Eli Cohen Says No — Israeli Minister Floats Open-Ended Occupation of South Lebanon and the Whole of Gaza Strip

On the evening of 25 June 2026, Israel's Minister of Energy Eli Cohen told the country's Channel 14 that there is no plan to withdraw from the strip of south Lebanon Israeli forces have occupied since the autumn 2024 escalation, and that the cabinet intends to push security control across the whole of the Gaza Strip. The remarks, circulated in the same hour by Iranian-state outlets Tasnim and the Telegram channel Clash Report, amount to the clearest statement yet from a sitting Israeli minister that the country's current frontier posture — five occupied points along the Litani, and a grinding ground operation across Gaza — is the intended steady state rather than a transitional arrangement to be wound down under American pressure.

The statement lands at a moment when the diplomatic calendar is unusually crowded. A ceasefire architecture negotiated through 2025 has held in patchy form; hostage negotiations are stuck; and the United States, by every public reading of the bilateral relationship, would prefer that Israel consolidate its current positions and stop. Cohen's insistence, broadcast to an Israeli audience in Hebrew, that Israel will tell even a sitting US president "No" if asked to leave the Lebanese buffer, is therefore less an aside than a marker of how wide the gap between Washington and Jerusalem has become on the question of what a permanent settlement looks like.

What Cohen actually said, and where

The core of the interview, as relayed by Tasnim English and by the Telegram channel Clash Report from the Channel 14 broadcast, is a pair of claims and a rhetorical flourish. On Lebanon, Cohen was asked whether Israel intends to leave the points it has occupied since late 2024. His answer, per the Telegram reproduction: "We have no intention to completely withdraw from Lebanon"; the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the so-called security zone, he added, is "not on the agenda" — and, in language that has drawn particular attention, "Even if Trump asks us to withdraw, we'll tell him, 'No.'"

On Gaza, Cohen was if anything more categorical. Per Clash Report's summary of the same interview, Israel has "no intention of taking over the entirety of Lebanon," but "in Gaza we will establish security control over 100% of the Gaza Strip," and in the end Israel will have "full" control of the territory. The juxtaposition is deliberate and political: the minister is drawing a bright line between the two fronts — the Lebanese buffer as a permanent forward position, Gaza as a re-occupation in slow motion — at a moment when Israeli officials more usually insist they do not intend to reoccupy Gaza or run its civilian life.

The interview aired on Channel 14, the Israeli public-affairs broadcaster owned by the pro-Netanyahu Adelson family and associated with the right flank of the governing coalition. The choice of venue matters: statements made on Channel 14 travel inside the Israeli coalition as signals to the prime minister's base, and they tend to harden policy positions rather than triangulate them. That is the audience Cohen was performing for, and the words were chosen accordingly.

How it squares with the stated Israeli position

The official Israeli government line, repeated through 2025 and into 2026 by the prime minister's office and the IDF spokesperson, is more hedged. It runs roughly: Israel retains operational freedom of action inside southern Lebanon to degrade Hezbollah's rebuilt rocket and drone infrastructure; in Gaza, Israel will maintain "overall security responsibility" until a demilitarised Palestinian civil authority acceptable to Jerusalem is in place, after which Israeli forces will redeploy rather than reoccupy. The phrase used in communiqués after the November 2024 ceasefire is "buffer zone" for Lebanon and "security perimeter" for Gaza — both carefully chosen to avoid the legal language of occupation.

Cohen's interview collides with that formulation. If Israel is to maintain security control over 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, including the areas Palestinians nominally administer under the Oslo-derived framework, then the announced plan to hand the strip to a non-Hamas Palestinian technocratic body becomes harder to execute, not easier. And if a withdrawal from the Lebanese points is "not on the agenda" regardless of what Washington asks, the bilateral understanding that produced the November 2024 arrangement — Israeli withdrawal in exchange for a US-brokered enforcement mechanism against Hezbollah reconstitution — looks more like a temporary pause than a settlement.

The tension is real but not new. Cabinet ministers from the governing coalition have repeatedly outflank their own prime minister's diplomacy on Lebanese and Gazan questions, in part because the same coalition has both the security hawks who want to hold the territory and the diplomatic partners in Washington who want it traded for a longer peace. Cohen's intervention, on this reading, is the security-hawk end of that internal debate pushing back into the open.

Why it is being amplified from Tehran-aligned channels

The other notable fact about the story is the speed and shape of its circulation. Within roughly forty minutes of the interview airing in Hebrew, Tasnim — the Iranian state-affiliated news agency — had pushed an English-language summary; within ninety minutes, two separate Telegram accounts (JahanTasnim and ClashReport) had run near-identical reproductions. The packaging in all three — "the Israeli regime," "the energy minister of the Israeli regime," "the security zone in Lebanon" — follows a template Iranian-aligned outlets use to strip Israeli official language of its diplomatic dressing and present statements as admissions of expansionist intent.

