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Jeremy I'm Jeremy Scahill from DropSiteNews. DropSiteNews.com it is Tuesday, April 14th. Welcome to our regular Tuesday live stream. Coming up in just a few moments, we're going to be joined by my friend and colleague Rami Khoury to discuss the historic these kinds of formal publicly known talks have not taken place since 1993 between Israel and Lebanon. Hezbollah, the Lebanese based resistance movement, is already on record rejecting these talks, calling them an Israeli ploy and an attempt to enforce a disarmament of Hezbollah by using the veneer of the Lebanese government being the force that would implement or impose such a disarmament. And of course, the fighting continues between Hezbollah and Israel. In fact, since this so called two week pause that Donald Trump originally characterized as a double sided ceasefire took effect just a few days ago, the Israelis have continued to pound Lebanon with bombs and continue their ground operations in Hezbollah itself, which said that it was going to respect this ceasefire agreement or this two week pause while the Iranian and American sides held talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, aimed at, at least from the Iranian side at trying to find a resolution or an end to this war. Hezbollah said initially that it was going to respect that. And then the Israelis came out almost immediately after Donald Trump announced this pause of two weeks was taking place for talks to occur and said that Israel did not consider Lebanon a part of this agreement, which flies in the face of what the public announcement by the leader of Pakistan, the prime minister of Pakistan, who formally announced the agreement in his post that clearly had been approved by the United States before he put it online. He said that the two week ceasefire applied to all of the war fronts and he specifically mentioned Lebanon. And so, you know, clearly what we're seeing here is that Netanyahu and the Israelis are trying to sever Lebanon and Hezbollah from any kind of a broader framework. The Iranians have been very, very clear from the beginning of this US Israeli war against Iran that started on February 28, at least this round of it, that among their demands was that any agreement will apply to all of the fronts of resistance, all of the areas where the axis of resistance is based. Primarily that would mean Lebanon and Iraq in terms of the acute fighting that's taking place right now and the attacks by the United States and Israel. And all of this is happening against the backdrop of questions as to whether this so called ceasefire of two weeks is actually going to result in any sort of an agreement. I think most people that are watching this are aware of the fact that when the initial 21 hours of talks took place in Islamabad. JD Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had direct talks with an Iranian delegation that was headed up by the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Ghaliba, as well as the Foreign Minister, Abbas Arachi. The Iranian delegation numbered, we understand, some 80 people. The US delegation was much larger than that. But JD Vance then came out after those 21 hours and said that they had failed to reach an agreement. The Iranian side said they were within inches of an agreement, but that the maximalist demands implemented by the United States late into the into the night and early morning had effectively sabotaged an agreement. Benjamin Netanyahu, then, as JD Vance left to get on Air Force Two and go back to the United States, gave a televised address to the Israeli public in which he said that JD Vance had called him to update him on the flight back to the United States, clearly asserting Netanyahu was that he is very much at the steering wheel with Donald Trump or maybe on his own, and Donald Trump is sitting next to him. All of this also is occurring as the United States has implemented what Donald Trump is calling a blockade, which most international law scholars say would in fact be illegal on the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians are saying that the strait remains open for maritime traffic that is not connected to the U.S. israeli war. And there's real questions about whether there is going to be some sort of an agreement. We do understand that there are back channel discussions taking place. There's reports that there may actually be another round of talks. It seems most likely if that were to occur, it would again be in Islamabad. But all of this is very much in the air and the Lebanon situation is very dire because the Israelis have engaged in some of their heaviest attacks against Lebanon since the sweeping strikes that resulted in the assassination of many hundreds of Lebanese and killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. The Israelis technically had a ceasefire with Hezbollah and Lebanon that was in place for more than a year, but it consistently continued to carry out operations that Israel characterizes as mowing the lawn, which most ordinary people would just understand to be Israel violating the ceasefire and continuing its military assault and attacks. But it's now has its ground forces deeper into Lebanon than they have been in quite some time. And so the stakes of all of this is very high. And I look forward to talking to Rami Khoury to break it all down in a moment. But first let me bring on my colleague Sharif Abdul Kaddus, the Middle East North Africa editor at Dropsite News. Sharif, you've just finished editing and putting out Dropsite News's daily newsletter, which I encourage people to subscribe to. It's really a remarkable comprehensive breakdown of developments happening across the world and certainly dealing with Iran, with Palestine, with Lebanon and beyond. But give us a sense of the latest news you're hearing about the Israeli military attacks and the Hezbollah retaliatory strikes that have taken place place in the last hours.
