Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed that negotiations are nearing success, saying that the Islamabad MOU “has never been closer. “This sort of response from Tehran is rare. Often Trump announces breakthroughs in the talks that are denied by Tehran, and the American public suspects he is just manipulating the stock market. But this time, the Iranian foreign minister concurred. In part, this alacrity may have been intended to forestall further American strikes, some of which hit radar installations and so blinded the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps in their attempt to keep tight surveillance on civilian vessels in the Gulf so as to maintain as much of its Hormuz blockade as it can. That blockade is Iran’s only leverage over the US, and it is eroding.

The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding has never been closer. Pending its finalization, the media should refrain from entering speculation about its content.

In line with our responsible and transparent approach, all details will be shared with the public in due course.

— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) June 12, 2026

In an incredible development, Donald Trump actually reposted Araghchi’s message on his Truth Social. For Trump to retweet Araghchi is an unexpected and remarkable development.

Earlier, on June 11, sources close to the hardliners in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) denied that a new round of talks had begun. It is not clear what this assertion meant, since talks have been ongoing, with Pakistani, Qatari and other mediation. It could just be that the IRGC sinply did not want to look weak while Iran was being attacked. Another IRGC source denied that a final draft of the agreement was ready. ( H/t to BBC Monitoring for links.)

During the most recent two days of exchange of fire between the US and Iran, the IRGC had announced the the Strait of Hormuz was completely closed to shipping. As the US was striking Iranian infrastructure, including petrochemical plants and a water reservoir in the south (a war crime), the head of Iran’s Air Force or as they style it “Aerospace Forces,” Brig. Gen. Majid Musavi, warned the US against meddling with the “sacred [muqaddas] Strait of Hormuz,” saying that Iran could make the region “hell” for America.

Photo by Alireza Akhlaghi: Pexels

I thought Musavi’s terminology here interesting. I hadn’t seen an Iranian official call the Strait “holy” before, and there isn’t really a good basis for so considering it as far as I know in Islamic or Shia sacred geography. There is of course an old, pre-Islamic Zoroastrian notion that all of the land of Iran, Iranzamin, is holy. And French Islam specialist Henri Corbin argued that Iranian Shiism accepted many Zoroastrian ideas and symbols. Corbin was certainly right; even some Zoroastrian angels are accepted.

It is a reminder of the different stakes for Iran and the United States. The Iranian government is fighting for control of its own soil, which Netanyahu and Trump tried to deny it. From Tehran’s point of view, that is sacred territory.

( Middle East Monitor ) – The latest exchange between Iran and Israel raises a fundamental question: Who is really driving events in the Middle East – Washington or Jerusalem? 

Following Israeli strikes on targets in Beirut, Lebanon, Iran responded with strikes against northern Israel and military facilities around Haifa. Israel then immediately retaliated by attacking Tehran, Tabriz, Karaj and Isfahan. While the ceasefire between the United States and Iran is technically in place, the broader regional conflict continues to intensify. Throughout the crisis, President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed support for de-escalation and urged all parties to avoid a wider war. 

Yet events on the ground suggest that Washington’s desire for stability may not necessarily translate into restraint by its closest ally. The current crisis is becoming a test not only of regional security but also of American influence itself. 

The Trump administration appears reluctant to become involved in another prolonged West Asian conflict. Unlike previous periods of direct American military engagement in the region, Washington’s priorities today are largely domestic and economic. 

A wider regional war would almost certainly increase energy prices, disrupt global trade routes, and create uncertainty in international markets. Such instability would undermine economic recovery efforts and place additional pressure on American households.

For Trump, who has consistently portrayed himself as a leader focused on domestic prosperity rather than foreign military adventures, another regional war offers few political benefits. 

This explains why Washington continues to advocate restraint and emphasize the importance of maintaining the ceasefire framework currently in place. 

Israel, however, views the situation through a different lens. 

From the Israeli perspective, Hezbollah and Iran remain immediate security threats that cannot be ignored. Israeli leaders claim that military pressure is necessary to weaken these adversaries, regardless of American concerns about regional escalation. 

