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U.S.-Israeli Bombing and Assassination Campaign Intensifies in Iran as Israel Threatens Wider War Against Hezbollah
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- [01:56]
A
Sa. Foreign. I'm Jeremy Scahill From DropSite News. DropSiteNews.com it is Tuesday, March 3rd. Welcome to our regular Tuesday live stream. And as we speak, the United States and Israel are continuing their very heavy bombardment of Iran. The death toll inside of Iran is rising. It is nearing 800. It surpassed 770 people today. And those are just the confirmed deaths. Some estimates indicate that the death toll is much higher. And at the same time that the US And Israel are continuing to strike, Iran is engaging in its own series of retaliatory strikes at US Facilities, US Interests across the Persian Gulf region. There's a lot of attention and allegations coming from Arab states in the region claiming that Iran has been targeting their oil infrastructure. And certainly there have been explosions and fires at some of these facilities. The allegation coming from the United States and those Arab countries is that Iran has struck oil infrastructure. The Iranians, though, are denying that. We're going to report on some of what's happening later on at Dropsite News, but there is a very much a war of narratives. The Iranians are denying some of the allegations that are being made right now. And as this war of words is happening between Iran on the one hand, some of these Arab nations on the other, and then, of course, the United States and Israel. Donald Trump has been doing a sort of manic series of interviews with a variety of journalists. It seems like, you know, almost any reporter that wants to can get Donald Trump on the phone these days to talk about his ideas for what actually is happening. And, you know, he's, he's saying things like the United States has enough munitions to wage war forever, which objectively speaking, that of course, is not true. And there are munitions experts that have been looking at the stockpiles and saying that Trump is radically overstating the position of the United States, including, even though there is this massive buildup of forces in the region, what is actually in, quote, unquote, theater right now for the United States, the death toll of US Personnel, the officially recognized death toll has climbed to officially to six US Soldiers, undisclosed number of injuries. We had heard via witnesses in Kuwait that the number of American personnel injured is much higher than has been acknowledged. We've reached out to centcom and they still have yet to respond to us. And as all of this is happening, Trump is sort of floating ideas about, you know, the quote, unquote, day after, even though the Iranians are still ferociously fighting, there are reports that Trump has been speaking to Kurdish leaders in the region and that they may view Kurdish forces as some kind of insurgent or rebel force that the US And Israel could back to go into Iran. The IRGC announced today that they've bombed some positions of Kurdish forces inside of Iraq. At the same time, Iraqi militias that are operating in support of Iran have been launching attacks of their own. The Israelis this morning started to move troops into areas of southern Lebanon and have been indicating that they might engage in wider ground operations. Hezbollah, which has been launching rockets at Israel is now saying that if the Israelis are declaring an open war, then Hezbollah is ready for them. We're going to be talking to Karim Makdisi in Beirut a little bit later in this broadcast. But first I want to bring in my colleague Murtaza Hussein from Dropsite News. Maz and I since the, since this started have been reporting, have been talking to sources in Iran, helping to coordinate also with our colleague Sharif Abdul Kudd on the ground reporting from inside of Iran, something that not many news outlets are doing right now. But Murtaza, give your sense of where you see the state of things because what we heard yesterday from the so called War Secretary Pete Hegseth was that the US Is dispensing with sort of rules of engagement and is going, you know, all out. He gave this series of, of kind of bombastic one liners. And then Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State making a statement that's raised a lot of eyebrows which is that he justified the US quote unquote preemptive attacks against Iran by saying that they knew that Israel was going to attack Iran and that Iran was going to retaliate and therefore the United States needed to bomb Iran before they retaliated after the Israelis hit them. So this is the kind of twisted logic now that this administration is using where they're saying we had to wage a preemptive war because our ally slash client was going to assassinate the supreme leader of Iran and we knew then that the Iranians would retaliate so we had to preemptively attack them so that they wouldn't be able to retaliate after our ally that we fund, arm and coordinate with all the time attacks them.
