By KEREN SETTON/THE MEDIA LINE JUNE 17, 2026 22:13 Nearly three years after Hamas’ devastating attack on Israel on October 7 , which plunged the country into a multifront war, Israel finds itself at a strategic crossroads as a new US-Iran memorandum of understanding reshapes the regional battlefield.
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Israel remains largely isolated on the international stage, maintains a military presence in Gaza , Lebanon, and Syria, and is still far from achieving long-sought normalization with Saudi Arabia. None of its conflicts has been conclusively resolved, and its relationship with its major ally in Washington has grown more complicated.
The preliminary US-Iran framework reached earlier this week is a significant turning point.
Israel has projected its military might throughout the region, causing massive destruction in Gaza and southern Lebanon while conducting airstrikes in Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar. The strike in Qatar, carried out in September 2025, targeted Hamas leaders in Doha and drew international condemnation for violating Qatari sovereignty.
“There is a great gap between the military picture and the strategic picture, which is one of overall defeat and collapse of Israel’s strategy,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli national security adviser and currently a professor at Tel Aviv University and Columbia University, told The Media Line.
Despite that military prowess, Israel is far from reaching its goals.
“It did not succeed in destroying Hamas or unseating it from power, Hezbollah is coming back despite downgrading its capabilities greatly, and Iran believes with good reason that it won the war by surviving an attack by the world’s superpower and greatly out-negotiated the US, coming ahead on the diplomatic level as well,” Freilich added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to overthrow Hamas in Gaza, destroy all of Hezbollah’s military capabilities, and remove Iran’s nuclear threat over the Jewish state.
Still, budding alliances between Israel and several Arab states under the Abraham Accords survived the war, despite initially seeming fragile. Relations with Saudi Arabia, long coveted by Netanyahu and pursued by several American administrations, remain out of reach.
“All of Israel’s enemies are significantly weaker; there is wider interest in the Abraham Accords because of the threat from Iran, but Israel’s diplomatic and political situation internationally is much worse, particularly in the United States,” Prof. Jonathan Rynhold, a senior researcher at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, told The Media Line. “Israel has been far more isolated than this during its history.”
Israel's war fronts remain complex
The picture across Israel’s main fronts remains complex.
For decades, Israel has viewed Iran as its most significant strategic threat and the driving force behind the network of armed groups that surround it. Israel entered the latest confrontation determined to degrade Iran’s nuclear program and military capabilities. Tehran sought to demonstrate resilience and preserve its regional posture.
The joint American-Israeli strikes inflicted significant damage on Iranian military infrastructure and reportedly set back elements of Tehran’s nuclear program. Yet the conflict ended without the collapse of the Islamic Republic, perhaps amplifying its nuclear ambitions, and without a broader regional realignment in Israel’s favor.
Iranian officials and state media quickly declared victory, arguing that Tehran had survived direct attacks by both Israel and the US while maintaining its regime and much of its strategic posture.
“Iran believes that it won the war, doing so by withstanding a major American and Israeli operation,” said Freilich. “They come out feeling stronger and invigorated. Israel and the US helped them achieve progress towards their goal of being a regional hegemon.”
The memorandum of understanding with Iran, announced by Washington, demonstrated Israel’s dependence on American diplomatic backing while also revealing differences between Netanyahu and President Donald Trump over the desired endgame. While Israel views Iran as an unresolved threat requiring continued pressure, Washington has sought to prevent a wider regional war, reopen maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and stabilize the situation.
For now, neither side appears to have achieved a decisive outcome. Iran emerged weakened militarily but intact politically, while Israel demonstrated unprecedented military reach without fully removing the threat it sought to eliminate.
“Israel faces a real problem,” said Rynhold. “If Iran is not limited in its conventional missile stockpile, Israel will want to attack, and it will be constrained by the US.”
The future of sanctions against Iran is also unclear, as the sides have agreed on a 60-day period to negotiate the final terms of a deal.
“From Israel’s perspective, the worse the Irania…
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