Yet security alone does not fully explain Israel’s actions.

The conflict is also intertwined with political and ideological ambitions. The influential factions within the Israeli regime continue to be influenced by a broader vision of expanding Israel’s strategic footprint in the region, often associated with the concept of “Greater Israel”.

In this reading, Lebanon is not merely a battlefield but part of a wider Israeli expansionist project. 

This creates an important divergence between American strategic interests and Israeli security calculations. The result is an increasingly visible gap between what the United States wants and what Israel is prepared to do. 

Recent developments have also highlighted Iran’s growing strategic importance. Iran occupies a critical geographical position overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant portion of the world’s oil and gas supplies passes. Any disruption to this maritime chokepoint would immediately affect global energy markets and international trade. 

More importantly, external pressure has strengthened domestic unity within Iran. The groups that previously disagreed with the government have increasingly rallied around the state in response to external threats. Regionally, Iran has demonstrated both military capability and strategic reach, reinforcing its position as a major regional power whose actions can no longer be ignored. Recent events have witnessed that Iran possesses significant leverage over regional security and global energy stability. 

The central issue, therefore, is not whether Trump supports a ceasefire. He clearly does. 

The real question is whether Washington possesses sufficient leverage to translate its preference into Israeli behaviour.

If Israeli military operations continue despite American calls for restraint, observers will inevitably question the extent of US influence over its closest ally. 

This matters because American credibility remains a key pillar of regional stability. If Washington is unable to shape the actions of partners that depend heavily on American diplomatic, financial and military support, its broader influence across West Asia may also come under scrutiny. 

Failure to contain the current escalation carries risks far beyond West Asia. A wider Iran-Israel confrontation could threaten critical energy routes, including the Strait of Hormuz and other regional maritime chokepoints. Rising energy prices would affect economies worldwide, including countries geographically distant from the conflict such as Malaysia. 

At the same time, continued instability risks expanding the conflict across multiple fronts involving Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Red Sea region. The longer the crisis continues, the greater the likelihood of miscalculation by one or more actors. 

File Photo. Trump and Netanyahu. (Official White House Photo by D.Myles Cullen). Public Domain.

For this reason, calls for a genuine ceasefire must be matched by meaningful diplomatic efforts and credible pressure on all parties involved. 

The current crisis has become a test of two things: regional stability and American influence. 

President Trump may genuinely prefer de-escalation, but preference alone is insufficient. The true measure of leadership lies in the ability to shape outcomes, not merely express intentions If Washington cannot persuade its closest ally to support a sustainable ceasefire, the risk of a wider regional conflict will continue to grow. 

The key question is therefore not whether Trump wants peace. The key question is whether he still possesses the leverage necessary to make it happen. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

(The Conversation) – The US and Iran stepped back from the brink of returning to all-out war on June 11. Hours after saying the US military would carry out strikes against Iran for a third consecutive night, Donald Trump postponed the attack. The Iranian military had said the US would “receive a more severe response than before” if it followed through on its threats.

Trump claimed to have cancelled the strikes because of progress in negotiations between the two countries. In a statement posted on social media, Trump said: “Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved.” He later added that the deal is set to be signed over the “next few days”.

Whether this will happen remains to be seen. Trump has declared that a deal between the US and Iran is imminent on numerous occasions only for no agreement to be signed. Iran’s foreign ministry has also called claims that an agreement has been reached speculative, insisting that “nothing has been finalised”.

And, even if it is signed, the agreement Trump is talking about is far from a final peace deal. It appears to be a memorandum of understanding, establishing a framework for the two countries to talk about unresolved issues. These include Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and nuclear programme.

Rather than the supposed diplomatic progress, perhaps more significant in persuading Trump to pull back from renewing an all-out war with Iran was that a return to conflict simply would not have been in the interests of the US.

War, as Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz observed in his 1832 book, On War, is the continuation of politics by other means. Its enormous costs can be justified only when they are tied to a coherent strategy and when there is a clearly defined political objective that there is a reasonable prospect of achieving.

