Israel Strikes Beirut Hours Before Trump’s Iran Deal Signing — And Now Israel Is Bracing For Iranian Missiles: Hours before the Iran deal, President Trump says, gets signed today, Israel struck the one place that could unravel it, and by late Sunday morning, the Israeli military was bracing for Iran to fire back. The Israel Defense Forces hit Hezbollah targets in Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing at least three people, in what Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Katz called a response to Hezbollah firing into Israeli territory.
The IDF said it precisely struck a Hezbollah command center and issued evacuation orders for towns across southern Lebanon.
Iran’s Drones That Russia Is Using. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The timing is the problem: Tehran has made an end to Israeli strikes in Lebanon a condition of any deal, and that condition is being broken on the morning the deal is supposed to be signed.
Israel Braces For Iranian Missile Fire
By midday, the question had shifted from the strike to the response. The IDF is now bracing for possible Iranian missile fire after the Dahiyeh attack, and a senior Iranian commander has already seemed to promise one.
General Mohammad-Jafar Asadi, deputy chief of the Khatam al-Anbiya operational headquarters of Iran’s armed forces, told Iranian media the strike will not go unanswered, the same language that preceded earlier Iranian barrages in this war.
Israeli security officials told the country’s Channel 12 they are prepared for all possibilities and took into account how Tehran reacted the last time Israel hit the Beirut suburbs.
The military signals point to an escalation already underway rather than a contained incident. The IDF reported several hostile aircraft incursions along its northern border overnight and into Sunday, said it has struck more than 70 Hezbollah sites as its troops advance near Nabatieh in southern Lebanon, and notified U.S. Central Command shortly before the Dahiyeh strike, according to Israeli and American officials cited by Axios.
Iran flag. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
That last detail matters: Israel told the United States it was about to hit the target that most endangers Washington’s own deal, and struck anyway. The two governments are not coordinating toward the same outcome this morning.
The One Condition Iran Will Not Drop
Iran has insisted throughout the negotiations that any U.S.-Iran agreement must include a halt to Israeli operations against Hezbollah, and the strike collides directly with that demand.
The chain is not hypothetical. When Israel last struck the Beirut suburbs a week ago, Iran responded with strikes on Israel, an exchange that nearly derailed the talks then. The same trigger has now been pulled on the day of the signing, and the Iranian general’s warning suggests the same sequence may follow.
The deeper issue is one that the deal cannot resolve, because Israel is not a party to it. Netanyahu’s government has consistently held that the U.S.-Iran framework does not cover its war with Hezbollah, which is precisely what lets Israel keep striking Dahiyeh while Washington and Tehran negotiate.
That leaves the United States promising Iran something it cannot enforce on its own ally. Washington can sign an agreement committing to a ceasefire in Lebanon. It cannot deliver one while the IDF is hitting Hezbollah command centers and bracing for the missile reply.
The structural weakness of the entire deal is that its central Iranian condition depends on the conduct of a country that has not agreed to anything.
F-35I Adir Fighter. Image Credit: Israeli Air Force.
A Signing Still Scheduled, And A Warning Not To Sign
The deal is not dead, and the machinery is still moving, at least as of right now. Qatari negotiators flew to Tehran on Sunday morning to help finalize the agreement, in coordination with Washington, and Pakistan has said the memorandum is to be signed digitally on Sunday. Trump has said the agreement will be signed today, with the Strait of Hormuz reopening immediately afterward. The diplomatic track has not been called off, even as the missiles are readied, again, at least as of right now.
But the strike has handed Iran’s hardliners exactly the argument they wanted on exactly the day they wanted it. Nezameddin Mousavi, a former spokesman for the Iranian parliament’s presiding board, publicly urged the country’s negotiators not to submit to humiliation or sign anything under humiliating conditions, casting the Dahiyeh attack as a deliberate move to embarrass Tehran into capitulating.
Iran’s top negotiator has separately framed the strike as proof that Washington either will not or cannot honor its commitments. For a regime that has spent the war insisting it can outlast Trump, an Israeli strike on the morning of the signing is the kind of provocation that makes signing look like surrender, and the voices telling Tehran to walk away just got louder.
What the strike does not do is end the negotiations on its own, and limited exchanges have punctuated this ceasefire for more than a week without collapsing it outright. Trump may still get a signature today, and the Hormuz reopening he has promised may still come. Maybe. One can be hopeful.
My honest take this hour is narrower and harder: an Israeli strike, an Iranian general’s vow of retaliation, an IDF bracing for missiles, and a deal whose weakest seam is being pulled at the worst possible moment by an ally Washington does not control. Iran says it will wait and see. What it is waiting to see is whether the United States can deliver the one thing it has never been able to deliver in this war — restraint from Israel — and the answer, as of this morning, does not look good. Watch this space.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions focused on national security research and analysis. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