- [07:59]
B
Yeah, you know, first part about Hexa's comments, it was very interesting because when Hexth came into his role under Trump last year, one of the first things he did was actually dismantle the already very meager sort of civilian mitigation, civilian harm mitigation functions that exist in the Pentagon. He dismantled certain offices but also he sent a very strong message about this issue of the quote, unquote, rules of engagement, suggesting that in any future conflict, they'd be much more unrestrained, and even beyond that, suggesting that people could take their own initiative and do things which may result in more civilian harm than otherwise. And we've covered a few stories about this, and I'm sure there's much, much more going on in Iran we haven't heard of yet. But we've seen these huge massacres of young girls at the schools and in the volleyball stadium in southern Iran, a really horrific sort of instances. And we're only about three days into this war and we already have a confirmed death toll, as you said, near 800, probably far more than that. And the longer it goes on, certainly that was going to rapidly, rapidly rise as well, too. Secondly, about Rubio's comments, it's almost like a very extreme form of wagging the dog, per se, because this entire situation, the US Conflict with Iran, which is now becoming a regional war in all sense of purposes, it's come under two major decisions made by a foreign leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. First was to sabotage the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which was a deal which worked for the US And Iran, and then secondly to sabotage diplomacy last year, before Operation Midnight Hammer, because the initial US Negotiating position was something in line with what Iran was asking. They were asking for 3.67% uranium enrichment. As Steve Wyckoff said at the time, it's only after the meetings with the Israelis where the demands of zero enrichment and also introduction of demands over ballistic missiles and other issues were introduced into these talks. So it was really Netanyahu's project for a very, very long time to force the current war stopping right now. And he said to himself, he said that for 40 years he's wanted to have this come about, and it was only Donald Trump who could deliver it to him. So in all sense and purposes, this is Netanyahu's war. And every American serviceman, every Iranian, whoever else, dies, there's war. People in the Gulf Arab states is because of Israel, it's because of Benjamin Netanyahu. And it's not my opinion about that. That's Netanyahu's own ownership. And now we're seeing it reflected because egregious in the statements even of senior U.S. officials.
- [10:21]
A
And as you mentioned, you know, the death toll in Iran is climbing. And there were the two very serious bombings that took place that killed large numbers of Iranian civilians. And the bombing of this girls school is utterly horrifying. And that death toll now is officially climbing toward 200. And the death notices of some of those children have been released. And, and people should look at those photos of the, the, the girls who were killed in the strike and understand that, you know, this is, this is actually the human face of the other side of this war that the US And Israel are waging. And last night also our colleague Reza Saya, who is in Iran, filed a piece about a horrifying attack that either the US Or Israel did. You know, one of the things that's happened because the US And Israel are doing this together, we often don't know which one of them engaged in a specific attack. We know that they've taken credit, the Israelis have. And the US has said it was Israel in the strike that assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei. And also, by the way, Khamenei's wife died last night of her injuries that she sustained in that strike. They also killed his, one of his daughters, one of his granddaughters, several, one son in law, a daughter in law. They killed a number of family members of the Iranian supreme leader in the course of that assassination operation. But Reza filed this story last night about a bombing that took place on Sunday by either the United States or Israel in which they did a double tap strike. And people may remember this, the Israelis have done these quite frequently in Gaza, but also the United States has done them throughout the course of the so called war on terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Yemen. And the idea of a double tap is that you do an initial strike and then you pause for a bit as people come to try to rescue or retrieve survivors or bodies, whether they're first responders or just other people. And then you come through and you launch another strike on those people. And that is what witnesses are saying happen at this strike at a popular cafe in Tehran where our reporter says that more than 20 people were killed. And I just want to read part of Reza's description of what happened in this strike on Sunday evening as people were just beginning to break their fast and gather with one another because it is of course, the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. And one witness, Shaheen, told Reza, quote, we were sitting here around 8 or 8:30pm and suddenly there was the noise and explosion. We got up and a few people ran away. We turned around to get our belongings and we saw that blood was spraying everywhere. Someone's hand had fallen on the floor. A head had fallen on the floor. There were scalps torn off, hands severed. A few people were laying here all cut up and two People were martyred. And they also described this second bombing. And the quote continues, one hit, and it wasn't that bad. But when the second one hit, suddenly everything exploded. The windows all shattered. Whoever had hookahs were thrown to the floor. One of my friends, whom I don't know that well, he was sitting here, his hookah was in his hands until the last moment. He was severed in half. Half of him was thrown to the side. I put him back together and placed him where he was. A piece of his brain was thrown here on the floor. This the description of this double tap strike that took place on Sunday. Murtaza.