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Well, from what we understand, at least six people have been killed in continued Israeli attacks in Lebanon. This is according to the National News Agency. Three people from one family killed in western Bakar and a series of raids that hit the town and apparently destroyed 10 homes. Three people also killed in in another area of southern Lebanon in ongoing attacks. But also Hezbollah has said it's continuing retaliatory attacks on Israel, on military troops inside Lebanese territory. It said it struck a newly established artillery position that was in the town of Baida in southern Lebanon. It also targeted outposts with what it said were attack drones, as well as firing rockets into settlements in Israeli settlements in Palestine. The Israeli military today said that one soldier was killed and three seriously wounded infighting in southern Lebanon. We've also seen, and on top of what you mentioned, Jeremy, an extremely vicious campaign targeting medical workers in Lebanon. The Israeli military has openly admitted to this, that it would be targeting ambulances that it claimed were being used in militant operations by Hezbollah. This claim was unsubstantiated and they didn't provide any evidence to prove that. But over the weekend, we saw a series of double tap strikes targeting health care workers. Double tap strikes are when you bomb an area, then wait until health care workers arrive and then hit it again to inflict kind of maximum casualties. And we saw a series of these. Nearly 90 medical workers have been killed since March 2nd alone. So that's continuing to happen. And all of this fighting is going on as Israeli and Lebanese officials are meeting in D.C. just an hour from when we're broadcasting right now. And what's interesting about this as well is that they have issued conflicting statements, even Lebanon and Israel, about what these talks would cover. The presidency, the Lebanese presidency has said the talks would focus on announcing a ceasefire and setting a date for bilateral talks. These are, you know, a meeting between the two ambassadors at the moment and that the Lebanese ambassador was only authorized to discuss those two things. Israel, though, has said that it would not discuss a ceasefire, that it was focused on, that these talks are focused on disarming Hezbollah and establishing some kind of normalization agreement between Israel and Lebanon. So we already have Kind of of the split. And of course, you know, Hezbollah has absolutely rejected these direct talks. We had the statement by the Secretary General yesterday. And but this is further driving a wedge in Lebanon in Lebanese politics.
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Yeah. And in fact, Sharif, let's bring on Rami Khoury here, our friend and colleague, really a great experienced journalist, correspondent covering for many decades the Middle east, who currently is a distinguished public policy fellow at the American University in Beirut as well as at the Arab center in Washington. A non resident senior fellow, Rami also likes to be identified as a Yankees fan. We'll keep that away from this discussion, you know, for, for now. But Rami, I just want to read you two statements. One is Benjamin Netanyahu. He came out on Saturday talking about these talks that are going to take place imminently in Washington D.C. and he said, quote, we want the dismantling of Hezbollah's weapons and we want a real peace agreement that will last for generations. As Sharif mentioned earlier, Naim Qassem, who is the Secretary General of Hezbollah, he said in a speech last night, we reject negotiations with the Israeli entity as they are futile and, and require a Lebanese agreement and consensus. We will let the battlefield do the talking and reject negotiations with the entity. Let us confront the aggression together and afterward we can reach an understanding on the future. Let Israel implement the ceasefire agreement and we call for the cancellation of negotiations with it. So as we said, you know, this is historic in one sense. It's quite likely that there have been other talks over the years, secretly or on the sidelines of other meetings. But in terms of out in the open public at this level, probably nothing on this scale since 1993. Give us your overarching breakdown of what we're looking at today. Rami, thank you.
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It's great to be with you both. You know, the statement that Netanyahu made is a statement that every Israeli leader has made every five years going back about 50 or 60 years, except they changed the name of the adversary. They said the same thing about the PLO in Lebanon. They said the same thing about the Syrian government, the Egyptian government, the Iraqi government. Now they say it about Iran. Every group that, or country that challenges Israel politically, diplomatically or militarily becomes an enemy of the Israeli state. And they need to, to destroy it forever. And they've achieved some of that destruction in various parts of the region. But the second part of that is that Israel wants to achieve hegemonic supremacy. They want to be the power that defines how political actors act all across Western Asia, including Iran and They've succeeded in attacking and killing and destroying and creating desolation regions like Gaza and now parts of South Lebanon. They have never been