Measured against this standard, there was no argument for returning to war with Iran. The difficulty begins with the absence of any discernible plan in Washington. Trump has articulated no strategy and no definition of victory beyond a vague aspiration to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

He was drawn into prosecuting a war based on intelligence about the fragility of the regime in Tehran that proved flawed and on scenarios that were overconfident and have not come to pass. These scenarios suggested the decapitation of Iran’s leadership would lead to sudden regime collapse and a popular uprising that would see the country transition to democracy.

There is also very little a return to all-out war could have accomplished. The reason for this is that the Iranian regime is not a conventional state that can be brought down by overwhelming firepower. The regime, which is now dominated by the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, can best be described as a militia with a state.

It is operating through a dispersed network of forces across air, land and sea, which were designed as an asymmetric instrument of power capable of absorbing, scattering and outlasting precisely the kind of concentrated military pressure the US military was built to deliver.

Weeks of intensive bombing earlier in the war did not shatter the regime’s centre of gravity. Rather, it consolidated the regime and has left it more cohesive and determined than it was before. In contrast to the more cautious regime of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which tended to wait and to respond, the new regime has become assertive.

It has been quick to retaliate against US and Israel attacks with severity and to set the pace of escalation. On June 8, for example, Iran launched barrages of missiles towards Israel in protest at the Israeli military’s escalating campaign in Lebanon.

Costs of war

Iran also retains the capacity to impose intolerable costs on everyone while retaining a high threshold of pain itself. If an all-out war returned, there was a very real risk that Iran would have moved to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa by mobilising its ally, the Houthis.

This threat is already on the table. The Houthis paused their attacks on shipping in the region after a ceasefire was signed in Gaza in October 2025, but have warned these will resume if the Iran war escalates. The Bab al-Mandab Strait serves as the principal bypass route for Saudi oil and for much of Gulf maritime trade, both of which are currently unable to transit the closed Strait of Hormuz.

Iran is also likely to have resumed direct attacks on the Gulf states with greater scope and intensity than before, which could have converted an already severe global energy crisis into something far worse. Perhaps the most consequential impact of returning to all-out war, therefore, was the prospect that it would have cost the US its valuable Gulf partners.

Photo by mehrab zahedbeigi: Pexels

Every Iranian strike that American installations in the region attract reinforces a lesson the Gulf monarchies are increasingly inclined to draw, which is that the presence of American bases on their soil makes them targets rather than affording them protection.

Faced with a closed Strait of Hormuz, the global economy in decline and a looming defeat for his Republican party in November’s US midterm elections, Trump is clinging to the hope that he can pressure Iran into accepting a deal. The chances of this strategy proving a success are slim.

Andreas Krieg, Associate Professor, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The international community’s approach to conflict resolution has undergone a profound and dangerous structural shift, moving away from the pursuit of political settlements toward the permanent administration of crisis. This transition is vividly apparent in Rafah, where the newly established National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) has begun overseeing a reconstruction process stripped of any path toward genuine sovereignty or political renewal. What is being built instead is a sprawling, technocratic bureaucracy designed to manage human suffering indefinitely, transforming a site of active geopolitical dispossession into a permanent administrative holding pattern.

The rollout of Phase Two of the Trump administration’s Comprehensive Gaza Plan—secured with a UN Security Council endorsement—exposes the nakedly corporate logic underpinning modern foreign policy. By placing a “Board of Peace” stacked with billionaire financiers and political hawks like Marco Rubio, Tony Blair, Jared Kushner, Ajay Banga, and Marc Rowan in charge of post-conflict governance, Western hegemony has effectively financialized geopolitical containment. The plan treats Gaza not as a nation deserving of self-determination but as a high-risk economic asset to be secured, stabilized, and folded into regional trade corridors while its population remains permanently disenfranchised.

This containment model carries severe consequences both for the occupied population and the broader global order. For Palestinians, it institutionalizes a bleak daily reality of endless aid lines and checkpoints under an international apparatus that has traded the promise of liberation for technocratic stabilization. Globally, this reveals a deeper systemic reality: the traditional assumption that regional conflicts are temporary shocks awaiting a diplomatic fix has completely collapsed.