- [14:12]
B
Yeah. This is the horrific consequences of the war that Israel and the US Are waging and the way they're choosing to wage it. Tehran is a very densely populated city, 15 million people, and carrying out attacks in urban areas. These type of munitions inevitably are going to cause incidents like this. So, you know, again, we're only a few days into a war which in the US Officials are saying could go on, in their view, for weeks. Even former officials like John Bolton said months may be required for this war. I think it's questionable if they have the political will to go that far, but one can imagine that brutality which is being waged right now if it does go in for a few weeks, you could see death tolls and tens of thousands of people. And again, without really a strategic goal other than the fact of satisfying the political goals of another country.
- [14:57]
A
Yeah, in a moment, we're gonna. We're gonna bring on Sharif and Karim. But, you know, one other point is that in the aftermath of the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior leaders in Iran, we should note that the President of Iran is, is alive. And he said that there this morning. He said that the. That he's in the process of delegating authority to regional governance and, and, and elsewhere. And this is part of the. What Iranians told you and I maz, even before this was that they had a plan in place, understanding that this was going to be an. A war of decapitation at the beginning, that there was going to be an effort to kill the senior leadership, including. They knew well that there was going to be an effort to kill Ayatollah Khamenei. And we were told by Iranian officials actually that the Supreme Leader of Iran actually refused advice to go to a more secure location and said that he wanted to accept the fate of the people. And so he, even though the New York Times did this story that was meant to make it look like an episode of Tehran, you know, or something. The, the, you know, the, the Mossad propaganda spy show on Apple tv that in fact he was in his office when they, when they killed him. And in the aftermath of that strike, they very swiftly implemented the process laid out in Article 111 of the Iranian constitution. They put in place a three person council and then they also activated what were pre planned responses to and, and hitting targets across the region, American military targets and other targets across the region. And they said that they had planned for all of this and they delegated much further down the chain of command so that there didn't have to be a centralized decision making process. And that's why you saw the Iranians respond so quickly. So while, while, while we're seeing massive devastation and it's undoubtable that the Iranian security forces, the Iranian political leadership, the Iranian military leadership, the irgc, Iran's conventional capacities have been relentlessly attacked by the US And Israel. It is also true that the Iranians had been planning for this for a very long time. And so while, while there are predictions that Iran is just going to cave and crumble, the Iranians that I'm talking to from the government, while recognizing, and I think they're realistic about the degree of damage that they've sustained so far, they're saying that they are going to continue these fights and that they still have not unleashed some of their most powerful weapons in this battle.
- [17:32]
B
Yeah, you know, in past instances in the US Regime change, they've operated the assumption that they're dealing with a personalistic system. So there's an individual at the top, maybe a family you can remove, and in doing so, the entire system will collapse. But the Iranian system is not like that. It's built in with redundancies, it has, you know, a base of support socially, it has an ideology and so forth. It's not about Ali Khamenei. Ali Khamenei was the office holder at a certain time and he was also 86 years old. His passing was expected sometime. I talked to Iranian officials about this last year and they had a contingencies in place for him being killed in a situation like this, something they planned for for a very, very long time. So the idea that probably sold to Trump that this could be a quick victory by decapitation could not be further from the truth. And I think that the Israelis and others who pushed Trump into this likely knew that as well too. So their goal in these decapitation strikes obviously was to inflict harm on the Iranian political system. But also I think that they'd like. What they really need actually to happen now is that now that these initial strikes have now worked and topping the regime, they need to have a long war right now and they may need to have another war next year or they may have made normalize attacking Iran, bombing Iran, sort of a permanent political future of the American system for many, many years. And I would analogize it to Iraq in the 1990s, making it, you know, a normal thing to quote, unquote, mow the grass or maintenance the threat using the terms that they use for these kind of things to hit Iran periodically. Iran at the same time is a very large country. It's a very complex country of 90 million people, geographically very large. And demanding that level of commitment from the US Will also be very difficult. Difficult. But I think this is the kind of the game plan causing the gradual dissolution of what, for all intents and purposes is a very complex system. It's not a one man show by any means. And I do think that absent a large political pushback now to stop this war, they may succeed in trying to drag the US into a very long, very protracted regional conflict that can go on for many, many years. And that has no clear political end game other than trying to cause the destruction of Iran and improve the strategic position of Israel.
