fell well short of the blanket ceasefire Trump had described.
The call was significant in another respect. Trump said he had also spoken directly with Hezbollah — a group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States — and that the group had agreed to halt attacks. If accurate, it would mark the first time an American president has communicated with Hezbollah, either directly or through intermediaries.
The Lebanese Embassy in Washington confirmed that Hezbollah had accepted the terms of a U.S. proposal for what it called a “mutual cessation of attacks,” which would also prohibit Israel from targeting Beirut. Lebanon said it would seek to build on that agreement in talks with Israel in Washington on Tuesday.
But even as diplomats spoke, Israeli forces continued operating in Lebanon, conducting what the military described as strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure. A Lebanese Civil Defense center in Nabatieh, in the south, was directly hit by an Israeli airstrike, the agency said on its Facebook page; the building and equipment inside were damaged. The Lebanese army reported that two soldiers were wounded in a separate Israeli drone attack in the same city. The Israeli military confirmed to NBC News that it had conducted at least one strike in Nabatieh, saying it was targeting Hezbollah facilities.
Hezbollah said its fighters fired anti-tank missiles at Israeli troops advancing into the southern village of Hadatha, roughly seven kilometers from the Israeli border. The Israeli military said it had intercepted at least two projectiles crossing from Lebanon into Israeli territory overnight and later reported that sirens had sounded in northern Israel after a suspicious aerial target was detected in the area where Israeli soldiers were operating in the south.
On the ground, for the roughly 1.2 million Lebanese who have been displaced, the pronouncements from world capitals offered little comfort. Faten Al Chehime, who had returned to her home in Beirut’s southern suburbs just two weeks earlier, fled again Monday after warnings of possible Israeli strikes. She described the cycle of displacement with exhaustion. “Every time we return to our homes,” she said, “there is a warning for us to be displaced again.” The sound of an Israeli drone over Beirut kept residents tense throughout the day.
Hovering over all of it is Netanyahu’s domestic political situation — one that complicates every calculation his government makes.
On Monday, the Israeli Knesset voted 106-0 on the first reading of a bill to dissolve parliament, setting up early elections expected in the autumn. Netanyahu, who led early in polling after successful strikes on Iran, has seen his numbers slip as the conflicts in Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon have dragged on without resolution. And this week, hearings resumed in his long-running trial on charges of fraud and bribery — a case that Netanyahu has used his wartime standing to repeatedly delay.
For Netanyahu, analysts say, there is little political incentive to stand down.
“He’s got no story going into this election,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former special adviser on the Middle East to Vice President Kamala Harris and formerly the Iran team chief at the Defense Department, now chief policy officer at J Street. “He needs this so he can say: I’m still working for total victory. It’s a much better story for him than: this is done, and I’ve essentially failed to actually dislodge any of these threats.”
John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term and has since become a critic, was blunter. “I think he wants to have a deal that opens the Strait of Hormuz, and he can declare victory and get the price of gasoline down,” Bolton told Reuters, referring to Trump. “But he knows if he makes a bad deal, he’ll be justifiably criticized for it, so he’s between a rock and a hard place, and he doesn’t know what to do.”
The broader outlines of a potential agreement between Washington and Tehran have been visible for weeks. Iran is pushing for a limited interim deal that would ease mounting economic pressure without requiring significant concessions on its nuclear program. As part of any arrangement, Tehran is seeking an end to hostilities across all fronts, including Lebanon; access to billions of dollars in frozen oil revenues; waivers on crude exports; a lifting of the American blockade on its ports; and a continued role in controlling passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, offered what amounted to the most concrete acknowledgment yet of progress — and its limits. Iran had agreed to negotiate aspects of its nuclear program it had previously refused to discuss, he said, though he was careful to add that this did not guarantee a deal. “There is the prospect before us,” Rubio told lawmakers, “which could happen today, it could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week.”
He said the United States had not offered Iran sanctions relief in exchange for reopening the strait, and would not. Any relief, he said, would be conditioned on Iran’s nuclear commitments. He also confirmed that if Iran opened the strait, the United States would lift its blockade of Iranian ports, and that Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei remains alive and involved in decision-making — though communicating exclusively through written messages and intermediaries. The Iranian negotiating process, Rubio said, is highly centralized, with responses often taking three to five days.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Tuesday that 24 vessels had transited the strait in the past 24 hours after obtaining permission from the Guards’ navy — a small number relative to the waterway’s pre-war volume. Tehran separately threatened to extend its blockade to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint at the mouth of the Red Sea, if Israel resumed strikes on Beirut.
The global toll of the conflict’s disruptions continued to mount. The shipping company MSC, the world’s largest, confirmed Tuesday that one of its vessels had been struck by two projectiles while docked at Iraq’s Umm Qasr port. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed responsibility, saying it was retaliation for a U.S. attack on an Iranian vessel in the Gulf of Oman. The United Nations children’s agency UNICEF warned that surging transport costs and supply-chain disruptions were blocking life-saving aid deliveries in Gaza, Lebanon, and multiple other countries.
Iran, for its part, disputed Trump’s characterization of the talks. Iranian media reported Tuesday that Tehran had not communicated with Washington for several days and was reviewing a proposed interim agreement with what one source, cited by the Mehr news agency, described as a “stern” approach — reflecting deep mistrust and a history of what Iran sees as American non-compliance. The semiofficial Fars agency reported that the exchange of messages had stopped several days ago, with the last communication being Tehran’s pointed signal over Lebanon.
Trump pushed back forcefully. “The conversations between us have been going on continuously, including four days ago, three days ago, two days ago, one day ago, and today,” he wrote on Truth Social, calling the Iranian reports “false and erroneous.” He added, with characteristic ambiguity: “Where they lead, one never knows.”
Later, when asked by NBC News about Iran’s threat to suspend negotiations, Trump offered a response that cut against his own urgency. “I think it’s fine if they’re done talking,” he said. Then, moments later, he posted that talks were continuing “at a rapid pace.”
Iranian authorities said more than 3,000 people have been killed since the war began on Feb. 28. At least 13 American service members have died in Iranian retaliatory strikes. The war has left thousands more dead in Lebanon.
Trump has said, repeatedly, that he is close to a deal. “I still have to get a few more points,” he told ABC News on Tuesday. He added: “We’re going to get what we need.”
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