Iran's foreign minister said Tuesday that the deal meant to end the war already counts Israel in breach of it — before a single signature has been put to the page. "Without the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories they occupied during this war, the war has not fully come to an end," Abbas Araghchi said, calling Israel's continued occupation of southern Lebanon a violation of the still-unsigned memorandum. [1]

The trouble is that no one outside the negotiating rooms can read the clause being invoked. As the paper noted June 15, the agreement that moved markets without a public common text gives compliance arguments nothing to be measured against. A breach is being alleged against language that has not been published, on a deal that has not been signed, by a party — Iran — that is not the one accused. The enforcement mechanism, like the text, exists so far only as a description.

What is not in dispute is that the shooting has not stopped. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps accused Israel of violating the Lebanon ceasefire "84 times in the past two days" after Trump declared the war over, and warned of a "harsh response" if the strikes continued, according to Iran's Fars News Agency. [2] The Israeli military offered the mirror image: it said Hezbollah fired several rockets at Israeli troops operating in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, and that its air force struck and dismantled the launcher. [2] Each side enters the same hours into its own ledger as the other's crime.

The U.N. peacekeeping force has the only count that belongs to neither party, and it shows a war braking hard but not stopping. UNIFIL recorded 133 projectile trajectories and two airstrikes attributed to Israeli forces — and none from Hezbollah — between midnight and 4 p.m. Monday, along with 25 violations of Lebanese airspace. [3] Over the weekend before the deal was announced, the same force had logged 1,374 trajectories, 1,328 of them attributed to Israel, and 135 Israeli airspace violations. [3] A tenfold drop in a single afternoon is real de-escalation. It is also nowhere near the silence the word "ceasefire" implies, and it leaves both the breach claim and the counter-claim technically alive.

This is the divergence the deal's boosters would rather not see itemized. On X, the outlet Drop Site posted that "in the first 24 hours after the U.S.-Iran deal was formally announced, Israel has repeatedly violated the U.S.-backed Lebanon ceasefire." Israel's foreign ministry has run the opposite tally for weeks: "Hezbollah is violating the ceasefire again and again." Mainstream coverage, by contrast, has folded Lebanon into the deal story as its most fragile condition — the one Araghchi says is mandatory and the one Israel says it will not meet.

Israel has been plain about that. A U.S. official said the agreement does not call for an Israeli withdrawal, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that his forces would remain in Lebanon "as long as necessary." [1] Defense Minister Israel Katz has vowed the military will keep operating there regardless of any understanding reached with Tehran. [4] Israel's ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, told NPR that the apparent inclusion of Lebanon in a US-Iran deal was "unnecessary and unhelpful." [1] Two regional officials with knowledge of the interim terms told the AP the accord would in fact require Israel to leave nearly all the territory it holds, minus a few hilltop positions — exactly the demand Israel is rejecting. [1]

Even Trump, whose announcement set the clock running, has turned on his ally's conduct. "I'm not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah," he told reporters Tuesday. "It just goes on forever." Israeli strikes in Lebanon have killed nearly 4,000 people, including hundreds of civilians, and displaced more than a million, by the AP's count. [1] The Lebanese Health Ministry has reported more than 3,400 killed since fighting escalated in early March, a toll that has climbed through two extensions of an April 16 ceasefire that never held on the ground. [4] On Sunday, as the deal was being readied, Hezbollah sent drones into northern Israel and Israel answered with a deadly strike on Beirut's southern suburbs — an exchange Trump himself called out as something that "should not have happened" hours before he announced the agreement. [5]

The Lebanon clause, then, is the part of the deal already being tested in the field, and it is failing the test in two directions at once. Iran says the war is not over until Israel leaves. Israel says it is not leaving. Trump says Israel is fighting too long. And the document that is supposed to reconcile them remains exactly where it was on Sunday: unread, unsigned, and quoted by everyone.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem