JERUSALEM — After 40 days and almost 40 nights of war, many Israelis breathed a sigh of relief when President Donald Trump declared an 11th-hour, two-week truce with Iran — but others are saying not so fast.
Among high-ranking officials and civilians alike, there is a widespread sense that while a sudden end to retaliatory attacks is welcome, it’s still too early for a ceasefire deal. Despite a series of assassinations of high-level Iranians, they say, the war so far has not done sufficient damage to Israel’s mortal enemy.
Declaring victory over Iran now — for the second time in 10 months — would mean it’s just a matter of time until the next round of fighting begins.
“Israel needs to finish the game with Iran,” said Uriya Maman, 29, who was sitting in a schnitzel shop as the Jerusalem city center briefly reopened on Friday before closing down again for the Sabbath. “But not this way, maybe more aggressive … more attacks.”
Maman said Israel needed to end the Iranian threat once and for all. “All the time it comes back,” he said. “It finishes and comes back, finish and come back. We want to finish, and that’s it.”
Ali Al Jabarin, 40, carrying plastic bags of fresh bread from a market, called Iran “the big boss in the Middle East.” “It’s not over,” he said — this is just “a holiday.” “In one month,” Al Jabarin said, “they’ll come back, thousands of missiles.”
The Israeli political opposition, in particular, has been vociferous in criticizing the conduct of the war and, now, the temporary ceasefire, in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apparently had no say. Opposition politicians are asking what Israel has gained in this war that Netanyahu had sought for so long.
On Sunday morning in Islamabad, after more than 20 hours of negotiations, Vice President JD Vance said the United States and Iran failed to reach an accord to end the war, but it was unclear what would happen next. Pakistan, which mediated the talks, does not recognize Israel, and Israeli officials did not attend the negotiations.
In nearly six weeks of strikes, Israel killed at least 2,000 people in Iran, according to rights groups. Iran, in turn, killed about 20 people in Israel and four in the West Bank, officials say.
“Many people feel a deep sense of disappointment tonight because the government sold us illusions,” Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister and prominent Netanyahu rival, said. Opposition leader Yair Lapid called the ceasefire the biggest “political disaster in all of our history.” The leader of the left-wing Democrats party, Yair Golan, said Israel needs leadership that wins, not “just manages wars.”
Avigdor Liberman, a right-wing parliamentarian who opposes Netanyahu, said the ceasefire “gives the ayatollah regime a timeout and an opportunity to reorganize.” An insufficient agreement means “another campaign under harsher conditions,” Liberman said on X.
Zvika Fogel, a parliament member in a Netanyahu-allied far-right party, addressed Trump directly. “Donald,” he posted on X, “you turned out to be a duck.” Fogel later deleted the post.
Netanyahu supporters dismiss the criticism as defeatism and political maneuvering ahead of national elections expected in October. While Netanyahu potentially stood to gain from public perception of a clear military victory, recent Israeli media polls show his standing has weakened instead.
Israel has made “outstanding tactical achievements” but “lacks strategic or political closure,” Israel Ziv, a retired major general in the Israel Defense Forces, told The Washington Post. Israel dealt blows to Iranian military capabilities that will take years for Tehran to rebuild, but Netanyahu also “made promises” with high expectations that he failed to meet, Ziv said.
It’s difficult for Netanyahu to frame the situation, he said, in part because “it is out of his hands … and this creates a problem for him with the Israeli public. He is not in the decision-making circle.”
In the days after Trump unilaterally announced the ceasefire, Netanyahu asserted some independence, insisting that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia, was not included in the truce. Israel then stepped up military operations in Lebanon, including some of its heaviest bombing of Beirut, the capital, which killed more than 300 people. On Thursday, Netanyahu agreed to direct talks with the Lebanese government, which are now set to begin Tuesday in Washington.
Following Trump’s ceasefire announcement, Netanyahu was slow to communicate, waiting nearly 24 hours to address the nation directly after having published a brief, English-only statement. Critics said the absence of a message in Hebrew suggested he was trying to avoid acknowledging that he had been sidelined.
In a prerecorded statement to the nation in Hebrew on Wednesday night, Netanyahu claimed that Israel was aware of the ceasefire in advance. “They did not surprise us at the last minute,” he said.