able to achieve their political goals, which is to be accepted in the region and to live in peace, as they say, because most people in the region, Lebanon, Palestine, everywhere don't believe them. They don't think, they just want to live in peace. We tend to think that they want to assert their hegemonic supremacy across the region, that they determine how everybody behaves so that the primary supremacy of Israel's security and strategic goals, for instance, access to water, access to trade routes, access to ports, whatever that, that supremacy is affirmed in political organ, in political agreements. In other words, they want the Arab countries and Iran to be supplicants and vassals of a Greater Israel, which is backed by a imperial, militaristic United States. So they've been able to achieve this process, but they've never been able to achieve their goals. And Lebanon, in the context of this wider, older dynamic, is probably the most telling example of all of the problems in the region in the modern Middle east since the 1920s. And it also outlines all of the issues that need to be resolved in order to get a peaceful Middle east in which a State of Israel with a Jewish majority can exist in total acceptance and peace and sovereignty and security if it accepts the Palestinian rights to the same thing and no longer goes around occupying lands of Lebanon, destroying defense forces in Syria, and doing all the things it's doing now, including attacking Iran. So Lebanon is the best example, the best. It captures everything that's wrong in the Middle east and therefore everything that needs to be fixed. These talks today in Washington are not designed to do that. These talks in Washington are an instrument by which the Israelis, with the close, active, enthusiastic support of the United States, are pressuring the Lebanese government to accede to opening these talks. They just want to say that we've achieved direct peace talks between Israel and Lebanon. And probably you'll get a Trump tweet about that or whatever it's called Social Truth or later today. But this process is not a serious negotiating process. This is a process by which Israel and the US Assert their power to force the Lebanese government into these talks. The Lebanese government is trying its best to salvage something from this by saying, we're only entering into this to talk about stopping the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and achieving the sovereignty of Lebanon. Now, the sovereignty of Lebanon to the Lebanese government means stopping the Israeli attacks and also stopping Hezbollah's role in the life of Lebanon both as a resistance force against Israel, but which also triggers often wars and occupations, as is now happening. And many Lebanese are fed up with, but they don't have an alternative. So this is where we are. This is a very multifaceted process going on in Washington today in which the Lebanese have very limited wiggle room. Hezbollah has made clear that this is a waste of time, that this is a first step to vassalage for the Lebanese to become a formal vassal state of Israel. And the Israelis are very enthusiastic about this because they say, you know, we're talking directly to the Lebanese to disarm Hezbollah, which is never going to happen in a unilateral way. So those are the key points I would make. Now, there's other dimensions we can discuss.
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Rami, could I ask you also there's been reporting by Haaretz, by Axios and others about what Israeli military plans are actually for Lebanon. And that includes some kind of what they call a buffer or a zone that's actually occupied by Israeli troops about 4-8 km wide in the strip. And that would be permanent. They're already demolishing completely villages there. And using what the Israeli defense minister has said are Gaza style tactics. He said we're going to make it look like Rafah or Beit Hanun. Then everything south of the Latani river after that would become. They have acknowledged that they can't occupy it as they did between 1982 and 2000, but that they would. This would be a military operations area where it'll be kind of subject to constant airstrikes and that they're going to, quote, dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure there, north of the Latania, the rest of Lebanon. They're claiming that the Lebanese army must fully disarm and dismantle Hezbollah on its own, which is not possible. But can you, can you also just talk about the effect of these talks and how it's affecting internal Lebanese politics? Because the very fact that they agreed to do this is extremely significant on its own. We saw as soon as Hezbollah fired rockets in solidarity with Iran and then Israel began escalating its assault on Lebanon, the Lebanese prime minister banning for the first time Hezbollah military activities. Not a ban that they can enforce, but banning it. We saw then, interestingly, the head of the army, the Lebanese army, coming out with a statement and saying we support Lebanese unity. And that's basically saying we're not going to go in and try and fight Hezbollah and disarm them. So you have all these tensions that are within Lebanese politics that are kind of breaking Apart. And this is being fomented by the US and Israel. So can you maybe give us like a thumbnail sketch, just a brief history lesson of what these divisions are and how it's playing out today?
