U.S. warns Israel may derail early Iran peace deal

U.S. intelligence warned that Israel was likely to try to undercut the fledgling Iran peace deal, sharpening the split between Washington’s diplomatic goals and Benjamin Netanyahu’s security and political calculations. The warning came as Netanyahu faced pressure at home to keep the military campaign in Lebanon going, even though U.S. and Iranian officials had already begun treating the broader deal as something far more fragile than a finished accord.

The arrangement remained only an early outline, with major questions still unresolved. Negotiations planned in Switzerland were postponed before the agreement, and fighting in Lebanon quickly showed how easily the wider process could be thrown off course. After four Israeli soldiers were killed, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to renew a ceasefire, underscoring how events on Israel’s northern front could spill directly into the U.S.-Iran track.

The political stakes for Washington were visible in public too. Donald Trump defended the Iran deal and criticized Israel at the Group of 7 summit in France, even as U.S. officials were trying to keep the opening with Tehran alive. In the hours after the initial agreement, ships had begun crossing the Strait of Hormuz again, a sign that markets and shipping companies were already reading the talks as potentially important for global energy flows.

At the same time, the United States kept tightening pressure on Iran’s regional revenue streams. State Department sanctions notices in May and June targeted oil, shipping, energy-smuggling, and financial networks, including vessels, front companies, exchange houses, and firms tied to illicit oil trade. On June 5, the department said one network had smuggled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Iranian liquefied petroleum gas to South and East Asia, showing how much of Iran’s economy still ran through covert channels that any new deal would have to confront.

The intelligence warning also fit a broader pattern of Israeli willingness to use force to shape the battlefield before diplomacy hardens into constraints. The Associated Press reported that Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah on September 17, 2024 wounded more than 3,000 people and killed 12, including two children. Hezbollah said most of the dead and wounded were fighters or personnel, though civilians were also hurt. The episode highlighted the scale of Israeli covert pressure on Hezbollah and why U.S. officials feared Israel might again act to preserve its freedom of maneuver in Lebanon, even at the risk of derailing Washington’s preferred path on Iran.