After more than two weeks of fruitless negotiations for further hostage releases, Israel’s patience ran out. On Tuesday, the Israeli military bombarded Hamas leaders and positions in Gaza, and ground forces soon reentered the Hamas-ruled enclave.
Renewed fighting caused consternation for many. The remaining hostages’ friends and family fear for the safety of their loved ones. Israelis of all stripes want their countrymen free from the horrors described by some of the recently released captives. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political opponents accuse him of restarting the war to wriggle his way out of the most recent scandal to rock Israeli politics.
Focusing too narrowly on Gaza and Hamas, however, obscures the greater forces at play in the region. Jerusalem is acting like it is gearing up for the final confrontation with Iran, and it is taking Tehran’s pieces off the table in conjunction with the Trump administration.
Last week, a letter from President Trump reportedly reached Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. The message: Iran has two months to come to terms with Washington. As National Security Adviser Mike Waltz said this weekend, “Iran has been offered a way out of this.” It can either hand over its missile, uranium enrichment, and weaponization programs “in a way that is verifiable, or they can face a whole series of other consequences.”
So far, Iran is sticking with its usual tactic—defiance. After Trump announced the letter, Khamenei retorted, “They constantly say, ‘We won’t allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.’ If we had wanted to build nuclear weapons, the U.S. wouldn’t have been able to stop us.” Starting in December, Iran massively sped up its uranium enrichment program, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, by February, it had a stockpile of nearly weapons-grade uranium that could yield six bombs.
Iran can now get weapons-grade uranium at any time, and it is researching how to speed up the rest of its nuclear program. Toward the end of last year, the intelligence community assessed that the Iranians are working on shortcuts to shrink the time for making a bomb from about a year to only a few months.
The mullahs have crept right up to the edge of nuclear capability before, and previously they have traded parts of their program for diplomatic concessions, such as Obama’s misbegotten 2015 deal. Tehran has retained its enrichment program and its cadres of nuclear scientists so it can create new pawns to sacrifice as needed while moving toward its greater goals.
But over the past year, it has lost a lot of other pieces. Hezbollah, which had functioned as Iran’s strategic reserve in the region, is a shell of itself after Israel annihilated its leadership last fall. Syria used to be one of the Lebanese terrorist group’s primary supply routes, but the new regime in Damascus is clashing with it. Hezbollah rocketed Israel the day after Hamas began the war, but it is issuing only condemnations, not even threats, as the fighting resumes.
The Trump administration is pummeling another of Iran’s proxies, Yemen’s Houthis. The Houthis began attacking international shipping in the Red Sea in November 2023, and the Biden administration responded with only pinprick attacks. But last weekend, Trump began a much more damaging bombing campaign. The Houthis have been notoriously hard to dislodge, but if the U.S. military can pin them down and restrict their access to advanced weapons, they will be much weaker.
Hamas is one of the last Iran-backed groups that can seriously threaten Israel, and Netanyahu is hitting it again. This is controversial in Israel. Most of his countrymen seem to want to enact stage two of the ceasefire plan, which would trade all of the remaining hostages for a permanent end to fighting, and then finish off Hamas.
This is highly unrealistic. Hamas’s leaders are not very interested “martyring” themselves—in their view, that’s what Gaza’s children are for—and the remaining hostages are their best human shields. Returning the captives would remove the greatest obstacle to Israel finishing off the terrorists. They are not going to do that unless they believe that the only other choice is annihilation. That is the choice Bibi is offering them.
Bibi and Trump both prefer to intimidate with threats rather than risk war, which Carl von Clausewitz called “the province of chance.” But they are shrewd judges of power, and with Iran’s empire so weakened, Iran’s most advanced air defenses destroyed in an earlier Israeli air raid, and hard-earned Israeli expertise in tunnel fighting against Iran’s proxies, this is the best chance in decades to take out Iran’s bomb.
If Hamas and Iran are wise, they’ll take the deal.
