US President Donald Trump believes a deal will still be signed with Iran "in the next two to three hours", he tells Fox News.

He made the comments in a brief interview with the network's Trey Yingst, who repeated them on air during a live cross from Tel Aviv.

Trump told Yingst he spoke on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after today's strikes on Beirut. Trump appeared to express his frustration, using an expletive to ask Netanyahu what he is doing.

"He told the prime minister not to conduct additional strikes against Hezbollah, so it doesn't affect this deal from moving forward," Yingst said.

President Trump is clearly furious with Benjamin Netanyahu.

His social media post says that the attack on Beirut, which he implies was a disproportionate response to a “very small and meaningless” attack by Hezbollah, risked disrupting the peace process “on a special day”.

It isn’t specified what makes the day “special", but it has not gone unnoticed that there was a chance of a peace deal being signed on Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.

That prospect now looks far less likely.

What will make this doubly galling for the President is that he has repeatedly pointed out the extent to which he is in the driving seat of his relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister.

"If I tell Netanyahu to do something, he does it,” he told the BBC last week.

The fact that his ally decided to launch strikes, knowing the impact they would have, on a day when the President had predicted a deal, will further sour an already strained relationship.

There's no doubt that President Trump would very much like to be able to announce the deal on his eightieth birthday - and frame it as a victory.

The Iranian leadership may not want to give him that satisfaction.

But it certainly does look as if the two sides have all but agreed a deal.

The details are not yet known - and both the US and Iran have each been presenting the aspects that make them seem to have the upper hand.

A senior Iranian official has said that this initial deal would see the Strait of Hormuz re-opened immediately, as Trump has stipulated.

The same official has also said there's an agreement for Tehran to dilute its highly enriched uranium inside Iran.

These would be significant moves forward, raising hopes of success in the difficult negotiations to come.

But the issue of Israel's war against Hezbollah in Lebanon could still prove to be a deal breaker further down the line.

(Source: BBC)