ISRAEL’S murderous escalation of its war on Lebanon threatens to scupper the wider ceasefire between Iran and the United States. No doubt it is meant to.

Wednesday’s intense bombing of residential areas in Beirut and other cities killed at least 253 people. Such a sudden and arbitrary killing spree reflects Tel Aviv’s rage at the US having concluded a truce with Iran.

Israel was issuing more evacuation orders to densely populated areas today, prefiguring renewed bombing.

Now all is confusion. Israel and the US say Lebanon was never included in the ceasefire. Not just Iran but Pakistan, which helped broker it, say it definitely was. US Vice-President JD Vance calls this a “legitimate misunderstanding,” signalling that Washington is reluctant either to rein Israel in or tear up its Iran deal by suggesting the renewed closure of the Strait of Hormuz — announced by Iran in response to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon — is a bad-faith move.

The anti-war left needs clarity on these matters.

It is not true to hold, as sections of Donald Trump’s Maga movement do, that Israel is responsible for the US war on Iran.

Attacking Iran fits into a wider pattern of aggression: sending the US military back into the Panama Canal, bombing Venezuela and kidnapping its president, cutting off energy from Cuba in a bid to force regime change. Iran is a major oil producer, like Venezuela; its 1979 revolution was a humiliation for the United States, like Cuba’s in 1959.

Trump is obsessed with control of other countries’ natural resources and vainglorious enough to want to go down in history as the US leader who reversed these historic setbacks — his language on Cuba (where he said he would have the “honour” of “taking” the island) indicates this.

Then there is the wider picture of the rise of China, and using brute force to smash countries that co-operate with it and frighten others into continued subservience.

Even his indifference to crafting narratives about humanitarian intervention or imminent threats, as were used to justify past US wars, serves an ideological purpose in rehabilitating the might-is-right empire politics lauded by his Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Munich and his War Secretary Pete Hegseth in embarrassing daily briefings.

So Trump had his own reasons to start the war. It does not follow that they were the same as Israel’s reasons — hence the current divergence.

The pattern of Israel’s war in Lebanon in particular echoes its genocide in Gaza.

Intense bombing of civilians. Sweeping orders to residents to evacuate whole regions, with new no-go areas regularly added. Demolition of infrastructure and housing.

Israel’s Defence Minister says residents of Lebanon who lived south of the Litani river (about 300,000 people) will never be allowed to return. Its Finance Minister says the country’s borders will not be the same at the end of the war as they were at the start.

Israel has used permanent war in the Middle East to accelerate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and its own territorial expansion. That appears to be the aim in Lebanon too.

A balkanised (broken into smaller states like the former Yugoslavia), or rubble-strewn, failed-state Iran akin to Iraq or Libya, could no longer aid resistance groups in Palestine or Lebanon, while war for its own sake provides a context for Israel’s regional aggrandisement.

The United States has realised its war aims in Iran are unlikely to be achieved; Israel thinks differently. It will keep this war going unless it is starved of the resources to do so.

So, while it is welcome that Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper says Lebanon must be included in the ceasefire, we still need action not words from Britain. Stop all military co-operation with Israel, stop the arms sales, and stop US and Israeli use of our bases.

The war isn’t over.