All of the UK media is focused on US President Donald Trump’s decision last night to withdraw the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran.

BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme interviewed UK Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt, who said that the Iran nuclear agreement was the product of 13 years of diplomacy and that the UK would be launching an intense diplomatic effort to save it. The programme also interviewed Sadegh Zibakalam, professor at Tehran University, who said the US withdrawal was a “huge victory” for the hardliners in Iran.

BBC News Online and the Telegraph report that the European signatories of the deal, the UK, France and Germany, will remain in the agreement and attempt to prevent its collapse without the US. BBC Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent Jonathan Marcus said Trump “has put US diplomacy on a collision course with some of Washington’s closest allies. And some fear that he may have brought a new and catastrophic regional war in the Middle East that much closer”. Guardian Diplomatic Editor Patrick Wintour wrote an opinion piece on how the US withdrawal from the deal may colour the UK, France and Germany’s diplomatic relations with the US.

The Independent reports Iranian MPs have set fire to a US flag and chanted “death to America” during a session of parliament in reaction to Trump’s decision. The Independent also reports that former US President Barak Obama, who signed the nuclear agreement in his second term, called Trump’s decision “so misguided” and a “serious mistake”. Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent for the Independent Kim Sengupta wrote an opinion piece contrasting the long and painstaking process of negotiations to create the agreement with the brevity of Trump’s “statement of 12 minutes” to withdraw the US from the agreement, which Sengupta called “a mixture of bombast, threats and lies”.

The Guardian reports that Iran has vowed to remain committed to the Iran nuclear agreement despite the US withdrawal. The Times reports on the reasoning behind Trump’s decision, calling it “the biggest foreign policy gamble of his presidency”. The report says that the decision was aimed at bringing Iran back to the negotiating table. Also in the Times, Middle East Correspondent Richard Spencer reports that Iran is “ready to start enriching [uranium] in weeks,” unless talks with the EU, Russia and China can guarantee trade will continue as it was before the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement. The Times Diplomatic Correspondent Catherine Philp wrote an opinion piece, in which she calls the withdrawal a victory for the “implacable Iran hawks” in the US administration, namely Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton.

The Guardian reports that Trump’s decision has damaged the prospects of freedom for American dual national prisoners held by Tehran.

BBC News Online, the Times and Telegraph report that Israel launched a strike on Syria last night after detecting troop movements Israeli intelligence believed to have been preparing for launching missiles against Israel. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that Israeli jets had targeted a weapons depot near al-Kiswah, a Syrian military base south of Damascus that is used by Iranian forces. The Telegraph reported that at least nine pro-regime fighters, “including members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and other pro-Iranian Shia militiamen” were killed in the strike.

The Guardian reports that Israel will name a roundabout in Jerusalem after Trump in a show of gratitude for recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city and moving the US Embassy their next week.

The Guardian also reports that Israel’s interior ministry has ordered Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director of NGO Human Rights Watch, to leave the country after the Ministry for Strategic Affairs allegedly unearthed evidence that he had been supporting a policy of boycotting Israel for years.

A letter by 36 artists, broadcasters and academics published in the Guardian has accused Israel of “using culture to mask brutality” and of ”systematic and large-scale human rights violations”.

The Israeli media is dominated by two stories – President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA  and the increase of tensions in the north. The IDF has given instructions to open bomb shelters in the Golan Heights because it detected preparations by Iranian forces for firing rockets whilst an attack on a military base in the vicinity of the city of Al-Kiswah has been attributed to Israel.

Writing on Trump’s decision, Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz said: “A few minutes past two in Washington, the president of the United States adopted the ‘Netanyahu Doctrine’ wholesale and made it official American policy.” He adding that “Donald Trump’s announcement to exit the Iran nuclear deal could have been scripted by Benjamin Netanyahu. Word. For. Word”.

Also in Yediot Ahronot, Amos Yadlin predicts that Iranian response would likely be either a return to the enrichment policy that was in place prior to 2013 or a more extreme Iranian response of withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and making a breakout to a nuclear bomb. “In both these scenarios, the ball returns to the American and Israeli playing courts. Without broad international support for tough, effective sanctions, the only option for stopping Iran will be military action. President Trump does not want another war in the Middle East and it’s hard to envision his spearheading a military course of action to block the Iranian nuclear program. True, he won’t red light an Israeli action as his predecessor did, but ultimately, the task will most likely only be ours.”

In Maariv Ben Caspit says the nuclear agreement “is not all that catastrophic. True, it did neglect the spheres that are not nuclear (continuing to spread terror, developing ballistic missiles) and it did not hermetically close what would happen afterwards (the “sunset”), but the agreement did achieve its main goal … the agreement dismantled Iran from almost all of the uranium that it had enriched, it left it with a limited number of centrifuges, placed it under a particularly strict supervision regime and pushed its nuclear programme back 1.5 years, freezing it there”. He went on to say that “on the eve of the agreement, Iran was three months away, some say even less, from the ability to build a bomb. That is the reason that our security establishment, almost entirely, thought that in the absence of any other alternative, it was better to stick to this agreement and take advantage of the time window (between ten to 12 years) to prepare for the future, to strengthen, to attend to all the things that a nuclear challenge would not let us address”.

Michael Koplow in Haaretz suggests that while “Israel has been making a consistent case that the Iran deal is bad for its security on the nuclear front … there is a risk that if the Iran deal collapses entirely, it will create a more immediate and proximate threat for Israel to deal with.” He adds that “the Iran deal is keeping Iran in check from responding to repeated Israeli strikes on its interests in Syria” and that “the US president may just have ended up creating a new vulnerability for Israel, by removing a key restraint on Iran’s conventional forces”.

Alex Fishman, in Yediot Ahronot, argues that “it would be inadvisable to break out in a song and dance this morning”. “Even if Iran does not start enriching uranium tomorrow morning, it no longer feels bound by the agreement as signed: no timetables, and certainly none of the restrictions that appear in it. It will violate the agreement at every stage where it feels that it can. If Israel had any control, or at least cooperation, with the large world powers in the sphere of inspecting the Iranian nuclear programme, we’ve lost it.”

In Yediot Ahronot, Nahum Barnea writes about the upcoming meeting between Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Netanyahu will attempt to persuade him that Russia’s interests in Syria do not conform to Iran’s interests. If Putin wants a quiet summer, a summer that will be devoted to the World Cup festivities, he has to curb Iranian strengthening. He has to stop the passage of precision-guided missiles [to Syria], he has to prevent anti-aircraft missile systems from being deployed, he must stop [IRGC] troops far from the Golan border. Wrapped in the Israeli advice is a threat: if Iran continues to do what it is doing, Israel will take military action behind Russia’s back. Putin will receive Netanyahu with all the formalities, and he will then make it clear to Netanyahu that Russia does what is good for Russia. There are no celebrity discounts in the Kremlin: what Netanyahu did not get in his seven previous meetings, he will not get in the eighth.”