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01-04-2026
By SJA Jafri + Bureau Report + Agencies
ISLAMABAD/ TEHRAN: With mixed signals over US plans for fresh talks with Iran, the exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, the Middle East’s two arch-enemies continues.
Iran fired several missiles at targets in northern and southern Israel overnight, after Israel carried out “dozens” of air strikes inside Iran on Monday, hitting command centres of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) and Intelligence Ministry in Tehran, Israel’s army said, as well as weapons stores and air defences.
Around the latest blast site in northern Tel Aviv, balconies have been sheared off, and walls are shedding masonry into a crater between a clusters of residential buildings.
Local reports suggest this was a direct hit from an Iranian missile that narrowly missed several apartment blocks. Six people were reportedly wounded in the attack, though none seriously.
One man who lives on the road behind the impact site told media he didn’t have time to get to the shelter when the sirens sounded, and had just reached his front door when it was blown open by the blast.
He described fleeing from his apartment in bare feet as glass shattered around him. When he looked back, a fire had already broken out in the debris behind him, he said. There is still widespread speculation over Donald Trump’s motivation for opening a new dialogue with Tehran; negotiations have been used by the White House before as a smokescreen for military escalation, and thousands of US marines are currently being sent to the Middle East but to some in Israel, talk of negotiations is another indication that the US president is looking for a way out of the war and that the goals of Israel and its superpower ally are starting to diverge.
“(Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu doesn’t want a deal,” says Michael Milstein, a former military intelligence officer in Israel and now head of the Palestinian Studies Centre at Tel Aviv University.
“There is a kind of contradiction between Trump’s stance and Netanyahu’s,” he told media.
“Netanyahu wants to continue the war. He promised this war would end all the existential threats to Israel, and maybe even promote conditions to change the regime in Iran and right now there is a gap between his promises and what is happening on ground.”
If Trump is serious about finding a way out of this war, he says, Israel’s prime minister could find himself in an impossible situation.
“It’s Catch-22 because if there are negotiations, he will not be able to promote the war and he can’t say to Donald Trump, ‘I’ll continue the war without you’. He understands that he’ll have to accept it” but Netanyahu is treading a fine line, after promising Israelis this war would end the immediate threat from Iran and its network of proxies around the region. The bar for a deal he can sell to Israeli voters and allies is high at this point in the war.
“Israelis want the war to end. We just understand that the right way for it to end is by us defeating the regime, and not by just having this come back to haunt us over and over again,” said Dan Illouz, another Likud member of parliament.
“We’ve tried the containment policy in the past, we’ve done it with Hamas; we saw it blew up in our faces on Oct 7th, so we don’t want the same thing to happen with Iran.”
After speaking to President Trump on Monday, Netanyahu said Israel was continuing to attack both Iran and Lebanon and would “protect (its) vital interests in any situation”.
