New Delhi, Aug. 8 -- The shells landed while negotiators were still reviewing their notes. Overnight on August 8, Israeli forces resumed strikes on southern Lebanon within hours of the seventh round of ceasefire talks concluding without agreement, a pattern so consistent across the past two years that diplomats no longer treat it as a breakdown but as deliberate policy.

with artillery.

The question that has quietly consumed Washington, Tehran, and every chancellery between them is no longer whether Israel will strike during a diplomatic pause (it will), but whether any outside power, including the United States, retains the leverage to stop it. The answer, accumulating across incident after incident, is increasingly no.

The Iran-Israel...