For global political and economic elites, perpetual instability is no longer a failure to be corrected but a baseline structural condition around which modern global capitalism is choosing to organize itself.

A Shift in Logic

In the twentieth century, major conflicts were viewed as massive disruptions to globalization. In the twenty-first, globalization is rapidly adapting itself around endless disruption. Entire corporate, financial, and bureaucratic systems now operationalize instability as a baseline condition rather than a temporary shock.

Private-sector logistics firms are securing long-term contracts to manage continuous delivery corridors into high-risk zones. Maritime conglomerates are permanently adjusting pricing models and routing assets around Africa as a structural business reality. Digital and physical infrastructure protection has transitioned from an annual insurance check-box to a core operational expense that drives tech-sector hiring and venture capital investment.

Markets are internalizing this shift. Oil prices no longer spike the way they once did after escalations because commodity investors increasingly price in chronic, localized instability rather than assuming systemic collapse. Capital markets are no longer asking whether a crisis will end but whether it can remain geographically contained. That distinction changes everything for how corporate treasuries allocate capital.

Gaza and Ukraine

Gaza illustrates this vividly. The NCAG’s reconstruction mandate and the Board of Peace’s integration of Gaza into the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) show that crisis management itself has become a growth industry. Reconstruction is not about closure; it is about embedding instability into global supply chains.

This economic adaptation mirrors a deeper systemic fatigue within international governance. The post-Cold War era operated on the logic that major conflicts eventually reached closure, whether Bosnia after Dayton or Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement. Today, that logic is spent.

Instead of diplomacy aimed at structural architecture, modern institutions are becoming highly efficient at administering instability rather than ending it. The UN’s Resolution 2803 did not declare peace; it endorsed a framework for managing crisis indefinitely. The NCAG’s mandate is to restore services under conditions of volatility, not to deliver closure.

Ukraine offers a parallel. Western institutions have become adept at stabilizing financial flows, managing refugee integration, and sustaining military aid—but without a credible path to settlement. Sudan’s humanitarian corridors are similarly managed as permanent relief operations. Gaza’s plan institutionalizes this model: reconstruction without resolution, administration without settlement.

Normalization

The third transformation is occurring inside the human infrastructure of the modern workplace, driven by algorithmic fatigue and the workspace paradox. The digital age has fundamentally altered how societies, consumers, and employees process global trauma.

Previous generations experienced major conflicts sequentially. Today’s professional workforce experiences them simultaneously, continuously, and instantly. In any given hour, a professional’s algorithmic stream displays corporate Slack messages alongside real-time updates from Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, and climate disasters.

This continuous exposure has created a dangerous psychological paradox. The global workforce is more emotionally connected to macro-level crises than at any point in history, yet constant exposure is triggering widespread psychological numbness and professional exhaustion. Public and corporate outrage surges rapidly, then stabilizes into fatigue. For leaders, managing a workforce under the weight of this continuous cognitive load is a quiet crisis in itself.

The ultimate danger of the era of permanent crisis is that it becomes intellectually and socially normalized. Once corporate strategies and public expectations internalize the assumption that global disruption never truly ends, ambition contracts. Leaders stop pursuing long-term expansions because planning horizons narrow from years to weeks. Innovation takes a backseat to survival and containment.

Photo by Yannis Boschung on Unsplash

History offers a stern warning: the late Roman Empire did not collapse because every frontier failed simultaneously. It declined because permanent emergencies became routine, and tactical crisis management slowly replaced strategic renewal.

The modern international order risks entering a similar phase. Gaza, Ukraine, and shipping vulnerabilities matter immensely for their immediate human and material costs, but they matter even more because they reveal the new template of global operations. Trump’s Gaza plan, with its NCAG, Board of Peace, and IMEC linkage, is not just a reconstruction blueprint. It is a case study in how global institutions now design for permanence of crisis rather than its resolution.

