Israel has launched new waves of strikes in Tehran, targeting infrastructure linked to Iran’s government and military. Israel is still killing Iranian leadership during the talks.

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The Israeli military said it had launched a new wave of strikes on Tehran, after Donald Trump signalled a pause in US attacks against energy infrastructure after what he said were productive talks with Iran.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said it would continue operations in line with Israeli government directives until told otherwise.

About 40 minutes after Trump said he had extended by five days his deadline to strike Iran’s power plants, describing talks with Tehran as “productive”, the IDF said on X it had “just begun another wave of strikes targeting infrastructure of the Iranian terror regime across Tehran”.

The IDF told the Guardian that energy infrastructure would be spared, suggesting Israel may follow Washington in suspending any targeting of Iranian power plants and related sites.

An IDF official told the Times of Israel that the military could not comment on the US president’s announcement of negotiations with Iran, saying it was a “political echelon matter”, and stating the IDF was ‘‘operating in accordance with the directives of Israel’s political leadership and will continue to strike in Iran according to its plans until instructed otherwise”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/23/israel-launches-new-strikes-on-tehran-as-trump-pauses-iran-energy-attacks

The new ceasefire framework that reached the US and Iran overnight will not survive Tuesday. Every structural piece of it breaks on contact with the ground truth.

The Islamabad Accord does not actually reopen Hormuz. Mediators told Axios a full reopening of the Strait is not on the table until the final deal is inked, 15-20 days out.

Reuters reported “immediate ceasefire and Hormuz reopening” as the phase-one terms. Those two facts cannot both be true.

Trump’s entire deadline posture assumes the Strait opens immediately. Without that, he has nothing to sell on Tuesday and no reason to accept the accord in the first place.

The two sides are not negotiating the same war. The US wants Iran to weaken its ballistic missile program and end nuclear enrichment.

Iran wants reparations, US base closures, full sanctions relief, and a legal guarantee against future US-Israeli attacks.

There is no version of this deal both sides can sign.

Iran does not trust paper. Iranian officials told mediators they will not be “caught in a Gaza or Lebanon situation where there is a ceasefire on paper, but the US and Israel can attack again whenever they want to,” per Axios.

The accord offers no enforcement mechanism. None can be built in 48 hours. Iran is being asked to accept what it has publicly said it will not accept.

The US has its own reason to sign paper it cannot enforce, and the F-15 rescue is where that reason shows. The operation set up a forward arming and refueling point deep inside Iran, the kind of base built for sustained ground operations.

The mission was flown by 160th SOAR Night Stalkers, the same tier-one regiment that ran the Bin Laden raid and the 1980 Iran hostage rescue attempt.

Hundreds of special operations personnel were involved. Dozens of aircraft. Seven hours over Iran for the first rescue alone. Two MC-130Js and four MH-6 Little Birds were destroyed on the ground to prevent capture.

Fortune wrote that FARPs would likely come into play again for “a potential operation to retrieve Iran’s highly enriched uranium.”

The most valuable thing to seize inside Iran right now is the 60% enriched uranium stockpile. If the weekend operation was a failed attempt, the accord is landing on top of a failed US ground operation. That would explain the urgency on the US side.

Israel is still killing Iranian leadership during the talks. The IRGC intelligence chief was assassinated this morning. Katz vowed to hunt Iran’s leaders “one by one.”

Iran threatened to destroy OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Dubai. Bushehr was struck for the fourth time on April 4.

The accord exists because both sides need the paper trail before Tuesday. Neither side wants to sign it.