Trump distances US from Israel's Beirut strike, urges Iran back to negotiations

Donald Trump spent Sunday morning trying to put distance between the United States and an Israeli airstrike on Beirut, telling Fox News the operation had not been coordinated with Washington and that he was deeply unhappy about it. The timing was delicate. Hours earlier, Iran had launched a barrage of missiles at Israel—the first direct attack since a fragile ceasefire brokered by the Americans had taken hold in April. The region was teetering. Trump's instinct was to prevent the next blow.

According to the journalist Barak Ravid of Axios, who spoke with Trump by phone, the president said he would call Netanyahu immediately and tell him not to retaliate. "Israel already had its attack and Iran already had theirs," Trump said. "We don't need another one." He framed the moment as a chance to preserve something larger: a deal with Iran that he believed was close to completion. "We're about to finalize an agreement with Iran. It will be a good agreement. I don't want it to fail because of what's happening now."

But the forces on the ground were not waiting for Trump's phone calls. Iran's Revolutionary Guards characterized their missile strike as a warning, a measured response to what they called Israeli violations of the Lebanon ceasefire. Yet they also issued a threat: if aggression continued, the response would be broader and would target American and Israeli assets across the region. Iran's chief negotiator and parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, declared on social media that the naval blockade imposed on Iran and the green light given by the United States to Israel had made American bases and Israeli assets legitimate targets. "Our armed forces, as always, have freedom to act," he wrote.

Israel's military rejected any suggestion of restraint. They called Iran's missile attack a grave error and promised to intensify operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hours before the Iranian strike, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz had already warned that Israel would respond with attacks on Beirut if Hezbollah acted against Israeli territory during the ceasefire. The IDF reported striking more than 150 Hezbollah military targets over the weekend, including rocket launchers and command centers across southern Lebanon. Two Israeli soldiers had died in combat on Saturday. On Sunday, Israeli forces identified at least five projectiles launched from Lebanon toward the north; they were intercepted or fell in open areas.

The human toll was accumulating quietly. Lebanese health authorities reported that Israeli strikes had killed at least two civilians and wounded twenty others, including four children and four women. Residents in the targeted areas reported hearing three explosions. The details of what was hit remained unclear. Since the ceasefire began on April 17, attacks on southern Lebanon had continued almost daily. A new agreement proposed by the Americans earlier in the week had been rejected by Hezbollah, which instead backed Iran's demand that an end to the Lebanon war be part of broader negotiations with Washington.

Meanwhile, Pakistan was making its own attempt to hold the line. Pakistan's interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, was in Tehran on Sunday delivering a message from the country's military chief to Iran's supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who had not been seen in public since taking power following his father's death in February. Naqvi had met with Iran's interior minister on Saturday evening and with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Sunday morning. The substance of the message was not disclosed, but Pakistani officials said Islamabad was working with regional partners to narrow the gap between the United States and Iran and to encourage efforts aimed at reducing tensions and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway through which much of the world's oil and gas flows.

The regional airspace was closing. Iran shut down its western airspace. Iraq announced it would close its airspace for at least seventy-two hours. Syria closed its southern air corridors for twelve hours. The American military, for its part, reported shooting down two more Iranian drones over the Strait of Hormuz that posed a threat to international maritime traffic. The war that had begun one hundred days earlier and shaken the global economy was showing no signs of ending. The preliminary ceasefire of April 8 had held in name only. A permanent agreement remained out of reach. And now, with each side warning the other and Trump trying to manage the escalation by phone, the question was whether the next hours would bring de-escalation or whether the cycle would continue turning.