Foreign Policy

Trump's Middle Eastern Ceasefire: Fiery But Mostly Peaceful

The White House keeps insisting that peace is around the corner. Meanwhile, Israel, Iran, and the United States keep shooting at each other.

Matthew Petti | 6.8.2026 11:56 AM

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Israeli Border Police removing the remains of an Iranian ballistic missile shot down near Jericho, West Bank, on June 8, 2026. (Jim Hollander/UPI/Newscom)

President Donald Trump claimed on Monday morning that a peace deal in the Middle East is just around the corner, "subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way." He posted this statement a few hours after Iran and Israel bombed each other for the first time since a ceasefire took effect on April 7.

That ceasefire originally gave both sides two weeks to hammer out a final agreement to end the U.S.-Iranian conflict and work towards regional peace. Two months later, there is no deal and the two sides have been engaged in increasingly violent tests of each others' limits, which Trump calls "love taps."

The Sunday night air raids started over Lebanon, where Israel has been fighting the pro-Iran militia Hezbollah. Iran has been demanding that any peace deal include an unconditional ceasefire in Lebanon, while the U.S. wants the ceasefire to be "contingent" on a Hezbollah withdrawal and direct Israeli-Lebanese talks, a plan that the Lebanese government likes but Hezbollah rejects.

Despite its demands, Iran had seemed content to sit out of the fighting in predominantly Shi'ite Muslim areas of southern Lebanon near the border. On Sunday, the Israeli army bombed what it called a "terrorist headquarters" and........

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