The challenge for the next generation of business leaders is not simply navigating the next disruption but learning how to build sustainable, human-centric enterprises when disruption is the baseline condition. The permanent crisis economy is here: industries are monetizing instability, institutions are administering it, and workforces are absorbing it.

Gaza’s reconstruction framework, endorsed by the UN and operationalized by Trump’s Board of Peace, crystallizes this reality. It shows that the world’s most powerful actors are no longer promising closure. They are promising management.

For commerce, governance, and society, the task is clear: to resist the temptation to normalize crisis as the only horizon. Otherwise, the machinery of global order will become a treadmill of containment, and the ambition for renewal will fade. The permanent crisis economy may be the present reality, but it must not become a permanent destiny.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Really? The costliest fires ever? Doesn’t that catch your attention? It certainly did mine!

In fact, wouldn’t it catch your attention more than “President Said to Be Dropping Plans for Fund,” or “In Stalemates, Trump’s Talk Meets Reality,” or, for that matter, “Lutnick Runs Commerce Dept. With Bare-Knuckles Approach”? All three of those headlines were on the front page of that same paper, not at the bottom of page seven, and all three were, of course, distinctly Trumpian-themed pieces.

And, of course — sorry to be so repetitive, but what choice do I have in the world of… yes, who else but, of course, Donald J. Trump? — who or what could possibly catch your attention more than him and his crew?

If he were another president, I would have written “his crew and him,” but of course, in his world — and all too sadly in ours as well — he always seems to come first, no matter what. Certainly, on the planet that Donald Trump rules (or at least thinks he rules), the last thing that should appear on a front page would be an article about the scorching of this world of ours, or “the costliest wildfires ever,” or the fact that the European Union “declared the 2025 wildfire season the most destructive on record,” or that we (or at least our children and grandchildren) could potentially be facing the end of this planet as we’ve known it all these thousands and thousands of years, right?

 

Buy the Book

Or put another way, of these four lines, which would you have highlighted on page one and which would you have buried on page seven:

“President Trump is backing off his plan to establish a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed they were victims of unfair prosecution by the government, two people familiar with the matter said on Monday.”

“President Trump likes his military and diplomatic victories quick, clean, and decisive”

“When auto executives learned last year that President Trump’s punishing tariffs on foreign car parts were set to cost their companies billions of dollars, they were rattled.”

Or (yawn):

“Even though the total area burned was relatively small, 2025 was the most economically damaging wildfire year on record, according to a new analysis published Sunday.”

Yes, those are the first lines of each of those pieces and that ordering tells you so much about how Donald Trump has indeed taken control of our world in 2026. And give The Donald credit. After all, his greatest skill (above all others) is his unbelievable ability — no matter what he has to say — to regularly get more attention than just about anything (or anyone else) on this planet of ours, including the possible end of this world as we’ve known it.

And I suppose we need to give him credit in another sense, too. He has, in every imaginable fashion, proved capable of all too literally changing the climate of our all-American world. (And I’m already sweating as I write that!) He’s the man who has shut down wind-power projects along the East Coast, tossed solar power projects out the window, managed to open another 1.3 billion acres of ocean waters to oil and natural gas drilling, and considers climate change not just a distinctly fake news story, but a genuine “scam,” and yet Americans elected him president a second time in 2024.

And consider this no less strange: Despite Donald Trump, as the Guardian reported recently, red states, unbelievably enough, seem to be heading the green energy build-out in this country, with Texas, for instance, “the leading green energy superpower, especially in wind power where it leads the country,” while green states seem — how truly strange! — to be cutting back on or “shrinking away from their climate plans.” Yikes!

And in his own strange fashion (despite that “despite Donald Trump” in the previous paragraph), “our” president has, in fact, launched a kind of global green energy — well, if not revolution, then at least potential spurt. After all, by launching a war on Iran and ensuring the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-fifth of this planet’s sea-borne oil and 20% of its natural gas passes (or rather once passed), he’s also spurred countries globally, especially in Asia and Europe, to at least start thinking about revving up green energy production. Of course, It’s sad indeed to count on a war for good news on the energy front, but there we are. Sigh.

