Yair Lapid on Monday told reporters that the deal being discussed between the United States and Iran fails to achieve any of Israel’s goals for the war and called the emerging terms "disturbing."
Lapid said the details of the emerging deal are alarming and offered a blunt verdict: "The deal is bad for Israel, bad for the region, bad for the citizens of Iran." He repeated that the arrangement under discussion would not deliver on what he described as Israel’s objectives since the campaign began.
The campaign Lapid referenced began on Feb. 28, when Israel and the United States launched the war with stated aims to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile program, end Tehran’s support for proxy militant groups across the region, and end Iran’s ability to pursue a nuclear bomb. Lapid, who is part of an alliance attempting to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in elections this year, explicitly criticized the government’s handling of the talks and framed the deal as politically and strategically insufficient.
Regional officials involved in the discussions say the current deal on the table would have Iran give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, reopen the strategic Strait of Hormuz, end a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and lift sanctions against Tehran. Those officials also say key details on Iran’s nuclear program would then be negotiated under the current deal being discussed.
That sequence — immediate concessions followed by further negotiations on nuclear details — is the friction point at the center of Lapid’s critique. On paper, the package being discussed includes substantial moves: removing a source of confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz and easing economic pressure by ending a blockade and lifting sanctions. Yet Lapid said those concessions still fall short of the three war goals Israel and the United States pledged to pursue when they opened the campaign on Feb. 28.
The contrast is sharper because both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, earlier this year, said they hoped to create conditions to topple Iran’s government. Lapid’s warning that the deal is "bad for Israel" frames the emerging agreement as not only diplomatically inadequate but also as a potential failure to translate battlefield objectives into durable security outcomes.
The political implications are immediate. Lapid’s alliance is contesting Netanyahu’s hold on power in elections this year, and his denunciation of the deal doubles as a direct indictment of the prime minister’s direction on the war and negotiations. By declaring the deal unacceptable, Lapid is sharpening a campaign argument: that current diplomacy will not deliver the core aims announced when the war began.
There is, in the details disclosed by regional officials, an awkward inconsistency: the deal being discussed would secure steps that appear to advance several stated objectives, yet it would also defer crucial nuclear questions to later bargaining. Lapid seized on that gap, calling the deferral "disturbing," and saying the package as discussed fails to achieve Israel’s goals for the campaign launched on Feb. 28.
What happens next is likely to hinge on whether Israeli political leaders and the negotiating partners in Washington and the region accept the staged approach regional officials describe, or whether opponents like Lapid can turn the deal’s sequencing into a decisive political issue ahead of elections this year. Lapid’s public rejection makes clear he intends to make that argument central to his alliance’s campaign against Netanyahu.
