The Wall Street Journal reports:

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weighed how to respond to waves of Iranian missile attacks Sunday night, President Trump called with a message: Stand down.

But as it became clear the Israeli leader wouldn’t ignore a direct attack, Trump shifted his tone. Keep it limited, and don’t let it escalate, he said according to people familiar with the conversation.

Trump had hoped to contain the flare-up in fighting to keep it from disrupting work on a peace deal he is trying to hammer out with Tehran. His struggle to squelch Israel’s retaliatory strikes shows the difficulty of managing a situation in which the U.S. and Israel’s priorities are diverging sharply, particularly over Lebanon, as he tries to wind down the war.

On another call Monday morning, after several rounds of back-and-forth attacks in which Israel struck an Iranian petrochemical facility and Iran threatened to retaliate against energy facilities around the region, Trump asked Netanyahu to end the attacks, people familiar with the matter said.

The Israeli leader later publicly agreed to refrain from further strikes—unless Tehran launched new assaults on his country.

The split between the U.S. and Israel has complicated the continuing peace talks and given Iran room to more aggressively defend its Lebanese ally, part of Tehran’s self-styled Axis of Resistance.

“Iran feels relatively comfortable, because it believes the U.S. and Israel are not aligned regarding the Lebanese issue,” said Ofer Guterman, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “Israel’s government wants to maintain the use of force as much as possible to achieve its interests in Lebanon and Iran, while the Trump administration is on a different page.”

Trump’s priority has been to wrap up a war that is unpopular at home and driven up gasoline prices and other costs. But that is colliding with Middle East powers who have their own priorities.

Israel is trying to beat back a newly resurgent Hezbollah, which has rebounded from its defeat in 2024 with deadly new drones and a renewed willingness to fight. Israel also hopes to keep striking Iran to further weaken a regime it sees as an existential threat.

Iran, meanwhile, has linked a broader peace deal to a ceasefire in Lebanon and raised the ante by firing waves of missiles at Israel Sunday night and Monday in retaliation for an earlier attack on Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

“In the past 24 hours, Iran and Hezbollah have tried to impose on us an intolerable new equation,” Netanyahu said Monday. “That did not happen, and it will not happen.”

“Israel has a full right to self-defense, and we are exercising it—I say this with appreciation and respect in my good conversations with President Trump,” said the prime minister, who has come under fire from political opponents and members of his own coalition for allowing the U.S. to influence Israel’s decisions on major security issues.

By Monday morning in Washington, Israel and Iran had engaged in several rounds of attack and counterattack. Iran fired nearly 30 missiles at Israel in successive waves, while Israel attacked the petrochemical facility and Iranian air-defense sites. [Continue reading…]