Shortly after the report, it emerged on Monday that Iran was suspending talks with Iran United States on Israel’s increased attack on LebanonPresident Donald Trump claimed that the Israeli forces were headed straight Beirut they are “returned” and that’s it Hezbollah has agreed that “all shooting will stop” after separate phone calls with representatives of the two warring parties.
Since Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Iranian officials and global experts have begun bombing Iran on February 28 accused The Israeli government in an attempt to sabotage any path to peace.
Iranian news agency Tasnim reported On Monday that “given the Israeli regime’s continued attacks on Lebanon and given that Lebanon had been one of the preconditions for a ceasefire – which has now been violated on all fronts, including Lebanon – the Iranian negotiating team is suspending “talks and text exchanges through intermediaries”.
According to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps news agency, the IRGC said in a statement that Iran considers “crossing red lines in Lebanon and Gaza it will mean direct war and imposing costs on its national security and the Islamic Resistance, and in response, it will “undertake defensive operations through unconventional measures, opening new fronts and maintaining the Strait of Hormuz equation.”
Iran has responded to the US-Israeli attack by restricting traffic through the waterway, a key one trade road, especially for fossil fuels and fertilizer. like oil worldwide prices have rose upTrump has imposed a naval blockade that he has maintained despite an April ceasefire deal— which Israel initially claimed did not include Lebanon.
In a brief phone call Monday, Trump said NBC News that he had not been briefed on Iran’s reported decision to suspend negotiations over Israel’s escalation in Lebanon, but “I think it’s good if they stop talking.”
“It’s an appropriate thing to say because they are better negotiators than fighters,” he continued. “But they haven’t informed us about it.” He added: “That doesn’t mean we’re going to go and start dropping bombs all over there.”
This comment came especially after The Trump administration GOING new attacks against Iran over the weekend and the Iranians attacked the US military installations in the Middle East.
“We will maintain the blockade,” Trump told NBC. “If they don’t want to talk, that’s fine with me. I think that’s fine. I don’t particularly want to talk either. We talk a lot.”
Soon after, however, Trump said on his “Truth Social” platform that he “had a very productive phone call” with Netanyahu, “and there will be no troops going to Beirut and the troops that are on their way have already turned back.”
“Similarly, through senior representatives, I had a very good phone call with Hezbollah, and they agreed that all the shooting will cease — that Israel will not attack them and they will not attack Israel,” Trump continued. Less than 15 minutes later, he added that “talks are continuing, at a fast pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
While Iran’s leadership had not publicly confirmed that the talks broke down on Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has written IN social media that “the ceasefire between Iran and the US is unequivocally a ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon. Violating it on one front is a violation of the ceasefire on all fronts. The US and Israel are responsible for the consequences of any violation.”
Similarly, Iran’s chief negotiator, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said: “Naval blockade and escalation of war crimes in Lebanon by the genocidal Zionist regime are clear evidence of the non-respect of the US ceasefire. Every choice has a price, and the bill comes due. Everything will fall into place.”
Responding to Israel “dramatically escalating its military campaign” in southern Lebanon and Tasnim’s reporting on the negotiations, Sina Toossi, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in WashingtonDC, END that “the Iranian message is increasingly clear: no ceasefire in Lebanon, no broader framework and potentially no talks at all”.
“Talks are in a vicious circle: progress, escalation, backtracking,” he said pointed out. “Many in Iran suspect that Trump is trying to lower the ‘floor’ on oil prices before another war. And Israel is doing everything it can to derail diplomacy by turning southern Lebanon into another. Gaza.
The “Gaza playbook” that Israel is now using in Lebanon, Toossi said, contains “scorched earth tactics, mass displacement and ethnic cleansing” of its neighboring nation.
Other experts also pointed to Gaza, where Israel is widely accused of pursuing a genocide ANTI Palestinians in the besieged enclave. Citing Reuters reporting on Israel’s escalation in Lebanon, the Arab Center Washington DC friend Assal Rad said that “as ‘targeting HamasIn Gaza, “controlled by Hezbollah” is used to justify Israel leveling entire neighborhoods in Lebanon. This is not JOURNALISTit’s shorthand.”
“This is what Israel’s total destruction looks like in southern Lebanon, deliberately destroying people’s homes so that they have nothing to return to,” she said. addedsharing satellite images of the destruction.
Mohamad Safa, who earlier this year resigned as a representative of the non-governmental organization Patriotic Vision Association in United Nationson Monday accused Israel of “committing another real-time genocide in Lebanon with complete impunity.”
Former adviser to the US Department of Defense, Jasmine El-Gamal, who now runs the consulting firm Averos Strategies, said early Monday: “At the start of the Iran war, I warned that US and Israeli interests would inevitably diverge and that President Trump would have to make a choice: actually put America first, or continue to allow Netanyahu to threaten our interests. Lebanon is the epitome of that choice.”
