Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Thursday that he had ordered his government to start direct negotiations with Lebanon on disarming Hezbollah, a possible concession after European leaders warned that Israeli attacks in Lebanon threatened to unravel the fragile cease-fire in the war with Iran.
But in a statement to Israelis shortly after he made the announcement, Mr. Netanyahu declared that “there is no cease-fire in Lebanon” and that Israel was “continuing to strike Hezbollah with force and will not stop until we restore your security.”
The Israeli military issued new evacuation warnings for the southern outskirts of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, which were among the densely populated areas pummeled by heavy Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday. Lebanon’s health minister said more than 200 people had been killed and more than 1,000 others wounded in those attacks, making it the deadliest day since the latest war between Israel and Hezbollah began last month.
The United States and Israel have said the two-week cease-fire with Iran, which was announced on Tuesday, does not extend to Lebanon, contradicting both Pakistan, which helped broker the truce, and Iran.
Iran has suggested it could pull out of the deal if Israeli attacks in Lebanon continue, even as Iranian leaders and Trump administration officials prepare for talks this weekend in Pakistan aimed at achieving a long-term peace agreement.
European leaders argued pointedly on Thursday that Israel’s attacks in Lebanon were undermining the cease-fire and that Lebanon must be protected under the two-week truce. “The severity with which Israel is waging war there could cause the peace process as a whole to fail,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, one of Israel’s closest European allies, told reporters in Berlin.
Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, said that Lebanon should not be the “scapegoat” for an Israeli government that is “frustrated because a cease-fire has been reached between the United States and Iran.”
Kaja Kallas, the top European Union diplomat, said Israel’s strikes in Lebanon had put the cease-fire “under severe strain.” And Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said during a visit to Bahrain that Israel’s attacks on Lebanon “should stop.”
President Trump told NBC News on Thursday that the Israelis were “scaling back” operations in Lebanon but stopped short of calling on Mr. Netanyahu to end the military assault.
“I spoke with Bibi, and he’s going to low-key it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “I just think we have to be sort of a little more low-key.”
Hezbollah, both an Iranian-backed armed militia and a powerful political force in Lebanon, started firing rockets and drones into Israel on March 2 in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike in Tehran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. Since then, Israel has carried out intense airstrikes in Lebanon and has moved troops into southern Lebanon in what it calls a campaign to eliminate the threat from Hezbollah. It is the latest of several Israeli invasions with that aim, most recently in 2024, across more than four decades of conflict between them.
In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said that he had instructed the Israeli cabinet to start talks with Lebanon at “the earliest possible time.” Those negotiations, the statement said, would focus not only on disarming Hezbollah but on “arranging peaceful ties between Israel and Lebanon.”
Joseph Aoun, Lebanon’s president, has repeatedly called for direct talks with Israel to end the Israeli assault in his country. Until Thursday Israeli officials had largely dismissed his entreaties.
Israeli officials have given no indication so far that such negotiations would lead them to stop their attacks in Lebanon, where they have signaled plans for a longer occupation of the country’s south.
And it is far from clear whether the talks have buy-in from Hezbollah, which has long overshadowed the official Lebanese government. While Lebanese leaders have voiced interest in disarming Hezbollah, Israel and many Lebanese have expressed intense skepticism that Lebanon’s weak government is willing or able to do so.
On Thursday, hundreds of people in Lebanon packed the roads to northern areas of Beirut after the Israeli military issued the evacuation warnings for the southern outskirts of the city, signaling that strikes could be imminent. Lebanon also began a period of mourning for those killed in the Israeli attacks on Wednesday, when the Israeli military said it had targeted more than 100 Hezbollah command centers and military sites in the span of 10 minutes.
Search-and-rescue teams on Thursday were still combing through apartment buildings in Beirut that had been flattened, with dozens of people missing. Signs of destruction were everywhere: mangled cars, blown-out storefronts and dust-covered streets littered with piles of gnarled rebar and broken concrete.
The cease-fire did appear to bring some measure of calm to parts of the Persian Gulf on Thursday. The United Arab Emirates said its skies were clear of aerial threats, and there were no reports from several other countries in the region of incoming fire, after they spent weeks fending off Iranian missiles and drones.
Marine traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway off Iran that was sup, through which a fifth of the world’s crude oil must pass, remained a trickle. Iran had promised to reopen the strait during the two-week cease-fire. But on Wednesday, the number of ships transiting the waterway was the lowest since late March, according to Kpler, a global tracking firm.
Saeed Khatibzadeh, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, told Britain’s ITV News in an interview published on Thursday that the strait was open but that ships wishing to pass through must coordinate with the Iranian authorities because of “technical restrictions,” including mines.
“We have to be very careful for the security and safety of tankers and vessels,” he said.
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief executive of Abu Dhabi’s state oil company, said on Thursday that for global energy markets to stabilize, more must be done to reopen the strait. “Let’s be clear: the Strait of Hormuz is not open,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Access is being restricted, conditioned and controlled.”
Reporting was contributed by Adam Rasgon, Euan Ward, Peter Eavis, Michael D. Shear and Christopher F. Schuetze.
Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporter covering Israel and Gaza. He is based in Jerusalem.
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