Israel entered its war on Iran with bold objectives and the backing of the United States. It is now staring down a US-brokered ceasefire — announced by President Donald Trump on a Tuesday night — with its missile defence stocks depleted, its prime minister under fierce political fire, and its arch-nemesis still standing. The picture emerging from the ashes of a 40-day military campaign is one that analysts, opposition politicians, and even former Israeli diplomats are describing as a strategic failure of historic proportions.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issued a statement — notably in English rather than Hebrew — claiming that “Iran no longer poses a nuclear, missile and terror threat to America, Israel, Iran’s Arab neighbours and the world.” But for many Israelis, those words rang hollow almost immediately. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, who had publicly supported the strikes on Iran, turned sharply on Netanyahu, calling the ceasefire one of the greatest “political disasters in all of our history.” Israel, he said, had not even been at the negotiating table — a damning indictment of how the endgame was handled.
Lapid did not stop there. He accused Netanyahu of failing politically and strategically, of not meeting a single self-declared war objective, and of causing damage that would “take years to repair.” Others within Israel’s political landscape were equally scathing. Ofer Cassif of the left-wing Hadash party noted that the prime minister’s announcement being made in English was no accident — Netanyahu, he argued, long ago stopped speaking to ordinary Israelis, preferring instead to address international audiences and his own support base.
The ceasefire itself was brokered by Pakistan, which also announced that Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon would cease. Netanyahu, however, carved out an exception for Lebanon, insisting the ceasefire does not extend to that front. For now, Washington appears willing to allow Israeli operations in Lebanon to continue — at least while its diplomatic negotiations with Tehran remain active.
Netanyahu’s Israel-Iran War Strategy Unravels Under Ceasefire Pressure
Netanyahu’s stated goals for the Israel-Iran war — preventing Tehran from developing nuclear weapons and creating conditions for the Iranian people to overthrow their government — are not new. He has been warning of an imminent Iranian nuclear threat since the 1990s. Despite inflicting serious military damage on Iran, including killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war and assassinating much of Iran’s senior military leadership, neither goal has been reached.
Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, who recently returned from Israel, put it plainly. “The Israelis are deeply disappointed with the ceasefire as none of the original aims of the war have been achieved,” he told Al Jazeera. He pointed out that Iran’s ballistic missile programme could be rebuilt quickly, and that Tehran still holds 440kg of enriched uranium at 60% purity — enough material for approximately 10 nuclear bombs.
What has arguably stunned analysts most is how Iran, despite losing control of its airspace and suffering the assassination of key figures, has emerged from the conflict with greater strategic leverage than before. “Israel and the US had many tactical gains. They won militarily, but, strategically, Iran is the clear victor,” Bregman said. That assessment carries enormous weight, particularly given Iran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz — one of the world’s most critical energy corridors — a move that fundamentally altered the geopolitical calculus of the entire conflict.
Under current negotiations, safe passage through the Strait is now effectively under the joint control of Iran and Oman. This is a seismic shift. Iran had long struggled under punishing US sanctions, including after Trump — at Netanyahu’s urging — unilaterally exited the 2018 nuclear deal. Now, Tehran stands to benefit from newly imposed levies on shipping through the Strait, and Trump has posted promises of future sanctions and tariff relief as part of the ceasefire arrangement. “Iran’s decision to block the Hormuz pushed Trump off balance, and he never recovered,” Bregman said, adding that future historians would likely identify that moment as the turning point in the war.
Israel’s campaign also appeared to inadvertently strengthen the Iranian government domestically. Strikes that destroyed centres of opposition — including Sharif University in Tehran, previously a hub of anti-government protests — helped rally Iranians around their leadership. Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilisation gave the regime powerful propaganda imagery, with citizens forming human chains around critical infrastructure in scenes broadcast internationally.
Cassif told Al Jazeera that Hadash had warned from the very beginning that neither Israel nor the US had the right or the ability to force regime change in Iran. “Instead, we’ve strengthened the support for that regime at the expense of the opposition,” he said. He added that Israel and the US had handed Iran “operational control of the Strait of Hormuz” — something that had never previously been in question — and signalled to the world that neither Washington nor Jerusalem could be trusted while negotiations were still under way.
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York, was direct in his assessment of what Israel’s war on Iran ultimately achieved. “Assuming the ceasefire holds beyond the two-week period, Israel achieved almost nothing tangible,” he said. He described Iran as having “upended the strategic asymmetry” by striking Arab Gulf states and closing the Strait with virtually no pushback from China. Israel, he added, is now increasingly viewed internationally as a destabilising force, and the relationship with Washington has been strained after every promise Netanyahu reportedly made to Trump about swift regime change in Iran came to nothing.
Whether the ceasefire holds remains an open question. Israel is not expected to attend peace talks in Pakistan on Friday, and its ability to continue operations in Lebanon may ultimately be decided not in Jerusalem, but in negotiations between Washington and Tehran. What is clear, for now, is that a conflict launched with sweeping ambitions has produced an outcome few in the Israeli political establishment are prepared to celebrate — and that the fallout for Netanyahu, both at home and abroad, is only beginning to take shape.