For more than two years now, Israel’s growing number of critics abroad have condemned it for what they allege is a reckless and indiscriminate war — with some charging genocide — that has seen tens of thousands killed in Gaza as well as expanding to Lebanon and several other fronts.
At the same time, some — mostly within Israel, particularly on the right — have leveled the opposite critique: Israel has been too timid, too deliberate when fighting terror groups sworn to its destruction. It needs to just finish the job.
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump managed to make both of those arguments simultaneously.
“Israel is fighting Hezbollah too long, and too many people are being killed,” Trump said at the G7 conference of global leaders in France. “And you don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. Because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses. And they’re not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you.”
Then, minutes later: “I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah. They should have been able to do the job faster. It just goes on forever.”
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Trump followed that up with another somewhat ambiguous statement about Israel and Lebanon on Wednesday, saying he did not want Israel’s fight against Hezbollah to end. “I want Israel to be able to protect themself, but I do want them to use good judgment,” he said.
One could imagine Israel’s top military strategists watching Trump from a secure room in Tel Aviv, smacking their foreheads and exclaiming: “Good judgment! Defeat our adversary quickly with minimal civilian casualties! Why didn’t we think of that?”
In fact, the US president did put forward a solution of his own to the Lebanon morass: pulling Israel out of the fight against Hezbollah and subcontracting it to Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Islamist president of Syria.
In typical Trumpian fashion, the idea is so far outside the box as to be intriguing, but unlikely to happen. What is clear from the US president’s latest stream of consciousness, however, is that Israel now finds itself in an impossible spot.
A man collects personal belongings from his house in front of a destroyed building that was hit in an Israeli airstrike, in the southern port city of Tyre, Lebanon, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)
Most Israelis, polls show, recognize the need to disarm Hezbollah, an Iranian terror proxy that amassed an army on the border and has rained missiles on northern Israel throughout much of the past two and a half years. And analysts say the only way to do so is through a combination of military and diplomatic pressure — depleting the terror group on the ground while shoring up the Lebanese government in its stead.
But the signed memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran, which claims to speak for the US’s allies (i.e., Israel), declares an end to fighting in Lebanon, indicating the US no longer supports Israeli military action against Hezbollah. Trump made as much clear in his comments to the G7, describing the Lebanon conflict as a sideshow that should not distract from the talks with Iran.
‘What do we want to happen?’
Soon, Israel may be forced to choose: Either keep up the military pressure and lose Trump’s diplomatic support, or stay on his good side — but only by ending, or scaling back, the conflict that many see as the country’s most urgent fight.
“Trump is not in the business of these prolonged wars, forever wars,” Ksenia Svetlova, executive director of the Regional Organization for Peace, Economics and Security, told The Times of Israel.
“Trump’s goal is no war in Lebanon, and consequently no war with Iran, because Iran ties these two things together,” she added. “But the goal that is important to Israel — and to I think all of the Israelis, who understand that we cannot continue the way it is — this goal is not achieved.”
IDF troops of the 36th Division operate in southern Lebanon, in a handout photo published on June 11, 2026. (Israel Defense Forces)
At present, Israel is proceeding on the diplomatic and military tracks simultaneously. Fighting in Lebanon continued on Wednesday, with one IDF soldier killed and 12 injured. And Israel has held several rounds of direct talks in Washington, DC, with Lebanese officials, which are reportedly close to yielding a deal .
But both Svetlova and Dan Naor, an expert in Middle Eastern studies at Ariel University whose research focuses on Lebanon, did not put much stock in those negotiations, as historic as they have been.
Svetlova called them “discussions for the sake of the discussions.” Naor said that the fact of the direct talks is a symbolic victory over Hezbollah, which staunchly opposes negotiations with Israel, but that they were unlikely to yield significant progress.
“The Lebanese and the Israelis are broadcasting on dif…
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