Israel must stop spoiling peace

June 20, 2026

The cancelled talks in Switzerland this week are bad news. The United States and Iran were supposed to sit down and build on a fragile ceasefire deal. Instead, the meeting was called off, and Vice President JD Vance scrapped his trip too. This is a setback for a region that badly needs calm. Here is the simple problem: every time the US and Iran make progress, fighting somewhere else in the Middle East threatens to wreck it. Right now, that “somewhere else” is Lebanon, where Israel continues military operations against Hezbollah. Iran has made clear it sees this fighting as connected to the wider deal. If Israel keeps striking Lebanon, it becomes very hard for Iran to trust that the ceasefire framework is being respected at all. This is the part worth saying plainly: Israel’s continued operations in Lebanon are doing real damage to a peace process that the whole region depends on. A regional ceasefire was supposed to come alongside the US-Iran agreement. Instead, the fighting in Lebanon keeps going, and it is undermining the trust both sides need to sit at the same table.

The United States signed this agreement. It has leverage over Israel, a close ally that depends heavily on American support. If Washington is serious about ending this war, it should use that leverage now, firmly, to press Israel to stop military action in Lebanon and give the broader ceasefire a real chance to hold. Soft statements about “complex diplomacy” are not enough when actual fighting is happening on the ground. There is good news worth highlighting too. Pakistan has played a central and often underappreciated role in getting the US and Iran to the table in the first place. Pakistan helped mediate the original ceasefire and hosted the first round of talks in Islamabad, despite the difficulty of dealing with a war right next door. Pakistan’s leadership became seen as a serious and trusted mediator between Washington and Tehran at a moment when few expected it to take on that role. That quiet, persistent diplomacy deserves real credit. Still, with 60 days on the clock to reach a fuller deal, every side needs to show restraint. The ceasefire is fragile. One more round of fighting in Lebanon could be enough to break it for good.