Will Netanyahu Derail the Iran War Cease-Fire?

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where we’ll tackle one of the biggest open questions despite a nominal two-week cease-fire in Iran.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Israel continues to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s cyberwarriors target U.S. infrastructure, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte makes an uncomfortable visit to Washington.

Israel’s ongoing offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon emerged as perhaps the greatest challenge to the fragile Iran war cease-fire since it was announced on Tuesday night.

Pakistan, which brokered the truce and is set to host peace talks between Washington and Tehran, has said Lebanon is part of the truce. Iran, a close ally of Hezbollah, has also insisted that that is the case. But Israel and the United States have said Lebanon is not part of the deal.

And just hours after the cease-fire began, Israel on Wednesday launched its largest wave of strikes on Lebanon since renewed fighting with Hezbollah broke out on March 2, hitting more than 100 targets in 10 minutes, killing over 300 people, and wounding more than 1,100.

Iran has threatened to abandon the cease-fire process and carry out “STRONG responses” over the continued bombardment of Lebanon and its lack of inclusion in the truce, and Israel is now under rising pressure from the Trump administration to scale back its campaign. U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he had asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a more “low-key” operation against Hezbollah.

In response, Netanyahu announced that Israel would soon begin direct talks with the Lebanese government on establishing peaceful relations and disarming Hezbollah. Yet he vowed to continue targeting the group, insisting that “there is no cease-fire in Lebanon.”

“A feeling of chaos.” Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations in Lebanon are reporting horrific scenes of human suffering from the Israeli bombing campaign and raising alarm bells about the toll the strikes are taking on the country’s civilians.

Jeremy Ristord, who serves as head of mission for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Lebanon, told SitRep that Wednesday was the “bloodiest day” since the resumption of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in early March. In Rafik Hariri University Hospital, one of the hospitals that MSF teams support, there was “a feeling of chaos.” It was a “really difficult day,” Ristord said, even after people woke up with a sense of hope following the news of the cease-fire.

“When the strikes started, some of them were really close by, so you had smoke everywhere in the emergency room,” Ristord said. Ambulances brought in a “mass influx of wounded,” Ristord said, including women, children, and older people. Many people who came to the hospital had head injuries, wounds from shrapnel, and blunt force trauma, he said, with others also turning up searching for missing loved ones. One patient arrived with “both legs severed,” among other wounds, and “sadly could not be saved,” Ristord said, adding that there were similar scenes in hospitals across Beirut.

While Israel has maintained that it’s striking Hezbollah targets, the Israeli military has repeatedly targeted densely populated areas. The United Nations and top human rights groups have questioned the validity of its claims and proportionality of its attacks as well as warned that actions taken by both Israel and Hezbollah could constitute war crimes.

Observers have also warned that Israel is targeting Lebanon’s health care system, which the Israeli military was also accused of doing in Gaza. Lebanon’s government has said dozens of medics have been killed by Israel in the war so far. The World Health Organization said on Sunday that it had verified more than 90 attacks on health care facilities in Lebanon since late February, though it did not specify the parties responsible.

Indefinite displacement. The dire humanitarian situation is also “compounding layers of vulnerabilities” in Lebanon, Ristord said. Before the recent conflict broke out, the country was already contending with the aftermath of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in 2024—which saw Israel occupy parts of southern Lebanon and continue near-daily strikes even after a cease-fire agreement that November—atop years of economic instability.

More than 1 million people have been forced from their homes in Lebanon since early March, and over 1,500 people had already been killed in the fighting before Wednesday’s strikes. Around 14 percent of Lebanon’s territory is under “so-called evacuation orders” from Israel that “have no start or end,” Ristord said, underscoring that in the United States, this would amount to a territory roughly twice the size of Texas. Ristord said groups that were already facing challenges in Lebanon prior to the renewed fighting, such as Palestinian refugees and migrant workers, are especially vulnerable in these circumstances.

“My deepest concern is just the magnitude of the displacement and the lack of clarity on when, if ever, the military campaign will end,” Kate Phillips-Barrasso, the vice president of global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps, told SitRep. “So that means you’re looking at a situation where 20 percent of the population or more could be displaced for an indefinite period of time.”

U.S. men ages 18 through 25 could automatically be registered for eligibility for a military draft as soon as December under a proposed new rule from the Selective Service System (SSS), the U.S. agency that oversees draft eligibility. That does not mean a military draft is coming, though—the last one was during the Vietnam War in the 1970s, and military service has been voluntary since then. Any future military draft would have to be authorized by Congress and the U.S. president, according to the SSS website.

However, by law, draft-eligible men must still register with the SSS. That process has for decades relied on voluntary compliance at the federal level (automatic registration is already in place in 46 states and territories), but the National Defense Authorization Act that Trump signed into law in December 2025 included a requirement that registration be made automatic nationwide. The proposed rule must still be approved.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Cyber concerns. The U.S.-Iran conflict has scaled back since Trump announced a two-week cease-fire on Tuesday, but Iran’s cyberwarriors remain a threat to U.S. critical infrastructure. An advisory issued by U.S. government agencies on Tuesday said Iran-affiliated hackers had compromised internet-connected control systems made by the U.S. company Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley, potentially impacting the water and energy sectors, among others. Iran has a long history of using cyberattacks to compromise U.S. industrial systems, and experts and former officials have warned that the more nebulous nature of cyberspace means that Iranian cyberwarfare could continue even if the missiles stop flying.

In other troubling cyber news, Anthropic (yes, that Anthropic) announced a powerful new artificial intelligence model that it says “could reshape cybersecurity.” The unreleased model, known as Claude Mythos Preview, has reached a level where it can “surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities,” the company claims, and it has already found vulnerabilities in every major web browser and operating system. Anthropic said it has launched an initiative called Project Glasswing, a collective of companies including Amazon Web Services, Apple, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, and Nvidia that will work with Anthropic to patch vulnerabilities found by Mythos to improve its safety before it can be released to the public.

Rutte awakening. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s visit to Washington this week may have been previously scheduled, but it happened to come at a particularly precarious and important time for the trans-Atlantic alliance. Trump has spent weeks ranting against NATO allies for their lack of support and participation in his war against Iran, and he continued to do so after a reportedly contentious meeting with Rutte at the White House on Wednesday. “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday evening after the meeting.

Rutte tried to downplay the rupture in a speech at the Reagan Institute in Washington on Thursday, saying that NATO was not “whistling past the graveyard” but was in the midst of a “profound change.”

As for the Iran war, Rutte admitted that “some allies were a bit slow” to support the United States but added that they were “also a bit surprised” because Trump did not inform them beforehand—a decision the NATO chief said he could “understand.”