A two-week ceasefire between the United States, Israel, and Iran took effect Tuesday, ending 39 days of war. The "Islamabad Accords," brokered by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief General Asim Munir, are already fraying.
Missile attacks hit the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait within hours. The Strait of Hormuz is reopening under terms that let Iran and Oman collect transit fees. Negotiations begin Friday. Nothing is settled.
The instinct right now is to focus on what went wrong. That instinct should be resisted long enough to reckon with what this campaign accomplished – but not so long that we mistake a successful military operation for a resolved strategic problem.
Former supreme leader Ali Khamenei is dead. The man who directed Iran’s regional aggression for 35 years was killed on February 28 in a precision Israeli airstrike, along with dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) senior commanders.
Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure has been set back to a degree Israeli defense planners would have called fantasy in 2024. Its air defenses failed to prevent sustained strikes over five weeks. Its navy in the Gulf of Oman is wrecked. Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA) has confirmed at least 1,221 military dead. Iran International places the toll at 4,700.
The nuclear program has been struck in two consecutive campaigns. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that highly enriched uranium stored underground survived 2025. Much of that capacity has been hit.
Iran is further from a weapon than at any point since it began enrichment. The proxy network is gone. Hezbollah’s senior leadership has been systematically eliminated. Hamas no longer functions militarily. The Houthis stayed out entirely. Iran spent four decades building a system that let it wage war without its own flag on the battlefield. It no longer exists.
Netanyahu claims victory in televised address
In a televised address Wednesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed the campaign as a vindication: “We shook the foundations of the regime. We crushed their missile manufacturing plants. The Iranians are firing what’s left in their magazine. It’s running out.”
He confirmed that Israel had destroyed centrifuge plants and eliminated additional nuclear scientists, and insisted the ceasefire does not cover Lebanon, calling the ongoing strikes there “the hardest blow, perhaps since the pagers.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed the confidence: “This is a victory for the United States that President Trump and our incredible military made happen.”
Those are fair assessments of the military outcome. The trouble is that wars are not graded on military outcomes alone.
President Donald Trump authorized the February 28 strike when Washington’s foreign policy establishment argued against it. His maximum pressure sanctions had hollowed out Iran’s economy. His deadline brinkmanship produced the ceasefire. Israel should acknowledge this partnership clearly.
But the regime survived. Mojtaba Khamenei inherited power through a dynastic succession that the revolution was supposed to reject, and the IRGC pledged its loyalty within days. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council declared “nearly all the objectives of the war” achieved. By any military measure, that is absurd. As propaganda for a battered domestic audience, it may be enough.
The Hormuz crisis is the sharpest concern. Iran discovered that closing a fifth of global oil supply gives it leverage that no airstrike can destroy. The ceasefire’s shipping fee arrangement risks institutionalizing that leverage. If the Islamabad negotiations allow Iran to convert wartime coercion into a permanent revenue stream, much of what the military campaign achieved will be undermined.
HRANA’s documentation of 1,665 civilian dead, a significant number of them children, will shape international opinion for years. The images from Minab, from the B1 bridge, from the Rafi Niya synagogue will not fade quickly. Israel cannot afford to ignore the weight of that narrative, even while rejecting the conclusions its critics draw from it.
The balance sheet tilts in Israel’s favor. That is true. Iran’s ability to threaten this country has diminished over the years. But Netanyahu’s own words Wednesday night suggest the government understands this is unfinished: “There are more objectives to complete, and we will achieve them, either by agreement or by resuming fighting. Our finger is on the trigger.”
The war gave Israel an opening it has not had in a generation. Whether it amounts to anything lasting depends entirely on what comes next.