- [19:41]
A
Yeah, and I also would want to let people know I just did a series of videos with Al Jazeera plus with AJ that you can see on our Instagram page and on Al Jazeera's Instagram page. And one of them looks at how even if the United States and Israel are not able to implement regime change in, in, in a sort of quote, unquote, clean sense, part of Israel's agenda with this was to severe, severely weaken the Iranian state, severely deplete its conventional defenses because of Israel's broader agenda. And the fact that the only nation state that in any meaningful way served as a deterrent to the broader Israeli agenda has in fact been Iran. And that's why you see Netanyahu, for know, going back to the 1990s, constantly saying they're a week away from building a nuclear bomb, they're a month away from building a nuclear bomb, they're days away from, you know, building a nuclear bomb, and he holds up his signs at the UN Etc, you know, they all know the actual intelligence on nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons aren't actually the issue. Yes, they don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, not because they believe Iran's going to use it, but because they don't want any country to stand in the way. And you know, the reason that there's that North Korea's system is still North Korea's system is almost certainly due in overwhelming part to the fact that they do have a nuclear bomb. So anyway, check, check that out. I want to bring in our our colleague Sharif Abdel Kadus, the Middle east editor for Dropsite News. Sharif, let's, let's also bring people an update on what's going on in Lebanon. We're going to go to Beirut in a moment to speak to Karim Makdisi. But you just got done editing our daily brief looking at Dropsite News, and I encourage people to subscribe to that looking at the latest in Lebanon, because we have Hezbollah has now entered the fray, launching missiles at Israel. Israel, of course, since a ceasefire was signed in November 2024, has relentlessly continued to attack inside of Lebanon, killing people on an almost daily basis. And now the Israelis are beginning to experiment with a ground incursion into Lebanon and threatening it could potentially go wider. Give us a sense of what's happening, Sharif.
- [21:56]
C
Well, I mean, Israeli airstrikes are hitting Lebanon today for a second consecutive day, targeting residential neighborhoods in the south and in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which is a power base for Hezbollah and a stronghold. They also actually struck the headquarters of Al Manor, the TV station that is aligned with Hezbollah, which is in southern Beirut. They haven't attacked that since in 20 years, since the 2006 war. The Israeli military has also issued additional evacuation and displacement orders for at least 18 villages and towns in southern and eastern Lebanon, warning residents to leave ahead of planned strikes. There are Already more than 30,000 people have been displaced. They're in shelters in the capital. Many I mean, the roads, there's scenes of the roads. What, you know, a drive that should take 40 minutes is taking five hours. People are sleeping in their cars or they're stuck in traffic jams on the sides of roads. Between 40 and 50 people have been killed and the attacks are continuing. And yes, Hezbollah fired a barrage of rockets at northern Israel in response to the US And Israeli attack on Iran and the killing of Khamenei. And you know, as you mentioned, this is probably the first time Hezbollah took credit for an attack since the ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel was signed in November of 2024. So, you know, it's the first major violation by Hezbollah of that ceasefire. Over that same period, Israel has bombed Lebanon on an almost daily basis, literally. The unifil, the UN so called peacekeeping force that's in Lebanon has documented over 15,000 ceasefire violations between by Israel over this period. And when you listen to a lot of media coverage in this country, they talk about how Hezbollah violated the ceasefire. It's really incredibly skewed coverage. Israel is now appears to be escalating as it always does. They appear to be launching some kind of ground incursion in southern Lebanon. It's unclear how far in they're going, but the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, directed troops to 16 positions along the border. We have to remember that Israel maintained five outposts inside Lebanon illegally following the ceasefire. And UN peacekeeping forces have seen Israeli forces crossing in today. And the Israeli, sorry, the Lebanese army has evacuated some of its positions along the border and Israel is apparently calling up reservists and so forth. We've also seen the Israeli Defense Minister basically saying that the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, is now a target for elimination and that they want to assassinate him. So, you know, this is all happening. And there's also quite strong statements by the prime minister of Lebanon against Hezbollah for launching the rockets, saying that it's illegal to do so, that it harms national security. So we can talk about all of this with Karim Moktasi, who I believe has joined us from Beirut. Hi, Karim, how are you doing? Karim Moqsi is a professor of international politics at the American University in Beirut. Thank you so much for joining us. Can you just talk about what's happening now, the latest on this second day of an intensified Israeli assault on Lebanon, but also put it in context for us about, about what's happening with the war in Iran.
