United States President JD Vance has been defending the memorandum of understanding to end the US-Israeli war with Iran, responding to criticism of the deal from members of the opposing Democratic Party and Republicans alike.

But speaking during an interview with The New York Times published on Thursday, the day after US President Donald Trump and Iranian President Pezeshkian inked the MoU, Vance reserved some of his harshest criticism for Israel, whose leaders have continually pushed Washington to continue the war.

Vance pointed to criticism of the deal from Israeli officials, including far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

“And I guess my response to them would be: What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” he said.

He called on Israel to let negotiations play out, and to “give a little bit of credit to the United States of America, which I think has been an incredible partner for the Israeli government for a long time”.

His statement was the latest instance of the Trump administration taking an atypically harsh approach – at least rhetorically – towards Israel, whose ongoing occupation of and military operations in southern Lebanon have repeatedly threatened to derail a more lasting agreement to end the war with Iran.

In recent days, Trump has criticised Israel’s rules of engagement, which war monitors have long said lead to high civilian casualties, while calling for restraint in its war with Hezbollah.

“Too many people have been killed,” Trump said from the G7 Summit in France.

“You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they’re not all Hezbollah,” he said.

Vance claims victory

Speaking at a subsequent news conference on Thursday, Vance continued the administration’s defence of the MoU with Iran, which opens the Strait of Hormuz, lifts the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and pledges to end fighting on all fronts, including in Lebanon.

Several top Democrats – and a handful of Republicans – have said the initial agreement appears to favour Tehran, saying the war has yielded no meaningful concessions that could not have been achieved in previous rounds of diplomacy.

Vance maintained that, while several issues remain unresolved, the Trump administration’s war had created more favourable circumstances for the US. That included degrading Iran’s nuclear capacity, setting back Iran’s conventional military and weakening Iran’s economy, he said.

The vice president framed the war as a victory, regardless of whether the upcoming negotiations, which he said could begin as soon as the weekend, were successful.

“If the Iranians don’t change their behaviour, their military and their nuclear programme is still destroyed. If they do change their behaviour, then they are going to have a transformative relationship with the Middle East, and the Middle East will have a transformative relationship with the people of Iran,” he said.

“That’s a win for the American people and for the President of the United States, regardless of which option the Iranians ultimately choose.”

Unanswered questions

The agreement includes immediate sanctions waivers on Iran’s fossil fuel industry, with pledges from the US and regional partners to create a $300bn reconstruction fund, negotiate the unfreezing of Iranian assets and lift all remaining sanctions.

The initial agreement also includes a commitment that Iran will dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium “on site”, but leaves questions related to the future of Iran’s nuclear programme unanswered, leaving the issue for 60 days of negotiations.

Vance said he was confident Iran would be willing to change its long-entrenched positions on its nuclear programme, potentially agreeing to an inspection regime if Washington leveraged sanctions and frozen funds.

The MoU also does not address Iran’s ballistic weapons programme or its support for proxies in the region, top issues for both Israel and Iran hawks in the US.

Vance suggested that he hoped negotiations would yield an agreement preventing Iran from building the “kind of missiles that can broadly threaten the entire world”. Still, as Trump had done on Wednesday, the vice president backed away from previous administration pledges to destroy Iran’s ballistic weapons capabilities.

“You can’t tell a country, whether Israel or Iran, they’re not allowed to have any self-defence,” he said.

The MoU also does not include commitments related to the future administration of the Strait of Hormuz or preclude Iran from imposing tolls.

Vance said any future agreement will be about “ensuring that the straits are never used as a choke point for the global economy ever again”.