The Israeli prime minister said his country’s goals in Iran will be achieved by “agreement or by renewing the war.”
Joe Lauria
ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that the two-week truce is not “the end of the war” but a “stop on the way to achieving all our goals.”
Netanyahu claimed that Iran “entered the talks beaten and weaker than ever,” while boasting that Israel is “stronger than ever.” He vowed that “there are still goals to be achieved” and Israel will achieve them “either by agreement or by renewing the war.”
According to Iran, Israel and the U.S. have already renewed the war. Tehran said it is preparing a “crushing response” to what it said were repeated violations of the truce.
“The U.S. and Israeli regimes have repeatedly violated the cease-fire,” the government-run Tehran Times said on X. “They should wait for Iran’s crushing response.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the U.S. must choose between the ceasefire or permitting Israel to continue its slaughter in Lebanon.
“The Iran–U.S. cease-fire terms are clear and explicit: The U.S. must choose – ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” he said on X. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”
Araghchi posted the Pakistani prime minister’s statement saying Lebanon was part of the ceasefire.
But Netanyahu disagreed. Israel killed 182 people and wounded more than 900 in Lebanon on Wednesday in the IDF’s biggest bombardment of the country since March 2.
Trump told PBS “everyone knows” Lebanon is not part of ceasefire. “Yeah, they were not included in the deal,” Trump said. “They were not included in the deal. That’ll get taken care of, too. It’s alright.”
He said it is “part of the deal – everyone knows that” for Israel to continue its war on Lebanon. “That’s a separate skirmish. Okay?”
Egypt called Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanon a “premeditated intent” to sabotage the truce with Iran, Reuters reported.
Tehran says it is ready to bomb Israel again if Tel Aviv’s attacks on Lebanon don’t stop. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander said Iran is readying “a major response” to “the Zionist entity’s brutal crimes in Lebanon” and that the response to will be “severe.”
Meanwhile, Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader who would face Netanyahu in the next election, called the two-week ceasefire with Iran a “political disaster of unseen proportions.”
He said Israel “had no say in the agreement the United States and Iran signed last night,” and that Netanyahu “has turned us into a client state that receives instructions by phone on issues that concern the core of our national security.”
“For three years now, Israeli citizens have been paying an unbearable price for Netanyahu’s failures, dragging Israel from one disaster to another,” Lapid said at a press conference.
c. Consortium News