Photo by David Yao on Unsplash

Now, don’t misunderstand me. Donald Trump is doing everything he can to promote the worst kind of energy on this planet. Only recently, for instance, he’s been using the Cold-War era Defense Production Act to provide grants to, as the (wonderful) Guardian again reports, “more than a dozen existing coal plants across the U.S., including facilities capable of exporting coal.” As he put it recently, “As a result of the $700m investment that I’m announcing today, we will protect 14 coal plants and 42 coalmines, a tremendous number, and build two new coal plants and one massive new export terminal.” And he added charmingly, “You’re not allowed to say ‘coal’ within the Trump administration unless it’s preceded by the words ‘clean, beautiful’.”

Now, admittedly, American coal production has nonetheless been falling for years.

And of course, if I were running a newspaper these days, I would indeed put the fate of the planet in the age of Donald Trump front and center. The top of page one, day in, day out. After all, nothing else truly matters if this planet of ours becomes ever more unlivable for us.

Let’s face it, if we don’t read not The Times but our times correctly, we’re in trouble deep.

Via Tom Engelhardt Substack

If, however, the strike on the water tanks was deliberate, it was a war crime. Iranian media alleged that it deprived 20,000 people of drinking water in 113º F. (45º C. ) temperatures and 60% humidity. This affected men, women and children. The reservoir held 70K cubic feet of water and the water tank 17K cubic feet. Drinking water was unavailable for 12 hours.

Photo by IRIB News of alleged US damage to water facility. Public Domain in U.S.

Fatemeh Jarareh, the female representative in parliament of Hormozgan Province, called the attack a “blatant war crime against humanity.” She accused what she called the “terrorist army” of the United States of deliberately targeting key infrastructure necessary to human life and livelihood.

The government said that repair crews restored water transmission lines in twelve hours and said that over the following 24 hours drinking water would stabilize.

During the 39-day all-out war in March, Iran asserted that the US or Israelis had damaged a desalinization plant providing drinking water to residents. Bahrain likewise said that a desalinization plant providing water to 30 villages had been damaged by an Iranian drone.

Quite apart from the question of whether it is a war crime to hit civilian water facilities, it is a very dangerous move. If Iran felt its inhabitants were systematically being deprived of water, it could likely take out all the desalization plants in the territories of its Arab Gulf neighbors, without which none of those countries could survive more than three days. That is how long it takes for renal failure from lack of water to kick in and kill you; it is why rescue teams after an earthquake gradually stop searching in the rubble for survivors after 36 hours, since the likelihood of someone surviving longer than that without water is low.

Some 80% of water in the United Arab Emirates, a country of 11 million, comes from desalinization plants. Their total destruction would provoke a vast exodus of the population and raise questions about the survival of the country, where 88% of the residents are non-citizen migrant workers and expatriates. In turn, the Emirates’ ability to export petroleum would be drastically impeded, hurting the whole world.

Hence, the Trump administration should think long and hard before hitting such civilian infrastructure in Iran. The whole Gulf region is full of glass houses, and if they are all shattered, the energy crisis would be unprecedented.

Currently, much of the international debate centers on a single official: Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov. The former United Nations Special Coordinator has been designated by the United States as the Executive Director of the Trump administration’s newly established ‘Board of Peace’—an international council founded to oversee the implementation of Washington’s 20-point Gaza roadmap.  

The issue, however, is much bigger than a single Washington-backed bureaucrat. A growing number of Palestinians and political analysts accuse Mladenov of manufacturing the very conditions that continue to obstruct progress on the agreement’s transition to its second phase. 

Under the framework, the official transition to this second phase—which Trump and the Board of Peace declared to have begun in January 2026—demands sweeping, one-sided Palestinian concessions, most notably the total disarmament of armed factions.  

This demand is a recipe for the failure of the entire project, especially given that Israel has completely failed to implement the most basic requirements of the agreement’s first phase. It has refused to halt its routine military incursions, has failed to withdraw its forces to the originally mandated ‘Yellow Line‘ demarcation, and continues to deny entry permits to the technocratic committee slated to assume civil governance of the Strip.

