US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu appear increasingly at odds after Washington reportedly pressured Israel to renew a fragile ceasefire with Iran-backed Hizbullah after an escalation in hostilities tested the new agreement to deal to end the Middle East conflict.
A meeting due to take place on Friday between the US and Iran in Switzerland to discuss implementation of the new deal was cancelled when Hizbullah killed four Israeli soldiers and Israel carried out a wave of retaliatory air strikes in southern Lebanon that killed at least 47 people.
Trump told NBC News in a phone interview that he had spoken with Israel on Friday and asked them to agree to a ceasefire with Hizbullah.
“You just gotta calm down sometimes and use your head,” Trump was quoted as saying on X by an NBC reporter, who added that Trump declined to specify whether he had spoken with Netanyahu directly.
RM Block
In a separate interview, Trump also told repeated his view that if it weren’t for him “Israel would not exist today”.
He made the remarks to US news outlet Axios, which released snippets of a 45-minute interview with the US president.
Trump added that his relationship with Netanyahu was “good, but we have to keep him a little bit sane”.
Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, meanwhile, has scrapped a planned election campaign highlighting the Israeli prime minister’s close ties with the US president.
Analysts say the special relationship built on “shared values” has soured and Trump, believing Netanyahu was deliberately trying to scuttle the emerging deal, told US media outlets recently that the Israeli prime minister had “no f***ing judgment” and needed to be “more rational”.
[ Israel and Hizbullah agree ceasefireOpens in new window ]
Further proof of the tense state of bilateral relations came when Trump said on Thursday that he would “most likely” endorse Netanyahu in Israel’s autumn elections, but wanted to see who else was running against him first.
Vice-president JD Vance, in his press conference on Thursday, berated the Israeli ministers who had criticised Trump over the memorandum of understanding to end the conflict.
“Donald J Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment,” he said. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”
Across the political spectrum in Israel, the US-Iran agreement has been condemned as a capitulation that fails to achieve even a single strategic achievement.
While the reaction of Netanyahu has been relatively mild, stressing that even in the best of families there are occasional differences of opinion, his leading supporters in the media, particularly on the right-wing Channel 14 TV station, have not held back.
The agreement was described as a “sell-out” and a “surrender” with Israel “being thrown under the bus”.
The US president’s relations with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni are also under stain after she accused her one-time close ally of fabricating a story about her.
Trump told an Italian TV channel that she had “begged” him to take a photo with her at the G7 summit.
Meloni said she was “astonished” by his comments, which were “completely made up”. She also chided him for acting with far greater deference to the enemies of the West than he does towards old, established allies.
Underscoring how much Trump’s comments have angered Meloni’s government, Italian foreign minister Antonio Tajani announced he was cancelling a planned visit to the US next week.
The latest exchange marks a sharp deterioration in ties, coming just days after signs emerged at the G7 summit that the two right-wing leaders had steadied a previously strained relationship following tensions this year over the war on Iran.
