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You are listening to an art media podcast. It's Thursday, June 4th. This episode was recorded at 7:00pm New York time on Wednesday. I'm Deborah Pardes and this is Ark News Daily. Another ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon has been renewed. Yesterday the two countries issued a joint statement which said they would create what they're calling pilot security zones inside Lebanon. These are specific areas where Hezbollah would be banned. The Lebanese army is supposed to take full control of those zones. The deal came after a fourth round of talks between Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors. Hezbollah, however, was not at the table and the talks were happening against a backdrop of ongoing fighting. Hezbollah drones were wounding Israeli sol in southern Lebanon. Israeli strikes were killing people in the south. So what's actually changed? The new agreement tries to do something the previous ceasefire didn't do. It's creating a phased testable structure, pilot zones, Lebanese army deployment and gradual expansion. The idea is to build trust incrementally rather than demand everything at once. We'll see if it can last. As fighting continues between Israel and Hezbollah despite a supposed ceasefire, a bigger question is taking shape in Washington and Jerusalem. What does the US military relationship actually look like going forward? This week, some of the most senior American officials gave a surprising answer. On Monday night, U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee posted on X. He said the next security agreement between the two countries ends aid to Israel and will be based on trade. The next morning, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed it under oath at a House appropriations hearing. He said the US and Israel have been discussing this for more than a year. And he said it was Israel's idea. In January, Netanyahu himself told the Economist he wanted to taper aid to zero within a decade. He also unveiled a hundred billion dollar plan to scale up Israel's domestic defense industry in its place. Currently, the US and Israel operate under a 10 year memorandum of understanding signed in 2016. Under it, Israel receives $3.8 billion a year, mostly to buy American made weapons. People close to the transition plan say it's being considered because of political risk. The US has withheld arms from Israel twice in the last several years. Once under Obama and once under Biden. Both happened in the middle of ongoing wars. We spoke with Amir Avivi, a retired IDF Brigadier general who is close to the Netanyahu government. He said, quote, israel understands today that after Obama and after Biden and not knowing what's next, we cannot play around with our existence. We need to be independent. He also said the Trump administration is pushing in the same direction. The feeling is that Israel is a big boy and should be independent. The current plans are that Israel will still buy American weapons, it just won't get a check to do it. The framing both sides are using is a shift from aid recipient to partner. That's how Congressman Marlin Stutzman put it yesterday to cnn. He just sponsored a resolution to encourage developing a new agreement between the two countries. We've been calling it Aid to Trade, moving from an aid supplement to a trade agreement to defense agreements and a real mature partnership because Israel has grown tremendously. The current MOU doesn't expire until 2028. Sources close to both sides say the hope is to get a new agreement in place by around October, before the US Midterms and the Israeli election. Child marriages are on the rise in Gaza. That's according to a recent article in the Associated Press. The AP spoke to several girls in Gaza who got married between the ages of 13 and most of their parents didn't want it, but said they felt they had no choice. One mother lost her husband and eldest son to Israeli airstrikes. She was living in a tent with rats and sewage. She was overcome with grief and felt she couldn't protect her 13 and 14 year old daughters from harassment, so she agreed to marry them off to two brothers who promised safety and support. What followed was horrific. Both girls were tied up by their mother in law and raped by their husbands. The younger daughter had two miscarriages after her husband kicked her while she was pregnant. The elder daughter eventually fled, carrying her newborn son 15 km on foot back to her mother's tent. Her sister followed, but months later, under pressure from in laws and with no money and no clear legal options, the mother sent them back. She hasn't been able to reach them since. What the AP found is that girls aren't only being pushed into marriage by desperate parents. Many are choosing it themselves because schools have shut down and because of the lack of food and resources. Starting a separate household means they can receive a separate aid allotment. One girl told the AP that marriage felt like, quote, the only sense of normalcy I could restore to my life. Gaza's rate of underage marriages is not as bad as other countries. UNICEF says the share of marriages involving a girl under 18 in Iraq and Yemen are around 30%. In Bangladesh it's 47%. But the concern in Gaza is that the war is driving the rates of underage marriages back up after they had been falling. According to registration data from the Supreme Sharia court, just over 20% of marriages in Gaza involved a girl under 18. That's up about 3% from 2022. But the real number could be much higher since many marriages weren't recorded during the war in the West Bank. In 2019, the Palestinian Authority raised the legal age of marriage to 18. Child marriage rates collapsed. Hamas never did that. The minimum age in Gaza is 17, with exceptions allowed for girls as young as 14. Beyond the tragic circumstances the trend points to, there is also a deeper issue. Analysts say that in the absence of strong secular institutions in Gaza, radicalization is likely to accelerate. Hamas governs Gaza from the mosque and neighborhood levels through what's called the Dawah network, where social services and religious indoctrination are delivered together. Researchers warn, the more desperate people become, the more Hamas fills the void. On a personal note, I'd like to say that I am a human being. I know that might sound funny, but somebody sent us a message recently saying that they were grateful I was human and not something else, perhaps an AI voice or something. It made me think a lot about what we're up against in this world. We're always wanting to know if something is authentic or real. It's partly the reason why I think it's so special that ARC Media puts these news shows together every day so that we're all able to not just learn about the news, but also consider how we think about it and what to look out for and why things matter. So yes, I am a deeply human person, a Jew in the Diaspora, keeping an eye out for what's important, and I'm keeping my heart open to feel why it's worth talking about. So thanks for listening. I'm Deborah Pardes and this is ARC News Daily. See you tomorrow. It.