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Yeah. Again, the internal situation in Lebanon, like the external one with Israel and others, captures a dynamic that's been going on for almost a century, since the birth of modern Lebanon. The 1930s or so at the hands of European craftsmen and women who created Arab countries here and there. And poof, they came into existence to serve Western colonial interests and Zionist interests at the same time. By the 1930s and 40s, the Europeans, especially the British, were essentially trying to create conditions that would allow a Jewish majority state to. To happen in Palestine after the 1917 Balfour Declaration. And Lebanon was part of this process indirectly. The French were there to keep Lebanon weak and divided so that it doesn't threaten Israel, but can be a partner for the Western imperial powers. Going way back to the 1920s and 30s. We've had this situation internally in Lebanon that there are all these different groups. I think there's 17 different sectarian groups that are represented in the Lebanese Parliament, including one seat, by the way, for the Hebrews, as they're called, one seat for Lebanese Jews, of whom there are about seven or eight people left in Lebanon who live there as Jewish Lebanese. But there's many others and many wonderful, amazing people that I know Lebanese Jews all over the world. So the situation internally is that this confrontation between Lebanese who want to get end this conflict with Israel, sign an agreement that keeps both sides happy. There's a bunch of people in Lebanon who want this, and there's a lot of people in Lebanon who want to support Hezbollah and others who have been fighting to prevent the Israelis from constantly attacking Lebanon. By the way, this Israeli move in Lebanon is the seventh number seven time that the Israelis have done this. They've sometimes stayed the longest. One was 18 years from 1982, 2000. And they've tried every trick in the book to achieve what they say they want to achieve, security, no more being attacked, etc. And they've never been able to achieve it. They set up a mini state that colludes with them in the south of Lebanon. They've armed people, they've done all kinds of things and none of them have worked. And the resistance keeps growing. The resistance now is primarily Hezbollah, but it also includes some Palestinian groups and includes some leftist Lebanese nationalist groups as well, here and there. The other point about this is that the importance of south Lebanon, especially water resources, The Litany and the Zahrani rivers in the south have been issues that the early Zionists, Ben Gurion and others, talked about in 1920 and 1930. So this has long been a. Let's call it a dream or a part of Zionist aims. In the greater region. They had to settle for the border that is there now after 1948. But there's a lot of Lebanese who still would like to take everything south of the Litany River. But that's probably not going to happen. These states that exist probably are going to keep their current form. But the contestation within Lebanon is extremely complex, but also extremely repetitive. It's been going on for decades and decades and decades. Hezbollah has formed alliances with other groups, including occasionally Christian groups, that allow it to have what was called the blocking. Third, they could block in Parliament any major decision because of the coalition that they were involved in. They have seats in parliament, they have seats in the government, in the cabinet. And they used to be able to block anything they wanted. Now it's more difficult because some of their allies have drifted off. And this is partly because so many people in Lebanon, while they don't like being occupied or attacked or sent on the road with their mattresses and their kids by the Israelis, they also don't like a resistance movement in their country that they believe is managed by Iran. And the Lebanese, who want to talk in a derogatory way about Hezbollah, they call them the Persians because they think they're really an instrument of Iranian regional politics. But the majority of Lebanese, also 80% roughly, say that they don't want to have a normal relationship with Israel under these conditions. They don't want to sign a peace treaty with Israel because it would turn Lebanon into a vassal state, and they don't want that. They want a genuine peace that gives Lebanon its rights. And the Lebanese government in these conditions has been forced to go into these talks in Washington by intense pressure from the United States and the Israelis. The Israeli pressure is to keep attacking and destroying. And the Israelis, by the way, are now doing in Lebanon what they did in Gaza, creating vast swaths of land that are not only destroyed and emptied of their people and their buildings, but made uninhabitable, often by spraying chemicals and making the place you can't grow anything there anymore, and closing up the water wells and stuff like that. So the Lebanese government is under intense pressure by the Israelis with their military action and their disruption of life all over Lebanon. It's not just they're attacking the south. They've sent 1.2 million Lebanese out of their homes from south Beirut, south Lebanon, the east. And this creates a lot of tension within the country. And the Americans keep up the pressure by telling the Lebanese, we want to come in with a couple of billion dollars from the World bank and from the US and other people to help rebuild. But we won't do that until you disarm Hezbollah and the Lebanese government takes control. And so there's these pressures that have caused the Lebanese government to agree to do this, thinking that this is a minimalist process. It doesn't have deep significance, but it allows the Lebanese government to show that it does really want a permanent peace treaty. But it wants one that is fair to both sides and anchored in international law, which the Israelis don't want to do, because the Israelis, with American direct involvement before they did the genocide in Gaza, they did the genocide against international law and UN resolutions and international conventions about rules of war, humanitarian law, et cetera. So this is where we are. It's a very difficult situation. But the net result of all this is that Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Yemen, anywhere you look in the region, if you want to solve those conflicts with Israel, you've got to go back to the Palestine, Israel conflict. It's the starting point and the mother load of all of these conflicts in the region. And editorial writers in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Guardian and will tell you that, oh, come on, you've got to forget about the past and look at all the people in the world who were moved out of their countries and rebuilt their lives and were great successes. The thing about the Palestinians is they're not like people in Europe or people in the United States or elsewhere. They are deeply attached to their land. I wrote an op ed yesterday that came out talking about the Iranians and the people in the Levant. And if you look at the names, the family names, Isfahani, Mashhadi, Damashti, Safadi, salty Arab countries, Iran. Family names are the names of locations, of cities, of towns, of regions. The first thing that a person gets when he or she is born, other than the grace of God and the love of their mother and father, is their name which attaches them organically to the land. And these are societies that have done this for 3,4000 years. And the Americans and Israelis don't understand this. So the net result of this deep human attachment to the land is resistance, insistence on living in dignity with full rights and living peacefully alongside other states if international law requires this, which means that the Lebanese are perfectly willing to live alongside a Jewish majority Israel, as are the Palestinians, as are the Iranians and as is Hamas, if the Palestinians and Lebanese have the same rights. So you always come back to the Palestine issue and you always come back to the simple equation that if you want to resolve this problem in Lebanon or anywhere, you have to give both sides equal rights. The chances of that happening in these negotiations in Washington are about 2% because the mediators are the United States. You can't have the mediators being one of the main protagonists in the war that brought this about. And not just the war, but the last 60, 50, 60 years of Israeli colonization and settlements and attacks, which the US has enthusiastically and still supports. And so that's why we're at a kind of dead end.