That packaging is a frame, not a falsification. The quotes are real; the interview is real; the choice of channel and the wording of the chyron are a separate question. But the speed of the relay matters for an honest reading: when an Israeli minister says something confrontational on Channel 14, the Iranian information apparatus is often the first to put an English version in front of a Middle East–wide audience, and the western wires follow on a delay. By the time a Reuters or AFP bulletin catches up, the framing has already been set by Tasnim and its Telegram mirror accounts. That is itself part of the story.

It is also worth saying that the alternative reading — that Cohen was performing for his domestic audience in language that does not bind the cabinet — has a basis. Israeli ministers on Channel 14 routinely go further than the prime minister's official line precisely because they are not the negotiator. The fact that this performance was broadcast and then picked up from Tehran rather than Jerusalem suggests that the channels of Israeli-to-world communication have narrowed in ways the Israeli government would not have chosen.

What it changes, and what it does not

The practical consequences depend on which level of analysis one cares about. Tactically, nothing changes overnight. The IDF ground posture in south Lebanon has been stable since late 2024; the ground operation in Gaza has been stable in its broad outlines since the spring of 2025; no Israeli unit moves because a minister says something on a talk show. Strategically, the statement is more consequential, because it raises the cost for Washington of continuing to present the current arrangement as a transitional one. If a senior Israeli minister says on the record that withdrawal is off the table, the US cannot credibly keep selling the policy to its Gulf and European partners as a temporary holding pattern.

The deeper pattern this sits inside is the slow-motion collapse of the distinction between "security operation" and "occupation" in the public language of Israeli politics. Inside Israel, the diplomatic euphemism has long been load-bearing — it allows the same government to claim both that it does not want to run Gaza and that it will not let a hostile force re-arm there. Cohen's remarks make that trick harder to pull off in English. For Lebanon, the same collapse has been visible for eighteen months: the points held along the Litani are not described as a "zone of operations" in the US State Department's daily briefings the way they are in the prime minister's office communiqués. The gap is widening, and Cohen has put it on television.

The counter-read is that this is exactly the language a coalition partner uses when he wants the cabinet to redraw the line in his direction. Israeli ministers often say the maximalist thing publicly and accept something more constrained privately; the leak-and-retract cycle is part of how coalition policy is built. A reader who wants to bet on the next twelve months should look less at the Channel 14 interview and more at what the IDF does with the points it is sitting on, and at what, if anything, Washington does in response. Cohen was emphatic that Trump will be told "No." What matters is whether the prime minister's office endorses that line in writing, and whether the Pentagon continues to fly the logistics that make the position sustainable.

Stakes and what to watch

If Cohen's line becomes the operative Israeli policy, three things follow. First, the November 2024 Lebanese ceasefire architecture erodes by attrition; the Iranian-aligned axis in south Lebanon has a permanent grievance to organise around, and the Lebanese army — the entity the ceasefire was built around — will struggle to assert itself in the buffer. Second, the US–Israel relationship becomes harder to manage inside the White House, because the cost of underwriting the position in Lebanon and Gaza is no longer plausibly framed as temporary; every resupply and every diplomatic cover story starts to look like complicity in a long occupation rather than support for a transition. Third, the Palestinian Authority, already weakened, finds the diplomatic ground shifting under its feet: a permanent Israeli security control over 100 percent of the Gaza Strip rules out the territorial preconditions for the two-state language Washington still uses in formal settings.

What the sources do not establish, and what remains genuinely uncertain, is whether Cohen is speaking for the cabinet or past it. The interview aired on a friendly channel; the prime minister's office has not, as of the available reporting, endorsed or repudiated the remarks. Until it does, the responsible reading is that the line on the Lebanese buffer is hardening inside the coalition, and that the Gaza line — "100 percent security control" — is at the outer edge of where the same coalition is willing to go publicly. Either reading carries significant consequences for the region's next quarter. A reader who is watching the Pentagon's logistics, the IDF's force posture, and the prime minister's office's silence will be in a better position than one who is watching Channel 14.

Desk note: Monexus treated the Channel 14 remarks as a primary statement, not as Tasnim's framing of them; the Tasnim and Clash Report summaries are cited for the text of the broadcast, with the Iranian-state packaging noted but not allowed to set the analysis.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/tasnimnews_en
• https://t.me/JahanTasnim
• https://t.me/ClashReport
• https://t.me/ClashReport