It should be obvious to anyone by now that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a monster. His ongoing genocide in Gaza, his brutal suppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and condoning of settler violence, his attacks on Iranian civilians, and now his indiscriminate and widespread bombing of Lebanon that have killed a huge number of civilians and left many others homeless and otherwise destitute reveals a man who has absolutely no conscience.

Israel’s devastating bombardment of Lebanon in the hours after a US-Iranian ceasefire was announced has been widely condemned amid global efforts to salvage the truce.

More than 200 people were killed by Israeli bombing, including strikes with heavy munitions on densely populated areas, which drew outrage from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international humanitarian organisations.

In Trump, he has finally found a US president who was willing to remove even the mildest restraints that former presidents placed on Israel and so his murderous impulses are now unchecked and revealed for all the world to see.

That he is a war criminal goes without saying. The amount of blood he has on his hands would give a normal person nightmares.

It also seems pretty clear that after pushing Trump into war with Iran, he is now determined to scuttle any kind of deal and ceasefire between the US and Iran by intensifying the attacks on Lebanon. He is also lying about Lebanon not being part of the ceasefire agreement. This is not surprising since, like Trump, he lies without compunction.

Pakistan, which led the efforts to broker a ceasefire after Trump threatened a civilisation-ending onslaught, has said Lebanon had been part of the agreement.

Robert Malley, a former American envoy who led earlier US-Iranian negotiations, said: “I would trust the Pakistani mediator that Lebanon was included. They put out a statement that it was included and we did not hear any American correct the Pakistani version for many hours.

“It looks like a case of the US reneging and giving the Israeli prime minister [permission] to go ahead [with bombing] for another 24 hours before they are ‘restrained’”.

But in not curbing his murderous impulses, Netanyahu may be losing the public relations war.

“There has never been a political disaster like this in our entire history. Israel was not even close to the table when decisions were made concerning the core of our national security,” Israel’s main opposition leader, Yair Lapid, wrote on X.

“The army carried out everything that was asked of it, and the public showed remarkable resilience, but Netanyahu failed politically, failed strategically, and did not achieve any of the goals he himself set. It will take us years to repair the political and strategic damage that Netanyahu caused due to arrogance, negligence, and lack of strategic planning.”
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The head of the leftwing Democrats party, Yair Golan, also called the ceasefire a “strategic failure” by Netanyahu.

“He promised a historic victory and security for generations, and in practice, we got one of the most severe strategic failures Israel has ever known,” Golan said on X. “It’s a total failure that endangers Israel’s security for years to come.”

The reality is that Netanyahu gambled everything on his war and in his failure to secure the fall of the theocratic regime, the seizure of Tehran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, or meaningful state degradation, Israel’s global standing – already massively tarnished by its actions in Gaza, where it has been accused of committing a genocide – has been damaged.

Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing attacks in southern Lebanon also appears hubristic, given that Israel’s declared intention to carve out a new security zone puts its forces in direct conflict on the ground with Hezbollah fighters who have historically proved adept at fighting on their own terrain.

Seen in this context, Israel’s horrific and unwarned-of mass airstrikes on Lebanon seem like a punitive act of displacement, having been thwarted in Iran.

The fallout in terms of public opinion and diplomacy is likely to be even more serious for Netanyahu and Israel. In America, in particular, a political consensus dating back to the 1960s is visibly crumbling. Israel’s role in pushing Trump to war in Iran has been assailed by both progressives and Maga’s far right, while support for Israel more broadly is at historic lows even among Jewish voters.

But it would be premature to write Netanyahu’s political obituary. He is a ruthless person, willing to do anything to anyone to maintain himself in power and has shown a remarkable level of durability. In that he has found a soulmate in Trump, sometime who shares his complete lack of any kind of morality. One can only hope that by clinging to each other, they will each bring the other down.