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I mean, I think your 2% is even generous given the, you know, the stance that, that, that the Zionists in control of Israel have, have taken, you know, the position that's being staked out here and you know, talking to people close to Hezbollah and also in Iran itself. I think that the real, the dynamic here that we all need to grapple with and that I think a lot of the, you know, broader Western media refuses to sort of acknowledge is that in the case of both Hezbollah and Iran, they understand this through the lens of an existential war, an existential moment in the history, not just of the resistance movement in the case of Hezbollah or in the Islamic Revolution in the case of Iran, but that this is one of the defining moments in a multi millennia history that we're on the precipice of history swaying in one direction or another. And I think that the United States quite dramatically underestimated, on the one hand, Iran's military capacity. Iran was very clear. Iranian officials told this to me and they also publicly stated it, that if the US and Israel do what they did in June of 2025, which is to pretend that there's negotiations, and then they launch a war against Iran, we are not going to coordinate or telegraph our retaliatory strikes. We are going to wage a defensive war against you. And we will not stop until we believe that we have reestablished long term deterrence. That's what the Iranians said from the beginning. And they said that they were going to strike at US Military facilities and other infrastructure attached to the US Or Israel across the Persian Gulf, meaning primarily in the GCC countries. Donald Trump and other US Officials have expressed surprise and said, well, no one knew that this was going to happen. The only people that didn't know this was going to happen were the people that didn't bother to listen to the people on the other side of the American threats, the Iranians, and people that didn't want to actually understand that. The Iranians, for their own tactical and strategic reasons, made clear to the world the stakes that would be involved if the U.S. attack. And I think that to a degree, some people within Israel and the United States in power deluded themselves into believing that either the Iranians were bluffing or they were huffing and puffing their chests out and didn't actually have the firepower to follow through. That clearly was a radical miscalculation. And the Iranians still have that capacity. The U.S. despite the fact that the war secretary and chief crusader Pete Hegseth every day would say 90% destruction of the ballistic missile capacity, 95 destruction of the drone capacity, their launchers are almost completely wiped out. Their navy is sunk the next day or even that evening or even simultaneous. While that guy was speaking at the Pentagon, the Iranians were launching ballistic missile strikes, they were launching drone attacks. The Iranians have a quite sophisticated and much cheaper than it used to be launching mechanism that they've been using. This is not like Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War of 1991, where the Iraqis would launch Scuds and then you come in and you bomb them and then there's no more Scuds being launched from that area. The Iranians have a very sophisticated system. They also implemented what they call the mosaic defense, where even if you kill the supreme leader, which the Iranians knew was going to happen early on, and you kill the commanders of the irgc, the conventional army, the naval commanders and war planners, that the battle command authority was pushed much further down the chain. And that meant that the Iranians were able to respond not just in an asymmetric way, but in a symmetrical way. They had a target bank that was pre approved and they didn't coordinate and they didn't choreograph. And that's why you've seen an unprecedented evacuation of American military facilities. This has never happened in history where the United States has had to evacuate so many of its facilities simultaneously. I think the casualties in terms of injuries are much higher, potentially of deaths. It's a little bit harder to cover that up. You can do it to an extent with special operations forces, but with conventional military, it's harder because of military families learning about this. But I think that many more U.S. soldiers have been wounded soldiers and sailors than the U.S. has acknowledged. So on the one hand, you have this radical underestimation or hubris that results in not analyzing on a factual basis the firepower of the Iranians that took place. And on the other hand, the resolve of the Iranians that they meant what they said when they talked in the language of we need to slap them hard so that they understand. And so the question, and this relates to what you were just laying out, Rami, when you talk to people close to Hezbollah or you talk to people from the Iranian government, they understand a basic core fact, which is that if Iran was to capitulate right now, which I don't think is in the cards, but if Iran was to capitulate on, on any core demands that would remove deterrence, that everything that has happened over the past three years since the initiation of, of the genocide against Gaza would have been for naught. And so the sense that I'm getting is that despite the overwhelming force that's being used, despite the fact that it is the United States that is giving Israel also free rein, but at the same time using its own massive military firepower to attack Iran, that there is a resolve that we cannot take temporary deals here. And my understanding from the Iranian position is that, and they've been saying this to us for many weeks, we want any deal to apply to Iraq, to Lebanon. They've also mentioned Palestine, although that's complicated because I pushed Iranian officials on this. What does it mean? Does it mean that you would support the Board of Peace, that you want this committee to go in? Does it mean you want a full withdrawal from Gaza? What does it mean about the occupied west bank and the expansion of settlements? They haven't answered what they meant, but they've gone on the record. But Lebanon is a very tangible thing to talk about because you have an active Israeli onslaught, attempted, deeper occupation and constant bombardment. So what I'm putting forward here, Rami, is this sense that it's not just about sort of technically, tactically, what can we negotiate. The Israelis are trying to win through this blackmail, cajoling and co optation what they have failed to achieve on the battlefield, that's the case. What they're trying with Iran, the Iranians have more leverage than they have since 2015, ironically. And that's what they're trying to do with a Hezbollah that they claimed had been largely wiped out after the pager bomb plot, the killing of Nasrallah and the low intensity but consistent bombing throughout the so called ceasefire that was put into effect formally back in late 2024.
