{"id":482178,"date":"2026-06-08T11:22:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T11:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/482178\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T11:22:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T11:22:09","slug":"renewed-fire-and-no-one-left-to-sign-the-war-israel-cannot-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/482178\/","title":{"rendered":"Renewed fire, and no one left to sign: the war Israel cannot end"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late Sunday, Israeli aircraft struck Hezbollah\u2019s headquarters in the Dahiyeh<\/a>, the group\u2019s stronghold in southern Beirut, answering rocket fire that had crossed into northern Israel hours earlier. The reflex is to ask how many fronts Israel now faces. The honest answer is fewer than before, and that is what makes this phase more dangerous than the last.<\/p>\n

Go back to December 2023. Then-defense minister Yoav Gallant<\/a> counted seven theaters before lawmakers: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. It was a grim tally, but it described a war fought mostly through Iran\u2019s proxies, on other people\u2019s soil.<\/p>\n

Three of those seven have since gone dark. The Assad dynasty fell in December 2024, and a Hezbollah too battered to save its patron could only watch Hayat Tahrir al-Sham take Damascus.<\/p>\n

In Iraq, the Iran-aligned Shi\u2019ite militias that once rained rockets on American and Israeli targets pulled out, and some are weighing whether to disarm rather than invite US retaliation. Gaza sits under the ceasefire reached in 2025, contained even as Hamas refuses to disarm.<\/p>\n

Those vanished theaters were the buffer, the forward defense Iran spent two decades assembling, the arc Qassem Soleimani stitched from Beirut to Sanaa before a US drone killed him outside Baghdad in January 2020. Strip it away, and Israel is left fighting the war Tehran always meant for other hands.<\/p>\n

\"AA streak of light illuminates the sky during a missile attack from Iran towards Israel, as seen from Jerusalem, June 7, 2026. (credit: AMMAR AWAD\/REUTERS)The surviving fronts\u00a0<\/p>\n

What remains is four direct fronts. The first is Iran itself<\/a>, no longer sheltering behind anyone; in the first two weeks it fired more than 500 ballistic missiles and over 2,000 drones, one of which killed nine civilians in Beit Shemesh.<\/p>\n

The second is Lebanon, where Hezbollah holds on as the last working arm of the Axis, and Sunday\u2019s strike shows the fighting has climbed back to Beirut.<\/p>\n

The third is Yemen, beyond the reach of Israeli ground forces, where the Houthis have fired at Beersheba and Eilat since late March and will not stop on Israel\u2019s schedule.<\/p>\n

The fourth is not a place but a passage, the chokepoints at Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, where the war is counted in shipping insurance and Washington, not Jerusalem, carries the load. That one is most likely to go global.<\/p>\n

Four fronts, but four deep ones, each pressing on Israel or its ally directly, with no proxy left to take the first blow.<\/p>\n

The deeper problem is that this war has no one left to end it. The February 28 strike killed supreme leader Ali Khamenei, and Trump later admitted the operation had been so thorough that the successors Washington had in mind were all dead.<\/p>\n

What the Assembly of Experts had left was his son Mojtaba, judged more hardline than his father, called unacceptable by Trump, and whose elevation, Foreign Affairs observed, would have drawn protests in any calmer hour.<\/p>\n

Israel has said any successor to Khamenei is a target. So the one man with the standing to order a stand-down is marked for death, buried his father after an Israeli bomb, and must prove to his hardliners that he is no softer than the martyr he replaced. A leader boxed in like that does not sign a ceasefire. He needs the war to last.<\/p>\n

Israel applied the same logic in Beirut, killing Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024 and his heir Hashem Safieddine days later, leaving Hezbollah to fall back on Naim Qassem, the cleric Gallant met with a photo on X\/Twitter reading \u201cnot for long.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is an end achievable?<\/p>\n

The counterargument deserves a hearing. A decapitated Iran with degraded enrichment, Soleimani and Nasrallah dead, and a shrinking proxy ring is, by most measures, a weaker enemy than the one Israel faced two years ago. Fewer fronts can mean fewer enemies, and four direct fronts may be a war Israel is winning.<\/p>\n

Maybe. But Israel can win all four and still not end the war. From Kissinger\u2019s shuttle diplomacy after 1973 to Resolution 1701 that closed the 2006 Lebanon war, Israel\u2019s wars ended when someone on the other side had the authority to sign.<\/p>\n

Israel and Washington have spent six years removing those people, from Soleimani to Nasrallah to Khamenei. The table is still there. It is the chair across from it that keeps emptying.<\/p>\n

So expect the next ceasefire to be announced<\/a> in Washington and ignored in Beirut by the end of the week. The men still shooting across these four fronts no longer wait for Tehran\u2019s permission, and Tehran no longer has a leader with the standing to grant it.<\/p>\n

This war ends when one side can no longer go on, not when a document says so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Late Sunday, Israeli aircraft struck Hezbollah\u2019s headquarters in the Dahiyeh, the group\u2019s stronghold in southern Beirut, answering rocket…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[16097,29800,50,51,86,8954,85,87,6605,46,15005,88,43,4713,2201,77,2893],"class_list":["post-482178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-ayatollah-ali-khamenei","tag-bashar-assad","tag-gaza","tag-hamas","tag-hezbollah","tag-houthis","tag-il","tag-iran","tag-iraq","tag-israel","tag-israel-iran-war","tag-lebanon","tag-news","tag-syria","tag-war","tag-west-bank","tag-yemen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}