President Donald Trump unleashed an expletive-filled tirade against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, accusing him of jeopardising a landmark peace deal with Iran just an hour before it was due to be signed. The outburst, confirmed in a call to Axios and echoed across social media, followed an Israeli air raid on Hezbollah targets in Beirut that Trump said “should never have happened” and which he claimed delayed the signing by several hours. “I couldn’t believe it. An hour before we are supposed to sign the deal,” Trump fumed, adding that Netanyahu had “no judgement” and had launched a “f*****g attack” that nearly collapsed the diplomatic endgame. Despite the fury, the US president insisted the agreement was back on track and would be finalised on Sunday, his 80th birthday.

Viewed from Washington, the deal represents an attempt to close a devastating chapter that began in late February, when coordinated American and Israeli strikes on Iran triggered a wider Middle Eastern war. The memorandum of understanding, now described by Trump as “complete”, aims to halt direct hostilities between the US and Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil chokepoint whose closure has rattled global energy markets. Yet from Tehran’s perspective, the terms remain entangled with the parallel conflict in Lebanon. Iranian officials have long demanded that any ceasefire must encompass Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy force. The Beirut strike, therefore, struck at both a military ally and a core diplomatic condition, leaving the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry to state flatly that the signing would “not be tomorrow”.

The dissonance between Trump’s triumphalism and Iran’s caution underscores the fragility of the process. In a further complicating remark, Trump declared that the United States would seek to locate and destroy “the nuclear dust” in Iran—an opaque phrase that analysts in London interpret as a reference to residual nuclear materials or clandestine facilities, and one that risks being read in Tehran as a threat to renege on the deal’s spirit. The Israeli strike itself, launched on the day of the anticipated signing, is seen by many regional observers as a deliberate spoiler, reflecting Netanyahu’s deep-seated opposition to any agreement that might legitimise Iran’s regional role or leave Hezbollah’s arsenal intact.

Whether the accord can survive this eleventh-hour shock depends on the coming hours and the willingness of all parties to compartmentalise the Lebanon front. Trump’s personal rage at Netanyahu, while theatrically raw, does not necessarily signal a structural shift in the US-Israeli alliance, but it lays bare the growing divergence between an American president eager for a legacy-defining peace and an Israeli premier determined to maintain military latitude. For global markets and a war-weary region, the Strait of Hormuz’s promised reopening offers a tangible prize, yet the path to a durable settlement remains strewn with the debris of a single, ill-timed airstrike.