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Right. You've touched on so many important related issues there. Let me just Comment on a couple of them, if I could. You have to keep in mind that the Zionist movement and the state of Israel has done three things historically over time. They lie, they exaggerate, and they refuse to see the humanity and the reality of the people, that they're fighting against the people they're trying to conquer the people they're trying to subjugate all over the region. It started with the Palestinians in Palestine who were invisible people in 1910, 1920, and therefore the Zionists did what they did with the Balfour Declaration. But now this is expanded all over the region. They refuse to acknowledge what you just said about the sense that the resistance, what the resistance groups, whether states or armed movements, have done. They refuse to see this as effective or existential or coordinated across the region. The reality is that this is a historic moment, not because Iran and Hezbollah have defeated anybody, but they have checked for the first time, and I use the word check descriptively and deliberately, they've checked the Israeli and American onslaught to a large extent. And they continue to develop the capabilities of the resistance groups, Hamas and Hezbollah and Sarallah, the popular mobilization units in Iraq and others. And they link with 85% of public opinion across the entire region. And that would include, I would say, Iran and Turkey, non Arab Muslim countries and the Arab countries. So you've got something like, I don't know, 750, 3/4 of a billion, 750 million or 3/4 of a billion people in the West Asia region who support this position. They refuse to submit to the threats and barbaric genocidal attacks of the Israelis. And the Israeli attacks, directly supported and enabled by the Americans and politically protected, diplomatically protected, have turned from just occasional war crimes, ethnic cleansing, destroying a village or something, have turned now into genocidal wiping out of entire societies. Gaza was the major lesson. They did it with Jeannie and Camp a few years ago. Now they did it in Gaza on a bigger level. And now they're trying it in Lebanon, a bigger level. And this has only generated massive international disagreement and criticisms of Israel to the point where countries in Europe like Spain and others are breaking relations with Israel, refuse to allow any economic links, whatever. It's bringing about a huge backlash of public opinion all over the world, visible in the student demonstrations and others in the US and certainly in public opinion polling everywhere. Israel is now like South Africa in 1975. And the same kind of response is happening from the world to contain the criminal acts of the Israelis, but also to try to engage them in a diplomatic negotiation that would allow them to have their little Israeli state, but as defined by the UN in 1947, with some adjustments to the borders that are mutually agreed. And that's the best that the Israelis can hope for. But the public opinion around the region and the actions of the resistance groups, which have learned their lessons from the previous years. And so you see Hezbollah now regrouped, reorganized, restrategizing how they do their work, and they've been able to pretty much hold off the Israeli ground, this whole in Bintishbel and Khayyam in southeast Lebanon. It's very difficult for the Israelis now to go in and occupy large swaths of southern Lebanon. So this is all part of a historical process. And the American government continues to be blind to the human and political and historical realities of the region and therefore uses its Pete Hegseth, Popeye cowboy type approach to, you know, flex your muscles, beat the hell out of them, threaten them, sanction them. And this doesn't work because it's an existential battle. As you said, the Hezbollah, Hamas, the Iranians, they understand if they allow themselves to be defeated, they're out. You know, they're out of history almost. They turn into a little vassal state with no rights whatever. And they're not going to let this happen. So we don't know how it's going to turn out. It's possible that the US And Israel will drop some nuclear weapons, will carry out, you know, destroy all of Lebanon south of Tripoli, possibly. They might destroy all of Beirut, like they've destroyed much of Gaza. So we just have to wait and see how it goes. But the signs so far are that the people being attacked are resisting to the extent that they can. And I think one of the really important signs we're seeing is the entrance into this picture of some serious adult mediators, the Pakistanis, the Turks, the Chinese, the Qataris, the Egyptians. But we're getting some people now from outside the Arab world, which is really, really significant, who are trying to mediate things and move them along. And the Israelis, by the way, are preparing the groundwork now to make Turkey the next bad guy after Iran. So we'll see how this process goes. It is a historical process with a lot of continuity. And I think on the Arab Middle Eastern side, we've learned the lessons. The Western countries seem not to have learned the lessons, and the Israelis certainly haven't.
