The truce that never came: Why Israel repeatedly keeps sabotaging peace despite negotiations

On 8 April 2026, less than 24 hours after Pakistan brokered a historic two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran — ending nearly six weeks of devastating conflict — Israel launched what observers described as the most intense single-day bombardment of Lebanon since the war began. 

In approximately 10 minutes, Israel carried out around 100 airstrikes on Lebanon, killing about 250 people and injuring more than 1,000 others, Al Jazeera reports citing the General Directorate of the Lebanese Civil Defence. 

The timing was not coincidental. It was just part of a pattern that Israel has been employing since October 2023.

For over two years, across Gaza, Lebanon, and now in the shadow of a fragile US-Iran truce, Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly escalated precisely when diplomacy gains momentum. 

The attacks on Lebanon following the ceasefire announcement are the latest chapter in a sustained, deliberate effort to prevent any durable peace from taking hold in the Middle East.

Attack, negotiate, attack again

The Lebanon strikes of 8 April carry a particular kind of audacity. 

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had explicitly announced that the ceasefire included "all fronts of the war, including Lebanon". Mere hours later, Israel launched its largest airstrikes of the war on the country. 

Netanyahu then publicly contradicted the mediator, asserting the ceasefire did not cover Lebanon, a surprising move that left international actors scrambling to understand what had actually been agreed upon.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei responded by saying that delegates from the country would not attend peace talks in Pakistan scheduled to begin on Saturday if the cease-fire was not extended to Lebanon.

This is not the first time Israel has undercut a negotiated agreement at the precise moment it comes into effect. 

Despite the November 2024 ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah, Israel continued airstrikes in Lebanon nearly every day afterward, killing 500 people including 127 civilians. 

UNIFIL, the international peacekeeping force, reported that Israeli forces committed around 10,000 violations of the Lebanon ceasefire deal, including 2,500 land incursions and 7,500 airspace violations, in the year following November 2024. Violations escalated systematically until the ceasefire effectively collapsed in March 2026.

The same script played out in Gaza. According to the Gaza Government Media Office, Israel violated the Gaza ceasefire agreement at least 2,073 times between 10 October 2025 and 18 March 2026, through attacks by air, artillery, and direct shootings — shooting at civilians 750 times, bombing and shelling Gaza 973 times, 87 raids beyond the ceasefire line, and demolishing properties on 263 occasions. 

And when phase two negotiations stalled, Israel unilaterally resumed its full offensive in March 2025, killing more than 591 people, mostly women and children, while also blocking all food, medicine and electricity from entering Gaza — actions deemed war crimes by Médecins Sans Frontières and Amnesty International.

Now this Lebanon gambit is wrecking the Islamabad talks. The April 2026 attacks on Lebanon serve multiple objectives for Netanyahu. 

The most immediate is to torpedo the US-Iran negotiations before they can produce a durable settlement. 

A ceasefire that excludes Lebanon risks weakening Iran's decades-old defence strategy. If Hezbollah continues to be targeted while attacks on Iran remain paused, Tehran risks losing credibility within its network of resistance groups — appearing to have abandoned a key ally in exchange for a deal. 

Iran still retains significant leverage elsewhere. According to the New York Times, it is using its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz to selectively grant passage to neutral countries like Turkey, Pakistan and India while blocking others.

Iran has been explicit about this logic. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Khatibzadeh disclosed that Iranian forces were ready to respond militarily to the ceasefire violation when Pakistan intervened and conveyed messages that the US would stop Israel. 

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that the continued strikes render negotiations "meaningless," adding that Iran would never abandon its Lebanese allies. The deliberate ambiguity Israel has exploited — the dispute over whether Lebanon was included in the truce — has given it exactly the window it needed to attack while the diplomatic framework remains contested.

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi addressed this dynamic with unusual directness. 

He argued that it would be foolish for the US to allow Israel to jeopardise the regional ceasefire through its attacks on Lebanon, and also suggested that Netanyahu has an ulterior motive for continuing fighting, noting that the Israeli leader's corruption trial was about to resume.