Mladenov’s insistence on Palestinian disarmament before the agreement can advance—without a single guarantee of Israeli compliance—conveniently flips the narrative. It cynically reframes systematic starvation and the blockade of medical and construction supplies as a Palestinian failure to honor commitments.

In reality, Mladenov holds no real cards; he is merely a cog in a larger machinery controlled by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister has made it explicitly clear that he has no intention of following any peace roadmap, planning instead for the permanent, incremental takeover of Gaza.

Speaking at a conference in an occupied West Bank settlement on May 28, Netanyahu explained his strategy with total clarity, abandoning all diplomatic doublespeak: “We are currently squeezing Hamas; we now control 60% of the territory of the Strip—you know this. We were at 50, we moved to 60. My directive is to move to…” he said, pausing as an audience member shouted “100!”  

Netanyahu smiled and responded: “Let’s go step by step. First of all, 70. Let’s start with that. We’re pressing them from all sides, we’ll deal with the remnants.”  

This is the actual blueprint of the Israeli government, declared openly to domestic audiences. The admission was so brazen that even US Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed frustration at Netanyahu’s candor. Testifying before Congress on June 2, Rubio remarked, “We have a plan—it doesn’t call for that,” referring to further Israeli territorial expansion. 

Yet, Rubio quickly reverted to Washington’s standard line: “And at the end of the day, we understand that what we want, and I think what the Israelis would ultimately want, is a Gaza that is governed by a non-Hamas entity.” 

While the immediate priority for Palestinians is not governance but life-saving food, clean water, medicine, and basic survival, Netanyahu and Rubio view the entire crisis through a political lens.

The US-Israeli plan is predicated on achieving, through diplomatic strangulation and engineered famine, what they failed to fully achieve through military might.

A rare, decisive answer came from United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, who summed up the UN position plainly: “One hundred percent of Gaza should be for the Palestinian people.” The problem, however, is that the UN’s rhetoric is backed by no real enforcement mechanisms. 

The international community has walked directly into a trap, outsourcing the future of the Gaza Strip to the Trump administration and its Board of Peace. Even the designated technocratic committee has been rendered entirely irrelevant, excluded from a decision-making process left solely to diplomats beholden to the White House.  

The situation on the ground remains catastrophic. Since the fragile, heavily compromised ceasefire took effect on October 10, regular Israeli violations and airstrikes have killed nearly 1,000 Palestinians and wounded thousands more—the vast majority women and children. When added to the horrific toll of the initial two years of war, the official number of Palestinians killed has surpassed 73,000, with over 173,000 injured.  

Photo: A young boy in a gray shirt works in a muddy trench in a refugee camp in Gaza, by Hosny salah from Pexels

Furthermore, credible epidemiological studies and medical journals have concluded that the true death toll is vastly higher. 

With nearly the entire population of Gaza living in sub-standard tents and surviving on the meager rations permitted through Israeli checkpoints, it is the highest form of immorality to demand political concessions in exchange for basic sustenance. 

Netanyahu’s “step-by-step” annexation does not hinge on what Palestinian factions decide to do; his expansionist timeline is shaped independently of Palestinian compliance.

Arab, Muslim, and allied nations must fundamentally shift their diplomatic strategy. They must firmly insist on completely delinking humanitarian aid from the future governance or demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. 

Starvation cannot be tolerated as political leverage for war criminals. Netanyahu is emboldened by a history of international impunity, speaking openly of expanding his military footprint regardless of the consequences of such action. 

The international community must remind Israel’s government that the survival of millions of Palestinians cannot be held hostage to the political ambitions of an extremist coalition. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Via Middle East Monitor

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

(The Conversation) – The US military launched strikes against Iran on June 9 in response to the downing of a US Army helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier. These strikes, which the US military called “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression”, came after Donald Trump claimed he was in the “final throes of what will be a very, very good deal” to end the war.

