{"id":502147,"date":"2026-06-20T07:19:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T07:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/502147\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T07:19:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T07:19:14","slug":"us-iran-deal-on-the-verge-of-breakdown-48-hours-after-being-signed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/502147\/","title":{"rendered":"US-Iran deal on the verge of breakdown 48 hours after being signed"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US-Iran agreement that US President Donald Trump signed at Versailles on Wednesday was on the verge of collapse Friday, 48 hours after it was signed. The first round of nuclear talks, scheduled to open in Switzerland, was scrapped before it began after Iran refused to send its negotiator in response to a wave of Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon.<\/p>\n

Smoke rises to the sky following an Israeli military strike in southern Lebanon as seen from northern Israel, Friday, June 19, 2026. [AP Photo\/Leo Correa]<\/p>\n

Israel struck more than 80 targets across southern Lebanon on Friday, killing at least 47 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry. The bombardment hit Nabatieh and the surrounding region after a Hezbollah ambush killed four Israeli soldiers near the village of Kfar Tebnit. The strikes shattered a ceasefire that had taken effect in mid-April.<\/p>\n

The memorandum requires the United States, Iran and their allies to end all military operations \u201con all fronts, including in Lebanon.\u201d But Israel is not a party to the agreement and has refused to be bound by it. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called the deal \u201cbad for Israel,\u201d and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared that \u201cthe State of Israel is not a banana republic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday and, according to US officials, pressed him to halt the attacks. By the afternoon, Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to renew their ceasefire. Israeli troops will remain in southern Lebanon, Netanyahu said, for as long as the country\u2019s security required. US intelligence agencies have warned Trump that Netanyahu, who faces an election this autumn, is likely to keep undermining the deal.<\/p>\n

Hours before the talks were called off, Axios reported that Steve Witkoff, Trump\u2019s special envoy to the Middle East, was on his way to Switzerland, where \u201cthe first round of talks with Iran on a potential nuclear deal is expected to take place,\u201d citing a US official. Jared Kushner, Trump\u2019s son-in-law, was already in Switzerland. The meeting was cancelled before it began.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The agreement has drawn condemnation from broad sections of the US political establishment as having failed to establish US domination of Iran. Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, said the memorandum \u201cnegotiates away the victories\u201d of the war \u201cin ways that are completely out of step with the president\u2019s goals,\u201d and warned that its $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran \u201cwould make President Obama\u2019s 2015 deal look like a pittance by comparison.\u201d Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana called the deal \u201cthe worst foreign policy blunder in decades\u201d and wrote that \u201cReagan is rolling over in his grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Democrats denounced it in the same terms. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the war had \u201cleft America worse off by every measure,\u201d and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared that \u201cIran is stronger and America is less safe.\u201d Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut called the agreement \u201cessentially a surrender to Iran on Iran\u2019s terms\u201d\u2014and then announced that he would support it.<\/p>\n

Neither party opposed the war itself, a war of aggression launched in defiance of international law that killed thousands of Iranians and Lebanese. They faulted Trump only for having failed to win it.<\/p>\n

Having failed to achieve the war\u2019s objectives, Trump was forced to back down amid a deepening economic crisis. Iran had shut the Strait of Hormuz\u2014the channel that carries one barrel in five of the world\u2019s oil\u2014driving crude above $118 a barrel and lifting US inflation to a three-year high of 4.2 percent in May.<\/p>\n

Asked why he had dropped his demand for Iran\u2019s \u201cunconditional surrender,\u201d Trump pointed to the markets. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to see economic catastrophe,\u201d he said at the G7 summit in France. \u201cIf you kept this going, that could have happened.\u201d He added: \u201cThe one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.\u201d<\/p>\n

The economic crisis is far from over. Oil prices have fallen since the deal was signed, but gasoline remains a dollar a gallon above its prewar level, and central bankers are \u201cnot ready to call the all-clear,\u201d the Financial Times reported. The $300 billion fund Iran was promised is already unraveling: the Gulf states are reluctant to finance it, and Trump has denied that Washington will pay \u201cten cents.\u201d Some 20,000 sailors remain stranded in the Persian Gulf, roughly 2,000 ships remain trapped, more than 100 days after the war closed the strait.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Available from Mehring Books<\/p>\n

The struggle against imperialism and for workers\u2019 power in Iran<\/p>\n

A pamphlet by Keith Jones<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father was assassinated in the opening hours of the war, said Trump had signed \u201cout of desperation\u201d and warned that Iran would not submit to \u201cexcessive demands.\u201d<\/p>\n

The war was waged at enormous human cost. Iran\u2019s health ministry reported 3,468 people killed and more than 26,500 wounded since the fighting began on February 28; the human-rights monitor HRANA put the dead at 3,636, more than 1,700 of them civilians. The opening strikes killed not only Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei but much of the Iranian state, including the secretary of its national security council and dozens of senior commanders. Inside the country, prices have risen 84 percent over the year and food costs by 131 percent.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s parallel offensive in Lebanon, which opened on March 2, has killed at least 3,711 people and wounded more than 11,000, according to the Lebanese health ministry; its deadliest day was April 8, when 357 were killed.<\/p>\n

Thirteen US service members died and more than 380 were wounded, and a US strike on a tanker off Oman killed three Indian sailors. The United States burned through more than half its supply of several critical weapons, some of which will take years to replace.<\/p>\n

The assault on Iran unfolded as Israel pressed ahead with its genocide in Gaza. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023, the Gaza health ministry reported this week, including 1,005 since a ceasefire took effect last October. United Nations investigators reported this month that Israeli strikes had killed dozens of police directing traffic, calling the attacks possible war crimes.<\/p>\n

Israeli forces now hold more than 60 percent of the territory and Netanyahu ordered the army last month to seize 70 percent, confining nearly two million people to the remaining sliver. The United Nations confirmed famine across Gaza last summer, and aid agencies say barely a third of the relief trucks promised under the ceasefire have been allowed in.<\/p>\n

Join the fight against the Gaza genocide and imperialist war!<\/p>\n

Fill out this form and we\u2019ll contact you soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US-Iran agreement that US President Donald Trump signed at Versailles on Wednesday was on the verge of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-502147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502147","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=502147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}