The emerging deal between the United States and Iran represents an existential danger to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future. With his coalition fracturing and elections approaching, Netanyahu can’t survive a peace that leaves Hezbollah intact and Iran’s nuclear program deferred. The only path that may keep his future viable now runs through Lebanon.
This may help explain why, just hours after President Donald Trump announced that a deal with Iran was “largely negotiated” through talks that excluded Israel, Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to “increase the blows” against Hezbollah, adding on Monday that “we are deepening our operation in Lebanon.” Israel has now issued evacuation orders for two of southern Lebanon’s biggest cities, and Israeli aircraft have struck over 100 sites in southern Lebanon, adding to a death toll that has now surpassed 3,000 since the latest escalation in March, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. This comes as Lebanese and Israeli officials are engaged in historic, U.S.-brokered talks in Washington, including a security track that was due to be launched on May 29.
When the U.S. and Israel initiated strikes on Iran in late February, Netanyau framed the aims of the campaign in maximalist terms: destroy Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capacity, sever Tehran’s support for regional proxies, and, most ambitiously, overthrow the Islamic Republic.
Three months later, Iran is still standing. The deal taking shape between the Trump administration and the Islamic Republic addresses almost none of these objectives in the preliminary phase, focusing instead on restarting maritime shipping and bringing an end to direct U.S.-Iran hostilities. The blowback from Israeli politicians and commentators has been fierce. Israeli opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said the deal was “bad for Israel, bad for the region, bad for the people of Iran.” Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister and a key coalition partner in Netanyahu’s government, framed the proposal in similar terms, calling it “an agreement that can harm the State of Israel.” Against this background, Netanyahu’s predicament is especially acute. He co-launched a war that degraded Iran’s capabilities but failed to bring Tehran to heel. He has been excluded from negotiations on the conflict’s outcome and now faces an electorate that is expected to hit the polls as early as September. With these elections looming, only 10% of Israelis viewed the Iran campaign as a significant success when polled in mid-April.
The dominant analysis holds that Netanyahu is trying to drag out the election timeline, hoping to buy more time to achieve something he can market to voters on the security and diplomatic fronts. Lebanon is a key part of that calculation.
The immediate trigger for the escalation in Lebanon has a tactical dimension distinct from the emerging Iran deal. Hezbollah has deployed fiber-optic drones against Israeli troops occupying a self-declared buffer zone or “Yellow Line” in southern Lebanon. These cheap drones are unjammable because they avoid radio frequencies. Multiple Israeli soldiers have been killed or severely wounded by these drones, and some have struck civilian homes within Israel.
In response, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, approved a $700 million budget for counter-drone operations and added that playing defense was insufficient. "For every explosive drone, ten buildings in Beirut should fall,” Smotrich said. The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, agreed that Beirut should be struck. Ben-Gvir went furthest: “It is time for the Prime Minister to knock on Trump's desk and inform him that we are returning to war in Lebanon. We need to cut off the electricity in Lebanon..and return to a fierce war.”
To understand why Netanyahu cannot dismiss these voices, it helps to understand that Ben Gvir and Smotrich are not merely difficult coalition partners. Rather, they are men whose support gave Netanyahu the premiership and whose maximalism on Gaza and the West Bank have defined the identity of his government.
Smotrich has overseen the approval of more than 100 new settlements in the occupied West Bank. He recently boasted that he seeks to make this process “irreversible,” despite the fact that International Criminal Court prosecutors are now seeking to arrest him for overseeing this expansion.
Ben Gvir, whose maximalism on Gaza led him to to briefly resign over a Trump-brokered ceasefire deal for the battered enclave, stirred controversy last week by posting a video in which he is seen taunting Gaza flotilla activists at Ashdod port. The footage drew condemnation from the staunchly pro-Israel U.S. ambassador in Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee, in addition to European governments. Even Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar criticized Ben Gvir for having “knowingly caused harm to our state in this disgraceful display.” For both Smotrich and Ben Gvir, Lebanon serves as a theater for a political identity built on permanent confrontation and the desire to expand Israel’s borders. Netanyahu's dilemma is that he needs them but cannot control them. His coalition is already teetering, primarily because ultra-orthodox parties have declared they have “no trust in Netanyahu anymore” after he failed to pass legislation exempting ultra-orthodox Jews from military service. Israel’s Supreme Court recently struck down a long-standing arrangement that exempted this group after years of war left the army in desperate need of soldiers. That fracture alone could cost him his majority. Meanwhile, two former prime ministers, Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid, have merged their parties under the Beyachad (‘Together’) banner to unseat Netanyahu, running explicitly on accountability for October 7. Their platform also commits to universal military conscription and term limits for prime ministers capped at eight years. Every policy reads like a bullet aimed at the man currently in office. The result is a prime minister running out of options and time, and for whom Lebanon serves multiple purposes. Attacking there signals to his fractious coalition partners that he will put Israel first, even if it imperils ties with the U.S. And, with Israel locked out of Iran negotiations, Lebanon is also a useful pressure point for signaling displeasure with the emerging agreement.
Iranian officials have stated numerous times, including amid current talks, that any deal with Washington must halt fighting on all fronts, including in Lebanon. Netanyahu, though not party to the negotiations, can intensify attacks in Lebanon as an implicit veto — a demonstration that he can blow up the diplomatic environment that Trump needs to close his deal.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the pressure is not only military. Israeli officials are also pushing for “freedom of operation” in Lebanon to be written into the emerging deal with Iran. If Washington somehow delivers a carve-out, Netanyahu can claim to have extracted a concession from an ally that excluded him from the table. If Tehran rejects the idea — the likelier outcome — the deal could collapse, and Netanyahu gets to claim that he refused to let Washington trade away Israel’s right to self-defense.
All of this puts Lebanon in a position that is familiar by now. It is the terrain that each side squeezes to signal positions and extract concessions. When Iran insists that Lebanon must be covered by any ceasefire, it is not primarily defending Lebanese civilians but rather preserving Hezbollah as a forward asset that can bleed Israel’s military attention, and ultimately reduce pressure on Iran itself.
When Netanyahu escalates, he is communicating with Trump, Iran and his domestic audience. The intended message is clear: regardless of what gets signed between Washington and Tehran, the man who built his political identity on being “Mr. Security” will not allow Israel’s freedom of operation on its borders to be negotiated away by others.