- [43:55]
B
Well, and yeah, and Rami, we're going to leave it there. But just one point, you know, to emphasize what you're saying, let's remember two core facts regarding this one is that not once, but twice in the last year the Trump administration claimed to be negotiating with the Iranians. In fact, they had technical talks scheduled for two days after the start of this bombing on February 28th. A similar scenario played out last summer when Israel and the United States launched the so called 12 Day War in June of 2025. And so when I spoke to Iranian officials right before this two week pause was implemented, what the Iranians were saying is the most likely scenario that we believe is at play here is that Trump is using this to try to rearm and restock because Israel was running dangerously low on interceptors. Trump had to do something about the global economy and his reputation and the perception that Iran was actually winning this war by not losing it. And so it could well be that that's what we're witnessing here, because there are once again discussions about technical talks ahead. The Iranians have said they're very suspicious of this, but again, they emphasize to me that this looks like that. But the reason we're willing to engage in this is that we feel that we have more leverage now than we've had in quite a long time. So just putting that on the table. And the second thing is, as you mentioned, these other mediator countries, let's remember that it was the Sultanate of Oman that was the original mediator in this situation. And when the Foreign Minister of Oman, he was pulled in to essentially a clandestine operation against his will to do a sneak attack that would assassinate the Iranian leadership at the beginning of it, because he flies to Washington, D.C. supposedly in a good faith negotiation because he believed that they were on the verge of signing an agreement because of the flexibility of the Iranians. He meets with J.D. vance and other senior U.S. officials and comes out and says, I think that we're on the verge of a deal. We have to iron it out. And then they launch the war right after that. The Omanis have Steve Witkoff's number. I mean, literally they have it. But also they understand that Steve Witkoff is a poodle in this whole process. And so the Omanis can't be the mediators anymore because they know exactly what you're mentioning there, Rami, which is that when the mediator is a contaminated, you know, entity, as is happening in Washington with the Lebanese today, you can't have a real process. The Iranians publicly are saying very nice things about the Pakistanis, but I think that they recognize that Trump has done a lot to cultivate that relationship with Islamabad. So it's a complicated situation, Rami. We're gonna, we're gonna link to your substack and your, your writing and encourage people also to follow you on X. Rami Khoury, great, longtime journalist covering the Middle east and the region. Also wrote a really important early book on Hamas. Currently at the American University of Beirut and other distinguished places. Rami, thanks so much for being with us.
- [47:08]
A
It's a pleasure and an honor. Keep up your good work.
- [47:11]
B
All right, Take care, Rami and Sharif, before we wrap up, the breaking news this morning unfortunately was about a friend and colleague of ours, the prominent journalist Ahmed Shihab Al Din. We reported the Guardian reported, a few other news outlets and many press freedom organizations are now raising awareness of this. But Ahmed Shihab Aldin, I'm sure many of you know who he is, has been six weeks in jail in Kuwait. He was arrested six weeks ago. He remains in detention and he is facing a potential prosecution, possibly in a special tribunal. And it appears as though it's over posts that he made on social media relating to the early stages of, of the Iran war. Sharif, break down this situation. I'm sure many people know who Ahmed Shihab Al Din is. You know, journalist who's worked for the New York Times, for Vice News, for hbo, for Huffington Post and has been a very, very prominent figure in raising awareness about the genocide in Gaza over the past almost three years.