The humanitarian toll of the Lebanon strikes is staggering. Lebanese health authorities reported at least 303 people killed and more than 1,000 wounded on a single Wednesday, with Israeli bombardment continuing overnight and into Thursday. 

Since the ongoing Israel-Lebanon conflict began in early March, Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,888 people and wounded more than 6,000, while displacement orders have been issued for about 15% of Lebanese territory, uprooting more than 1.2 million people.

Manipulation of intelligence

Israeli disruption goes beyond the battlefield. 

It was Netanyahu who personally lobbied Trump into the war. According to the New York Times, Netanyahu made an aggressive Situation Room pitch to Trump on 11 February 2026, arguing that Iran could be easily defeated and its government toppled. 

Trump's own intelligence officials warned the plan was unrealistic — his CIA director would later privately call the assumptions "farcical" and his Secretary of State dismissed them as "bullshit" — but Trump authorised the war regardless.

When that war ended not in Iranian capitulation but in a diplomatic settlement, Israel found itself in an untenable position. Its closest ally had negotiated a deal that left Iran standing — an outcome Israel had fought hard to prevent, reached without Israeli consent and over its strenuous objections.

The Lebanon offensive, viewed through this lens, is not a sideshow but a strategy of enforced escalation. If Israel can provoke Iran into breaking the ceasefire — or make conditions on the ground intolerable enough that Tehran walks away from the Islamabad talks — it restores the military dynamic it prefers over a negotiated regional order that does not centre Israeli security interests.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz was unusually candid about the underlying objective, stating that Israel "insisted on separating the war with Iran with the fighting in Lebanon in order to change the reality in Lebanon." 

That phrase, "change the reality", is a revealing formulation. It concedes that the Lebanon campaign is not about self-defence but about reshaping political and military facts on the ground, regardless of what any ceasefire framework stipulates.

This is not without precedent. 

The US has a long history of accepting Israeli assurances of restraint, only to watch further strikes unfold. In 2024, the Biden administration insisted for months that Israel was conducting only a "limited" operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah — yet the Israeli military ultimately destroyed nearly every structure there. Israeli officials then publicly announced their intention to replicate that same scorched-earth strategy in south Lebanon.

History appears to be repeating itself. When Trump told reporters he had asked Netanyahu to "low-key it" in Lebanon, and Vice President Vance added that the Israelis had agreed to "check themselves a little bit," the statements carried an uncomfortably familiar ring. 

Even as those assurances were being made, Israel struck a bridge in Lebanon — and Hezbollah, which had initially paused its attacks in observance of the ceasefire, resumed rocket fire into northern Israel in response.

Stakes for the Islamabad talks

The talks scheduled for Islamabad beginning 11 April were expected to centre on Iran's 10-point proposal, which Washington accepted "in principle", covering demands for an end to aggression, full sanctions relief, recognition of Iran's nuclear enrichment rights, withdrawal of US forces, compensation for war damage, and cessation of hostilities across all fronts including Lebanon. 

Lebanon's explicit inclusion in Iran's framework means that continued Israeli attacks are not merely a humanitarian catastrophe; they are an attack on the conditions necessary for any agreement to hold.

The stakes extend beyond the region. 

According to the New York Times, nearly 1,000 ships are stranded at the Persian Gulf entrance, and Iran is demanding $2 million per vessel for Hormuz passage — meaning every day the talks are endangered by Israeli strikes carries a direct and compounding cost to global trade.

The pattern documented across Gaza, Lebanon in 2024-25, and now the post-Iran ceasefire period points to Israel's use of the periods when diplomacy is most promising to create military facts that make diplomacy harder to sustain. 

Tel Aviv is using every means available to ensure the nascent peace process fails and hostilities in the Middle East resume — and President Trump must decide whether he wants to put America first, or continue doing Israel's bidding even if the region is set alight in the process.

The question is no longer whether Israel is impeding peace. The pattern makes that plain. The question is whether the US — the only power with sufficient leverage over Israel — will finally choose to put its foot down.