- [25:44]
D
Yes. Hi everybody. And thanks, Sharif. I think I just heard the end of your description, which really kind of summarized everything that's going on. Just for my part here in Beirut. I mean, the atmosphere is really, it's quite ominous. There's a very feeling that we're about to enter a really nasty kind of phase. There's a lot of post traumatic stress. There's a lot of scenes now, all the displays that you've been talking about, they've now made their way, or at least some of them have made their way to the corniche and to the downtown Beirut. They've put up some tents. You see a lot of women and children sort of just waiting around and trying to understand what's going to go on with their villages, with their homes, when they'll be able to get back. And God knows when that will happen. And in the meantime, of course, the Israelis are continuing to threatened Lebanon. They've been hitting targets, they've been threatening a ground invasion. And you know, everybody's just waiting to see what's going to happen next within the context of this larger scheme of Iran. I think you mentioned, Sharif, that this kind of very interesting question that people are trying to understand, why did Hezbollah get involved when it did, you know, it felt a bit like a damps squib where they got involved and they just sent in a a few rockets that really didn't cause much damage. So the question is, why did they do this? They caused on the one hand, a major political problem internally. The government met very rapidly after that and declared effectively that Hezbollah's military security wing is effectively banned for the first time in such explicit terms. And on the other hand, it caused this kind of displacement with people who are really, really exhausted and have been bearing the brunt of this war and especially all these Israeli attacks for many years and especially over the past year, year and a half, where they've not been able to access their villages, they've not been able to repair, to reconstruct or to do very much. But at least there's been this kind of sort of slight calm over the last months. Even though, as you mentioned, Sharif, the Israelis have never once stopped in their attacks, in their assassinations, in their incursions. As we speak, the drones are over us here. And you know, the sound of drones has been constant for the past couple of years. So we wait to see what's going on. The context, as I said, for the Hezbollah attack is clearly part of a larger, of this larger regional war. And I do think that we can talk about it. And I think it is important just to, as a final note here that I think Hezbollah understands that this, you know, we've been waiting, we've been talking for many years about the so called final war and maybe this is it. You know, this kind of regional war, it's an existential war. I think Hezbollah understood that it was going to be attacked sooner or later and it figured it might as well attack first and perhaps bring the Israelis in and then be able to pick them off while they're in a kind of occupation type situation. It's really not clear.
- [28:55]
A
Karim, I wanted to ask you, in the aftermath of the assassination of the secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager bomb attacks that Israel did, and then the ongoing targeting of Hezbollah leadership and cells of fighters and weapons systems, you've also had this track that's intensified, particularly under the Trump administration through Tom Barack and other American officials in this sort of endless string of visits to Lebanon to really try to impose a lebanization of Israel's aim of destroying Hezbollah and to turn Lebanon's official armed forces into the enforcers of what ultimately is an Israeli policy that, that Israel does not want any armed force in Lebanon that is going to confront its broader war of annihilation against the Palestinians or the political objectives it wants to achieve for what it wants Lebanon to look like as a, as a state. What, what does the scene look like with the Lebanese army? Now, you, you mentioned the prime minister saying that he's going to try to enforce or calling for the enforcement of a ban on military activity by Hezbollah. But is, are the Lebanese armed forces, is there any chance that they then say we're going to be the ones that now go in and start attacking Hezbollah? Because that to me just seems like you're then creating conditions for a very, very bloody domestic civil situation within Lebanon.