Iran swiftly carried out retaliatory attacks of its own. The powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps branch of Iran’s armed forces says it has struck US bases in Bahrain and Jordan. And it has warned of “even more severe attacks” if the US repeats its strikes.

This episode took place days after Israel and Iran had briefly returned to direct conflict. Triggered by Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where a ceasefire was supposedly in effect, both sides launched various rounds of tit-for-tat strikes before announcing they would halt hostilities.

At first glance, these incidents appear contradictory. Diplomacy is supposed to be the alternative to war and ceasefires are supposed to reduce violence. Yet with the US, Israel and Iran once again exchanging attacks, and as military operations continue in Lebanon despite ceasefire arrangements, diplomacy and conflict increasingly seem to be unfolding simultaneously.

For decades, policymakers assumed that war and diplomacy were distinct phases of international politics. States negotiated until talks broke down, and fighting followed. Eventually, battlefield realities or international pressure pushed adversaries back to the negotiating table. Diplomacy then functioned as an exit ramp from conflict.

The aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war exemplified this model. Sustained diplomatic efforts following the conflict culminated in the 1978 Camp David accords, which laid the groundwork for a definitive peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. This treaty was signed the following year and remains in effect to this day.

However, this model is becoming difficult to recognise, with the Middle East nowadays characterised by a different dynamic. Negotiations between warring parties continue during military confrontations, ceasefires coexist with airstrikes and mediators shuttle between capitals even as threats escalate.

The problem is not that diplomacy is failing. Instead, it is that diplomacy is no longer serving its traditional purpose. Rather than ending conflicts, diplomacy is helping to manage them – a distinction that matters because a conflict that is managed is not necessarily a conflict that is resolved.

Managing conflict

The latest escalations between Israel and Iran, and now Iran and the US, illustrate this dilemma. None of these parties appear to want a full-scale regional war, as the costs would be enormous and the consequences unpredictable. Yet each of them is unwilling to abandon what they see as vital security interests.

Israel views Hezbollah’s military capabilities as a major threat and therefore has a strong incentive to weaken the group. Iran, on the other hand, sees defending Hezbollah as critical to its security because the group serves as a key deterrent against Israel and extends Tehran’s regional influence. And the US struck Iran in an attempt to uphold deterrence and signal that attacks on US personnel and assets would carry consequences.

The result of this is a cycle of calibrated escalation. Military force is used not to secure decisive victory but to signal resolve to adversaries, reassure allies and domestic audiences, and persuade opposing leaders that the costs of further escalation outweigh the potential benefits. Diplomacy, meanwhile, works not to eliminate the underlying dispute but to prevent escalation from spiralling beyond control.

This creates a dangerous equilibrium. When diplomacy functions primarily as a mechanism for crisis management, leaders face less pressure to make the difficult compromises that lasting peace requires. Negotiations can continue indefinitely while violence persists, ceasefires become pauses rather than settlements and conflict becomes chronic.

The old distinction between war and peace is becoming blurred in the Middle East. Rival powers do not move neatly from diplomacy to conflict and back again. Instead, they are operating permanently in the space between the two. This should concern policymakers.

Much of contemporary diplomacy remains based on assumptions that no longer fully apply. Negotiations are often treated as evidence of deescalation, while ceasefires are assumed to signal progress towards peace. Yet neither necessarily tells us much about whether a conflict is actually moving closer to resolution.

The latest exchanges between the US and Iran, as well as Iran and Israel, therefore raise a troubling possibility. The greatest danger may not be that the Middle East slides back into a wider war. It may be that it settles into a condition of permanent confrontation in which violence periodically erupts, diplomacy periodically intervenes and neither fundamentally changes the underlying reality.

Photo of Manama by Charles-Adrien Fournier on Unsplash

For decades, the central challenge of international politics has been how to move from war to peace. The challenge emerging today is different, with negotiators grappling with the much more difficult task of ending a conflict when war and peace are happening at the same time.

Bamo Nouri, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of International Politics, City St George’s, University of London and Inderjeet Parmar, Professor in International Politics, City St George’s, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.