Israeli ambassador says Israel ready to resume war with Iran

Israel would be prepared to resume war with Iran if the United States asked, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Leiter said on Face the Nation, a striking sign of how tightly Israel’s military posture now tracks Washington’s decisions. The remarks landed while ceasefire diplomacy and political friction around the Iran conflict were still unsettled after the mid-June deal that ended the war and left talks ongoing.

Leiter’s message fit a pattern he has already made public. In a separate interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, he said Israel did not plan to withdraw from South Lebanon, signaling that Israeli officials were not presenting their military positions as temporary or easily reversible even as U.S.-brokered diplomacy continued. The combination of those comments put the ambassador at the center of two debates at once: how far the United States is willing to go to prevent a renewed Iran war, and how much leverage Israel expects to retain if Washington changes course.

At the same time, Representative Ro Khanna has become the latest Democratic lawmaker to describe a forceful confrontation with Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Khanna said on July 8 that armed settlers surrounded his group near the Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta in the southern West Bank, detained him for more than an hour, and released him only after calls to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. He said the group was confronted by settlers carrying U.S.-made M4 rifles and later described the encounter as an unfiltered look at the human toll of Israeli occupation as he weighs a 2028 presidential run.

The Israel Defense Forces said it had received a report of Israeli civilians blocking the vehicles of foreign nationals and members of the media, then sent troops, dispersed the civilians and reopened the road. The military denied that its soldiers took part in the blocking. The exchange added to intensifying scrutiny of settlement violence at a moment when Palestinian residents and Israeli activists have been reporting more attacks and more settlement expansion across the occupied territory.

That scrutiny has been sharpened by the scale of the death toll. In May, the United Nations said more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem since the war began. CBS News also reported that settler attacks had increased and that settlement expansion had continued, deepening pressure on the Biden-to-Trump-era foreign policy debate over escalation, diplomacy and the limits of U.S. influence over Israeli conduct.