Then, late Saturday, Netanyahu posteda 13-minute Hebrew video statement, in part addressing detractors, outlining Israel’s military wins late Saturday. “There are people who say ‘We have no achievements.’ There are giant achievements,” he said, adding that those who “diminish” those victories echo Iranian propaganda.
“The campaign is not yet over,” Netanyahu said. “We struck them. We still have more to do.”
Lapid, however, claimed Israel had “no influence whatsoever” on the agreement, making it a “protectorate state that receives instructions over the phone.”
Leading up to the truce, top Israeli and Iranian officials argued that each side would use a ceasefire only to rebuild military capabilities. After Trump announced the pause Tuesday, all sides claimed victory.
Israel’s military says it has met its operational goals, significantly damaging Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs, and eliminating top regime officials and commanders. Critics counterthat not toppling the regime and not completely eliminating the weapons programs amount to failures. Trump, for his part, has argued that regime change has been accomplished, a view most experts reject.
“Israel wants quiet,” said Alon Cohen, 51, who owns a convenience store in Jerusalem. “But we want quiet without an atomic bomb.”
Not a single resident of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv interviewed by The Post on Friday or Saturday said they believed that the fighting with Iran was finished.
“It’s not over,” said Myra Hovav, a rabbi in the southern Israeli city of Beersheva, who added that she wants the fighting to end for all sides. “We make jokes about it. We even have a new name for the next conflict, right? They have these glorious names.” The current war, for instance, is called Operation Roaring Lion. “Wow,” she said. “So the next one would be the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
Jerusalem’s Mahaneh Yehudah market was a scene of frenetic energy on the first post-ceasefire Friday afternoon before Shabbat, the biggest crowd he has seen here in weeks, a man hawking halvah said. At least two stores blasted tropical house music while Israelis jumped up in tight packs, forcing hurried shoppers to maneuver around them for last-minute olives, cheese and produce.
Twelfth-grader Yehuda Abuchatzira, who was playing games on his phone, said the ceasefire made him “happy because people stopped dying” — “but a little bit sad because I am a student.” He is set to return to school on Monday for the first time in weeks on Monday.
“The war ended without a victory, so I don’t think we achieved our goals,” said Abuchatzira, who will begin mandatory military service next year.
Avraham Gini, 30, who was shopping in the market, said “the absolute and final victory” will come only when the Iranian regime is overturned, which he said only the Iranian people can achieve.
Nitay Sadiq, whose apartment balcony door was blown off in a direct strike on his northern Tel Aviv street on March 24, said he believed the fighting should continue. “I want it to keep going all the way,” he said. Sadiq said he believed Trump had done “a great job, but he didn’t finish it all the way. He should destroy their power plants and gas wells.”
Recent polls suggest that public enthusiasm for the war has waned in recent weeks after initially running high following the Feb. 28 attack that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“The public is tired of being in a constant war that moves from one front to another, only to return to the previous one,” said Alon-Lee Green, co-director of Standing Together, a Jewish-Arab coexistence movement that has led weekly large-scale anti-war protests, including one he was arrested at April 4.
“The campaign may be over, but it is not complete,” Minister of Energy and Infrastructure and Security Cabinet member Eli Cohen wrote. Iran is “beaten, isolated, and bruised,” Cohen said, and Israel is ready to strike back if Tehran continues to want to destroy Israel. “Until the terror regime in Tehran falls, there will be no stability in the Middle East,” he wrote.
The ceasefire hasn’t delivered a complete truce in the region.
Lebanon, where according to health officials Israel has killed 2,000 people since March, remains especially dangerous. Eleven Israeli soldiers and two civilians have been killed by Hezbollah rockets in the same period. Israeli is continuing military operations in south Lebanon, where it says a bigger buffer zone is needed to prevent strikes by Hezbollah on northern Israel.
“I believe we must not stop,” said Avi Nadiv, deputy head of Metula, a border town at the northernmost tip of Israel, on Friday. “If we stop now, we’ll find ourselves in another round of conflict in a few months. We want to end this story once and for all.”
Nadiv said he’s in favor of talks with Lebanon and an eventual peace deal — “but not a ceasefire right now.” His home was hit by Hezbollah missile fire in 2024, and he said he wants to “stay here without my house ever suffering another scratch.”
Nadiv said he would be “deeply disappointed if Netanyahu listens to Trump and stops the fighting.”
Soroka reported from Tel Aviv.
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