JERUSALEM—Just before 1 a.m. Wednesday in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got a phone call from President Trump, who told him that he was about to announce a cease-fire in the war with Iran.
The Israeli leader agreed to participate. But Israel, which wasn’t formally part of the negotiations, wasn’t happy that it was learning of the completed deal so late in the process, according to a person briefed on the conversation and mediators in the conflict. Netanyahu had time to get in one important request: We need to keep going in Lebanon, said the person briefed on the call.
He got the green light from Trump, the person said, and Israel later launched a devastating air attack on Lebanon, hitting 100 targets in 10 minutes. The strikes led to a furious response from Tehran that shook the fragile hours-old cease-fire as Iran rained rockets and drones on targets around the region.
Netanyahu positioned himself as Israel’s warrior king after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and has kept up the fight for more than two and a half years. Israel has won battle after battle, sometimes in spectacular fashion. It has hit Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group with everything from airstrikes and ground assaults to exploding pagers.
But for many in Israel, fatigue is growing over living in a constant state of war, and there is mounting criticism that despite the success on the battlefield the country hasn’t yet won the war.
Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel would open direct negotiations with Lebanon over Hezbollah’s disarmament but there is little hope of a long-term agreement. He also said Israel would keep fighting to protect those in northern Israel from Hezbollah’s rocket attacks, underscoring that the U.S.-designated terrorist group remains a potent threat after years of war.
In Gaza, Hamas is resisting pressure to disarm despite getting pounded for more than two years. And some are now saying that the five-week war against Iran didn’t deliver the setbacks to Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missiles and regime that Netanyahu had advertised.
On Wednesday night, Netanyahu spoke in a recorded video to an Israeli public exhausted by daily barrages that have sent them running to shelters, saying that the war had been a major success.
“While you demonstrated resilience sitting in the secure rooms and shelters, together we achieved immense accomplishments,” he said. “Iran is weaker than ever, and Israel is stronger than ever. This is the bottom line of this campaign, up to this moment.”
The joint U.S.-Israel bombing campaign has conducted more than 20,000 airstrikes across Iran, including on military sites and factories, by relying on some of the world’s most advanced munitions and jet fighters. The attacks have killed Iran’s most senior military and political leaders, destroyed more than 150 navy ships and degraded its ability to fire missiles. Iran will likely need years to rebuild its military capabilities, analysts say.
But the Iranian regime appears to have survived the withering air campaign and remains unbowed, still capable of inflicting pain across the region and the global economy.
Israel’s security doctrine changed after the deadly 2023 Hamas attack, becoming more active and unwilling to tolerate threats. Israeli forces now hold buffer zones inside Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Netanyahu’s critics and political opponents say, however, that he is using Israel’s military force without a diplomatic plan to secure the peace.
“The state of Israel entered this war with a rare consensus,” opposition leader Yair Lapid said. “The public supported it across the board. I supported the war and its objectives from the very first moment in dozens of interviews with the international media. But after six weeks of dead and wounded and rushing to shelters, it became clear that Netanyahu is incapable of winning any campaign.”
The war in Iran tested the durability of some of Israel’s military gains in recent years. Earlier wars with Hezbollah and Iran appeared to shift the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor. How the region ultimately reorders itself after this war remains unclear, but Iran’s continued ability to attack its Gulf neighbors and control the vital Strait of Hormuz suggests it will remain a central player. It could even become bolder, say some analysts.
Israel has long struggled with long-term strategic planning, said former Israeli officials and analysts. Unlike the U.S., the U.K. and France, it has no tradition of publishing official national-security strategies that lay out foreign policy and defense priorities. But analysts say the difficulty has grown under Netanyahu in recent years. It was on full display during the Gaza war when Netanyahu was criticized for avoiding discussion of a plan for the enclave’s future governance despite the urging of his senior security establishment.
“There is a tendency to overemphasize kinetic means, so to speak, over diplomacy and other means of influence. Because quite frankly this is what we are good at,” said Eran Lerman, a former deputy director at the Israeli National Security Council and currently vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy.
It isn’t clear that there are political or diplomatic solutions to the conflict. Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas have posed persistent threats to Israel for decades. The best Israel can hope for, some analysts say, is to knock back those threats every few years.
One challenge for Israel and the U.S. in achieving their strategic aims is that their goals have shifted throughout the war. At the beginning, both countries spoke of regime change. But the focus since has turned to degrading Iran’s military capabilities, especially its ballistic-missile and nuclear programs.
Netanyahu didn’t mention regime change in his speech on Wednesday; instead, he focused on the damage to Iran’s industrial base, its nuclear program, and its ability to produce ballistic missiles.
“We have set the terrorist regime in Iran back many years,” he said. “We have shaken its foundations. We have crushed it.”
Iran nevertheless continued to fire missiles and drones daily and responded to attacks on Iranian infrastructure with strikes of its own on civilian and energy infrastructure in Israel and across the Gulf.
“They not only survived but were able to attack Israel and the Gulf states until the last day of the war and they discovered something important: They control the arteries of the international economy,” said Danny Citrinowicz, who formerly headed the Iran desk in Israeli military intelligence. “Those operational achievements that we had during the campaign actually did not accumulate into a strategic gain of toppling the regime or of depriving it of strategic capabilities.”
Tehran’s nuclear program has been heavily degraded, but Iran’s leadership is so far unwilling to cave to U.S. demands to dismantle it. Iran still has nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium, and the regime might feel it has no choice now but to rush to build a nuclear weapon to prevent more attacks.
It might be too soon to say whether the war achieved Israel’s goals. Some analysts say Netanyahu’s problem might be that with each battle he promises “total victory.”
“There is no such thing as the war to end all wars,” said Eran Ortal, a former Israeli military official, arguing that each of Israel’s previous attacks on Iran had laid the groundwork for the next one. “We need to see every war as a type of stage in a broader strategic campaign.”
Write to Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com