JERUSALEM, Israel – War and peace are colliding in the Middle East. As the fighting intensifies, President Trump has said a deal with Iran may be within reach.
Israel continues to strike inside Iran, while the Tehran regime and Hezbollah in Lebanon fire back. One Israeli woman died on Tuesday night in the Galilee region, killed in a Hezbollah rocket attack.
Defense Minister Israel Katz has announced that the Israel Defense Forces will maintain a security zone in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah’s threat is removed.
Yet, as the war rages on, President Trump insists that peace talks with Iran are underway.
“They’d like to make a deal,” Trump stated, and who wouldn’t, if you were there?”
The president announced that a team of top officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, is leading the effort and pushing for a possible peace summit in Islamabad, Pakistan, according to The Times of Israel.
Reports indicate that the U.S. has delivered a 15-point proposal targeting Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump told reporters that Iran has offered what he calls a “present,” which he wouldn’t elaborate on.
“And the present arrived today,” he said. “It was a very big present, worth a tremendous amount of money. So that meant one thing to me: we’re dealing with the right people.”
When a reporter asked, “Was it related to the Strait of Hormuz and the flow of oil?” Trump responded, “Yeah, it was related to the flow and the Strait.”
In return, The Wall Street Journal reports that Iran wants immediate closure of all American bases in the Persian Gulf, the end of Israeli attacks, removal of all sanctions, and compensation for war damages.
A U.S. official called those demands “ridiculous.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared, “We negotiate with bombs. We are keeping our hand on that throttle as long and as hard as necessary to ensure the interests of the U.S.A. are achieved on the battlefield.”
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The Pentagon is now moving as many as 3,000 additional troops from the 82nd Airborne into the region as the war now spreads to northern Iraq. CBN News International Correspondent George Thomas reported from northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region:
“Early Tuesday morning, six Iranian ballistic missiles hit two Peshmerga positions about an hour and a half north of here. Six Kurdish fighters were killed, and more than 30 others were wounded. The U.S. is calling it an outrageous attack, accusing Iran and its militia proxies in Iraq of wreaking havoc across the region.”
From the battlefield to the backchannels, many have argued that long-term peace with Iran can’t take place without regime change. Trump contends that it’s happening.
“We have, really, regime change. You know, this is a change in the regime because the leaders are all very different than the ones that we started off with, that created all those problems,” Trump asserted.
While Israeli officials are doubtful that the peace effort will bear fruit, Gulf States are said to be alarmed at the prospect of a deal. The leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates reportedly are privately urging President Trump to continue the war until Iran is no longer a threat to the region.
