It took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a day to respond to the news that the US and Iran signed an interim ceasefire deal, despite the potential consequences for Israel.
The void was filled with politicians across the spectrum expressing outrage at the framework, including from within the Prime Minister’s coalition. When he did eventually talk, on Monday evening, Mr Netanyahu promised Iran would never have nuclear weapons and that he had saved Israel from annihilation.
On Tuesday, the anger has gone nowhere and many in the opposition continue to turn it into a key attack line before elections, which are due in October.
Within the coalition, many appear to be biding their time. Some people close to Mr Netanyahu are going further and lauding him for standing up to US pressure.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday that the agreement is “bad for Israel” and for the world. “We will have to continue the campaign to topple the regime ourselves and in creative ways, and ensure that Iran will never have nuclear weapons,” he said.
In the same post on X, he lashed out at critics from the opposition, saying that none of them “would withstand even 10 per cent of the pressure currently being applied to the Israeli government, and especially to the one at its head”.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir claimed that “Trump’s agreement does not bind us” and said Israel “must not compromise on anything less than the dismantling of Hezbollah [and] we must not withdraw from any territory that our fighters have captured and cleared of terror infrastructure”.
Mr Ben-Gvir has consistently called for continuing war in Lebanon. On Monday, before the deal was signed, he said Israel should kill a thousand in Hezbollah “for every hair on the head of an [Israeli military] soldier”.
Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of opposition party Yashar, described Mr Netanyahu’s statement on Monday evening as “very regrettable”.
“It would have been better for him to say, ‘I erred, I set false goals that I was not equipped to achieve,’” he said.
Mr Eisenkot, fast becoming one of Mr Netanyahu’s main opponents in October’s elections according to opinion polls, accused the Prime Minister of issuing “the same declarations again, which are once more a sleight of hand, a denial of goals he had previously declared, and above all, zero real answers to a people that endured the hardest years in its history”.
He said that “the discourse must be changed to one that is honest, straightforward, and not driven by the pursuit of power”.
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, another key opponent of Mr Netanyahu in coming elections, on Monday accused the government of being “incapable of achieving a decisive victory”. In a separate statement he said: “The countdown clock for regime change in Iran will start ticking the moment the government in Israel is replaced.”
Opposition leader Yair Lapid, who was a prime minister in the same coalition as Mr Bennet, said “Netanyahu promised us a historic victory – and we got a crisis with the Americans, Hormuz open to the Iranians, money for the Revolutionary Guard, ballistic missiles aimed at Israel, and Israel waiting in the corridor like a scolded child”.
In a separate statement on Monday, he said: “Israel is a strong country with a weak government; that is its main problem, and we will solve it in the coming months.”
There was similarly bitter criticism of Mr Netanyahu on Israel’s dwindling left.
Leader of The Democrats party Yair Golan, who supported the war against Iran, attacked Mr Netanyahu, who throughout his career styled himself Israel’s defender against Iran.
“Netanyahu, if you dedicated most of your life to the war against the Iranian threat, and by your own words we've reached a short distance from destruction, then you've failed at the mission of your life,” he said, after Mr Netanyahu’s address.
“We appreciate the honestly,” Mr Golan concluded.
In an earlier statement after the US-Iran deal, Mr Golan said defeating Mr Netanyahu at elections was “not just a political necessity, it is an existential security imperative”.
Hadash-Ta’al leader Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said that only peace between Israelis and Palestinians could lead to true regional peace.
“Time and again, reality proves to us all the limitations of power,” he said.
“We saw it in Iran, in Gaza, and in Lebanon. But in the end, the most important agreement of all is the agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.”