- [48:18]
C
Yeah, Ahmed Shepuddin is a American born Kuwaiti citizen. He also has Palestinian roots and he is very well known. He has over 2 million followers across social media platforms. He has worked with, as you mentioned, Vice, on hbo, the Huffington Post for a while. He's also been on Al Jazeera. He's also worked for the New York Times, PBS, Frontline and he has been jailed since March 3rd when he was arrested in Kuwait City by Kuwaiti security services. This appears to be over his related to his social media posts, including possibly one which was publicly available. This is not something that he shot. He just re shared something that was already online that showed a US F15E fighter jet that crashed near a US air base in Kuwait in the early stages of the war. And as far as we understand, again there's been little transparency about this and he's been jailed since March 3 with little access to his lawyer. That the charges that he's facing are spreading false information, harming national security and misuse of a public of a mobile phone. You know, these are charges that, you know, I can tell you from Egypt and working years. There are these catch all charges that are used against just to imprison people who speak out about anything or anyone that they want to put behind bars. But what is especially concerning is that Kuwait established just last month a specialized court to oversee what they called, you know, cases involving state security and terrorism. And this was set up by an official decree by the Kuwaiti government. And it's supposed to prosecute people with high speed to convict them quickly. And it's, you know, it says it's necessary because of the danger of terrorism that it poses to national stability and peace. So this kind of language is very troubling that there's a special tribunal that has been set up where usually conviction rates tend to be high. And so, you know, the Committee to Protect Journalists and other press watchdog groups are obviously calling for his release. But this is part of a pattern that we're seeing in Kuwait and in countries around the GCC that have engaged in a very fierce crackdown on any online speech. Journalists have been arrested, journalists have been deported. And these are, you know, all these countries that are US Allies are really clamping down on free speech, especially since the war in Iran. And I'll just finally say that Ahmad Shah Beddin, you know, he was, he's a graduate of Columbia Journalism School. He taught there as an adjunct lecturer for a while. He's earned awards from Amnesty International and a British Journalism award. And he needs to be released immediately. He's been in prison now for six weeks, which is six weeks too long.
- [51:29]
B
Yeah, I mean, for, for sure he should be freed immediately. And I think we should, we should also mention that the broader context of this, Sharif, that you were just alluding to is that the, in these countries, in the gcc, there have been hundreds upon hundreds of arrests targeting ordinary people and others. I mean, also in Kuwait, they're in the midst of a sweeping campaign to strip people of Kuwaiti citizenship. And they've been intensifying the process for, for doing that certainly since the, it predated the Iran war, but it's been sort of escalating since then. And, and the, the bigger dynamic here is that if you look at the narrative coming from the GCC countries about this war, you would, if you just dropped from another planet and you listened to the press conferences or read the statements of GCC rulers, what you would think happened is that the Iranian regime woke up one morning and decided that it was just going to start launching missiles at its neighbors, that that would be what you would think. If you simply listen to nothing except the pronouncements of the leaders of these GCC countries or you read the Security Council resolutions that they have tried to push through. In fact, their March 11 UN Security Council resolution that was sponsored by Bahrain or drafted by Bahrain doesn't even mention the terms Israel or the United States. It simply portrays Iran as the aggressor. And so what we're witnessing right now is a real mask off moment because many of these nations, or all of these nations, to be quite blunt about it, stood by for nearly three years while the Zionist regime burned Palestinian children alive. The most that they would do in response to it was issue thoughts and prayers and strong statements of concern about what the Israelis were doing. It would say, oh, we're opposed to this. Israel needs to stop. But they wouldn't do anything actively to try to confront or stop Israel. And Iran is the only actual established nation state that had an official policy of then launching missiles at Israel in response to the genocide in Gaza. And of course, there's a debate that is certainly legitimate to have about what targets Iran has struck in GCC countries. But it is clear that the vast majority of the missile and drone strikes that have taken place have been aimed at either US Military facilities or US infrastructure or are connected in some way to the US Israeli war against Iran. And so the US is again standing by while this dishonest and false narrative has been promoted, but also while people who are expressing dissent or committing the crime of journalism are being targeted. And I think that, you know, Ahmed Shihab Al Din, you know, I hope that he is freed immediately, but he is far from the only person right now that is being targeted. And there are so many people whose names are not known. So this is essentially just a call for people monitor what's going on here because these are US Allies that are conducting this sort of business and it needs to be all of our business. So, Sharif, thank you very much. I encourage people to check out the article that you just published at Dropsite News. Its prominent journalist Ahmed Shia Baldin has been in jail for six weeks in Kuwait, faces trial in a special tribunal. And also make sure to subscribe to the daily newsletter that we send out at Dropsite News. It really is the most comprehensive rundown of these events that you can get anywhere else. Sharif, thanks a lot for being here this morning.
- [55:35]
C
Thank you, Jeremy.
- [55:37]
B
And that does it for this live stream. The main way that Dropsite keeps going and stays afloat is through you, through people that appreciate our content, watch our livestream, read our articles, enjoy or benefit from our social media postings. We have a really phenomenal team of people, particularly on our X feed, which we operate as sort of a 24.7newswire. Our great colleague Herman Gill at the at the captain's chair there with with running the social media feed, we're expanding our YouTube presence. Make sure that you subscribe on all platforms. We also now have a WhatsApp WhatsApp channel that I encourage you to become a member of. And if you can afford it and you aren't already, please do become a paid subscriber to Dropsite News. You can do it@dropsitenews.com you can also gift a subscription to a family member, a friend, or even a foe. On behalf of our really hardworking and dedicated team of people at Dropsite News, I want to thank you very much for your support and for tuning in. Until next time, I'm Jeremy Scahill.
- [56:59]
A
Sam sa.