Wednesday April 8, 2026 {HMC} As Israel contemplates a two-week ceasefire announced by United States President Donald Trump in the war on Iran on Tuesday night, it appears weakened in the eyes of its opponents and critics. Its arch-nemesis, Iran, is still standing; Israel’s defensive stock of missiles is depleted and its prime minister is facing a political backlash.
Following news of the Pakistan-brokered truce, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issued a statement in English, saying that the PM supports the US decision and claiming that “Iran no longer poses a nuclear, missile and terror threat to America, Israel, Iran’s Arab neighbours and the world.”
But there was a caveat. While mediator Pakistan had announced that Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon would also cease, Netanyahu added that he does not regard the ceasefire as extending to Israel’s war on Lebanon, which, for now at least, the US appears willing to allow to continue, subject to its peace negotiations with Iran.
Responding to Netanyahu’s announcement, Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, who had strongly supported his country’s attack on regional nemesis Iran, called the ceasefire one of the greatest “political disasters in all of our history”. Israel had not even been involved in negotiations, he said, adding that, despite its military successes, the prime minister had “failed politically, failed strategically, and didn’t meet a single one of the goals that he himself set”, adding that it would take years to repair the damage inflicted upon the country through the prime minister’s “arrogance”.
Others were swift to join in the bashing. “I wasn’t surprised that the announcement was in English,” Ofer Cassif of the left-wing Hadash party said. “Netanyahu has no interest in talking to the people of Israel. He rarely does and almost never enters the [television or radio] studio,” he said of the prime minister, who waited two weeks to spell out his war aims to the Israeli public in a televised address after the start of the war on Iran.
“He knows, probably correctly, that those who support him will do so anyway, and those who oppose him will continue to do so, so when he speaks, it’s to the international media and to reassure his base,” Cassif said.
Netanyahu’s war aims
Those war aims, as stated by Netanyahu, of preventing “Iran from developing nuclear weapons” and of creating ” the conditions for the Iranian people so they can remove the cruel regime of tyranny”, were merely the latest iteration of Israel’s longstanding strategic goals. Indeed, Netanyahu has been claiming Iran’s potential to develop a nuclear weapon was imminent since the 1990s.
But, despite significant military successes over the past 40 days of attacks on Iran, neither of those goals has been achieved.
“The Israelis are deeply disappointed with the ceasefire as none of the original aims of the war have been achieved,” Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow at the Department for War Studies at King’s College London, who has recently returned from Israel, said. “The Iranian regime is still in place, its ballistic missile programme could be rebuilt very quickly, and it’s still got 440kg of enriched uranium at 60 percent purity, enough for 10 bombs.”
In fact, according to many observers, despite significant military defeats, including the loss of control over its airspace, the assassination of much of its leadership – including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war, as well as many of Iran’s key military figures – Iran has, counterintuitively, emerged stronger as a result, analysts say.
“Israel and the US had many tactical gains. They won militarily, but, strategically, Iran is the clear victor,” Bregman said.
