The billowing smoke from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on Sunday should have told the world everything it needs to know about Iran’s appetite for Middle East peace. Days after the regime scrapped plans for a fourth round of U.S. nuclear talks, people were running for cover from a Yemen-launched missile strike that exploded dangerously close to passengers at an international terminal. It was a gutsy move from the Iran-backed Houthis, who are about to reap the outrage of an incensed Israeli cabinet. “Anyone who hits us,” the country’s defense minister warned, “we will hit them seven times stronger.”

The weekend attack will almost certainly throw a wrench into the Trump administration’s next steps. While the Houthis have tried to bombard Israel for the last several weeks, Sunday’s offensive was the first one to cause multiple injuries. And as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reminded the world, the president doesn’t take kindly to Iran’s proxies provoking the Jewish state.

“Let nobody be fooled!” Trump cautioned in a March post that Bibi recirculated Sunday, “The hundreds of attacks being made by the Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemini people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN. Any further attack or retaliation by the ‘Houthis’ will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee the force will stop there.’”

Iran, the president wanted people to know, “has played ‘the innocent victim’ of rogue terrorists from which they’ve lost control, but they haven’t lost control. They’re dictating every move, giving them weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated Military equipment. … Every shot fired by the Houthis,” the U.S. leader reiterated, “will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired by weapons and leadership of IRAN.” And that regime, he emphasized, “will be held responsible, suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!”

On Monday, the Israeli Air Force and U.S. forces started to make good on that promise — bombing more than a dozen sites in Yemen by nightfall. “A total of 50 munitions were dropped. We destroyed Hudaydah Port and facilities used to manufacture arms,” an Israeli official said. “This was a very powerful strike — and it will not be the last. The era of restraint is over.”

Before the Tel Aviv attack, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had drawn a bright red line on what the U.S. could do in Iran if they insisted on poking the bear. “We see your LETHAL support to The Houthis. We know exactly what you are doing,” he posted Wednesday on X. “You know very well what the U.S. Military is capable of — and you were warned.”

Barely 48 hours earlier, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, who’d led a delegation of Christian leaders to Israel, sat down with CBN’s Chris Mitchell in Jerusalem to talk about the country’s mood about Iran. Not surprisingly, they’re frustrated by the on-and-off again talks between Trump’s team and Iranian leaders. There’s a lot of “consternation,” Mitchell agreed. “There seems to be some momentum to actually [move forward with] a military strike on Iran’s nuclear programs,” especially, he pointed out, as more American bombers moved into the Indian Ocean.

Most people in the Jewish state presumed that an operation against Iran was imminent. “Then the negotiations come in, and the thinking is, ‘Well, what’s happening here? First of all, the negotiations were like, ‘Oh, we’ll limit their enriched uranium.’ And a lot of people here think, ‘Well, wait, we did that in the 2015 [Iran nuclear deal]. And why are we actually talking about enriching uranium and reducing the amount they have? Why aren’t we talking about eliminating the entire program?’”

And yet, as Mitchell pointed out, there’s a lot more trust in the Trump administration than its predecessor. So if the president thinks he should at least make an effort at diplomacy, they understand that. “He’s not a warmonger. He likes to end wars, not start wars.” The Israelis have been giving American leaders the benefit of the doubt, hoping maybe Iran would actually cave to pressure and “pull back.”

But there’s also a very real concern that “Iran seems to be getting closer and closer to a nuclear device,” Mitchell explained. “And a lot of people here are saying, ‘Well, this is Iran’s method of operation. This is their M.O. They like to stall. They like to keep talking. … And so the fear here is that they’re going to extend the talks, while, on the other hand, trying to get as close as they can to a nuclear weapon.”

That concern was echoed by the new U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee. In a wide-ranging conversation with the former governor on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill,” Perkins wondered if the world could trust Iran. “Are they reasonable people?” he asked Huckabee in his second interview at the embassy. Absolutely not, the new ambassador replied.

“To be blunt, they never have been in [the] 46 years they’ve been under the rule of the ayatollahs. And they’ve been very adamant that their goal is to destroy Israel and then to destroy the United States. When they’ve said something like that for 46 years … we’re looking at a nation that has a long history of doing everything that it says it’s going to do.” Of course, he added, “Are they at a point where they’ve been downgraded in their military capacity because of the Israeli strikes that happened last year? We don’t know. So the honest answer, when people say, ‘Do you have any hope that this will result in some type of negotiated peace settlement with the Iranian government?’ All I can do is say, I hope so, because I’d rather see that than war.”

Anyone who’s studied the regime’s history, Huckabee says, wouldn’t be “overly optimistic that they’re just eager to sit down and that they would make a deal,” the Arkansas native warned. “And if they made it, would they keep it? But let’s hope and pray that they do. There is a lot at stake if something doesn’t happen. The president has been adamant that they’re not going to get nuclear weapons. They’re adamant they are. That’s a stalemate. … And I think … President Trump wanted us to know he’s not kidding.”

At the end of the day, the ambassador insisted, “They’re not going to get nuclear weapons. So the question is, do they realize that?” he wondered. “Do they risk the control of their regime just for the pride of saying they’re going to push forward with something that they’ve been told by everyone in the region they’re never going to have?” And frankly, Huckabee reiterated, “even their Muslim neighbors don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon any more than you would want a 16-year-old boy to have keys to a Lamborghini and a bottle of whiskey. You just don’t give irresponsible people things that they can’t be responsible with.”