An overwhelming number of Israelis oppose the US-Iran ceasefire deal declared last week, and anticipate a return to the war, a poll has found. The findings match observations by analysts, who say that Israeli political leaders promised a final showdown with Iran, only for the conflict to instead leave the Iranian government still standing.<\/p>\n
According to the poll, published by the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies (INSS)\u00a0 on Sunday, 61 percent of respondents said they opposed the ceasefire, announced 90 minutes before United States President Donald Trump\u2019s apocalyptic deadline on Tuesday, in which he had promised to launch devastating attacks on Iran\u2019s civilian infrastructure. Additionally, 73 percent said they expected fighting with Iran to restart within the next year.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n And the majority of respondents \u2013 69 percent \u2013 said they support continued military action in Lebanon, irrespective of talks between the Lebanese and Israeli governments that began in the US on Tuesday. Israel has continued to attack Lebanon, claiming it was excluded from the ceasefire, and killing more than 300 people in the past week in strikes that have led to widespread condemnation.<\/p>\n The expectation among many Israelis had been that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would finally make good on his promise to end what he has long framed as the existential threat from Iran. But the war Israel launched with the US on Iran on February 28 has, despite the death toll and spiralling economic cost, failed to deliver on that promise.<\/p>\n Instead, a two-week ceasefire has been negotiated, reportedly without Israel\u2019s involvement, and the Iranian state endures, battered but unbowed. Tehran\u2019s ballistic missile arsenal remains partly intact, and its strategic reach may even have widened, not least through its grip on the economically vital Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n \u201cHe [Netanyahu] did oversell how much the war could accomplish: regime collapse and completely destroying the nuclear program and ballistic missiles, which couldn\u2019t be accomplished,\u201d Dahlia Scheindlin, an American-Israeli political consultant, pollster, and journalist, who recently wrote about the various polls showing resistance to a ceasefire.<\/p>\n Much of the problem for the Israeli leader, she suggested, was his longstanding public opposition to negotiations with Iran, such as his resistance to previous agreements to limit its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief, of the kind that the US now appears to be considering.<\/p>\n \u201cFor many years and decades, [Netanyahu] had completely destroyed and delegitimised the idea that diplomacy and agreements \u2013 negotiated agreements \u2013 would have any impact,\u201d she said, referring to Netanyahu\u2019s previous characterisation of talks between the US and Iran as somehow posing an existential threat to Israel.<\/p>\n None of Israel\u2019s top political leaders has questioned its reasons for attacking Iran. Instead, opposition leaders, such as Yair Lapid, fell in behind Netanyahu. Lapid told reporters he supported a \u201cjust war against evil\u201d, doubting whether Iran could sustain a prolonged war against Israel and the US.<\/p>\n Needless to say, the US ceasefire has been seized upon by Lapid as an apparent capitulation on Netanyahu\u2019s part. \u201c[Netanyahu] has turned us into a protectorate state that receives instructions over the phone on matters pertaining to the core of our national security,\u201d Lapid wrote on social media after the ceasefire.<\/p>\n The left-wing Democrats leader Yair Golan was equally scathing. \u201cNetanyahu lied,\u201d he wrote. \u201cHe promised a \u2018historic victory\u2019 and security for generations, and in practice, we got one of the most severe strategic failures Israel has ever known.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNone of Netanyahu\u2019s critics and rivals questioned the narrative that Iran posed an existential threat,\u201c Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York, told Al Jazeera of the consensus across Israel\u2019s public and political sphere that Netanyahu, for the large part, had helped create.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is why they\u2019re disappointed and this is why they\u2019re beginning to blame Netanyahu,\u201d he said, citing the deadly attacks on Lebanon a day after the ceasefire as an attempt to both deflect attention from the US agreement while trying to curry public favour by being seen to strike the Lebanese armed group, Hezbollah.<\/p>\n However, how long that might placate the Israeli public remained to be seen, he said.<\/p>\n While many in Israel may chafe at the ceasefire, they have little choice but to follow the lead of the US and Trump.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, despite appearing to have fallen far short of his electorate\u2019s expectations and showing every appearance of having been diplomatically sidelined, Netanyahu has given public support to the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, claiming that the two sides \u201care in constant coordination\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe claims that there is a rift between us are completely false,\u201d he said on Monday. \u201cThe exact opposite is true. Anyone who was present in these conversations, and in the daily discussions we hold with the president and his team, can attest to that.\u201d<\/p>\n Irrespective of the reality of the relationship, Israel was unlikely to break with the US while it was leading negotiations with Iran, Mitchell Barak, a political pollster and Netanyahu aide from the 1990s said.<\/p>\n \u201cI really can\u2019t see Netanyahu attacking Iran without Trump\u2019s green light,\u201d he told Al Jazeera. \u201cIt\u2019s like I\u2019ve said before, Israel has no foreign policy. It handed it over to the US years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n As for any political embarrassment Netanyahu might experience as a result, Barak was dismissive. \u201cYou cannot humiliate Netanyahu. Trust me. It cannot be done. He is always convinced he has made the right decision at the right time.\u201d<\/p>\n However, while Netanyahu may be incapable of experiencing personal embarrassment as a result of setbacks with Iran, he was far from immune from political reversals, Pinkas warned.<\/p>\n \u201cA victory over Iran, and especially a victory that he had been seen as enlisting US support for, would have eclipsed the conversation over the events of October 7, which many people still associate him with,\u201d Pinkas said of the Hamas-led attack of that day, which killed 1,139 people and for which Netanyahu is still accused of avoiding responsibility for, before leading Israel\u2019s genocidal war on Gaza, killing more than 70,000 Palestinians.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously, things are unlikely to remain as they are, but as they stand \u2013 in the public mind \u2013 that\u2019s now two disasters Netanyahu will be associated with,\u201d Pinkas said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n An overwhelming number of Israelis oppose the US-Iran ceasefire deal declared last week, and anticipate a return to the war, a poll has found. The findings match observations by analysts, who say that Israeli political leaders promised a final showdown with Iran, only for the conflict to instead leave the Iranian government still standing. According […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18951,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
![\"Cargo](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2026-04-10T180925Z_911361556_RC2B2KAIXPPB_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-OIL-BALANCES-1776109228.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C515&quality=80\")
Not just Netanyahu<\/h2>\n
![\"Israeli](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/ap_69c624893ba31-1774593161.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513&quality=80\")
Constrained<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"