- [30:40]
D
Yeah, no, I think you're perfectly, I think you, you really hit it. I mean, the Lebanese army, just to start with, that the Lebanese army is, has been in this very precarious situation where on the one hand it's the, it is the kind of, obviously the legitimate body that is mandated Both through the UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that was passed after the 2006 war and through recent governmental decisions to effectively go into the south and replace Hezbollah as the only military force that is south of the Litany and close to the border. They have, on the other hand, been prevented from having proper arms. So they have this kind of legitimacy, but they don't have any arms to, certainly not to confront the Israelis and at the same time, certainly not to be able to confront Hezbollah. So there have been forces, and definitely the Israelis have been pushing this for a long time and I think some within some of the American circles as well, which is to try to create this dynamic that would turn the Lebanese army into effectively an anti Hezbollah, so called anti terrorist kind of armed forces that would only focus on the internal situation and act in a way that was beneficial to Israeli interests. You know, some people have said that, you know, perhaps it's a bit like the Palestinian Authority creating security forces that, you know, basically deals with trying to stop any kind of resistance to the Israelis. I'm not saying it has become that, but I think that's one of the plans that was pushed. What we see in the army and Rudolf Haeckel, who's the head of the army now, is, you know, he's. He's played a really interesting role where he understands that, and he's been trying to stop that and understands that if the army were to do this, the army might very well split up and that would be a disaster and might push into a situation where we'd lead to a kind of civil war or the beginnings of some kind of civil strife which nobody, and certainly not the army wants. Well, nobody, I say nobody. The Israelis may want that, but certainly nobody in Lebanon really wants that. And there was reportedly a big argument that happened between him and the prime minister whereby the prime minister of Lebanon was trying to push the army to, let's say, to execute the orders and to go into the south, to even to arrest those that had launched the individuals who had launched the missiles across the border and to. To prevent any kind of attacks that go from the south into Israeli areas. And at the same time, and this is a bit bizarre, they've also insisted that as of now, the Lebanese army should enforce the second phase of a previous governmental decision, and that is not just to disarm Hezbollah south of Litany, but to start disarming them north of the Litany. And we're talking about in the middle of a war. So what the army has done now is it's been told to. To remove its positions across the border. So they've removed, as the Israelis are starting to enter, the army positions have withdrawn. But the idea that the army can in any way fight Hezbollah or prevent them in the middle of a war is, of course, kind of a ridiculous notion.
- [33:54]
C
I think it's also important to remind people that after, when Israel escalated the war in Lebanon In September of 2024, war assassinating Hassan Nasrallah and then essentially invading and, and carpet bombing areas, that over 1.2 million people were displaced, over 3,800 people were killed. But it's, you know, much of southern Lebanon was completely destroyed. I managed to, to go to Kafr Kela, which is right on the border, just three days after the Israelis withdrew. There was no village left. I mean, literally, it looked like an earthquake had hit. There's nothing there. So you're talking. And these attacks have. Have happened really on an almost daily basis. You know, we put out this newsletter every day, and it's almost every day that there's an attack. And so I think when you're, when you're talking about Hezbollah responding and why did they do it, that it was existential that if Iran, its main benefactor and conduit for support and weapons, is getting Attacked, the Khameneis assassinated. If they don't respond now, then when. But people that we're speaking to in Lebanon, I think there's mixed feelings about it because the country has been decimated and there's again mass displacement happening and people are extremely kind of just exhausted, essentially. That's what it seems like. But where do you think this is going now? I mean, do you expect an escalation? I read that Hezbollah also sent in a swarm of drones into Israel as well. So they seem to be continuing and they responded to the prime Minister's comments yesterday and saying basically that you are incapable of defending Lebanon, essentially.
- [36:02]
D
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think Hezbollah's position at this point is they're not going to pay that much attention to kind of internal governmental decisions in this phase. I think that moment is over. In their logic. They will have said, look, We've been waiting 15 months for the government, for the army to protect people in the south, to try to enforce that the Israelis withdraw from those so called security points that they had erected and now they want to kind of increase it in the buffer zone in south Lebanon and that's going to keep creeping north. And that the Lebanese government and their international benefactors, whether it's in the US or the Saudis or anyone else, have been unable to do anything and to protect people. And you know, I think around 400 or so people were killed over these past 15 months. And as I said, just, you know, routine daily assassinations, daily attacks, over 15,000 violations documented by the United nations since the so called ceasefire or really cessation of hostilities was concluded. So I think for Hezbollah, they use this to say, look, you guys were unable to do anything. You are unable to affect any of the decisions that you said you were going to do and to protect people and to protect Lebanon. So that the days of talking of the days of restraint are over. We're now part of this regional war. It's not about simply avenging Khamenei's death or being a proxy of Iran, et cetera, but more that this is the battle where we need to kind of join in in order to put as much pressure on the Israelis to, to defeat them or to create a set of terms so that if and when there's some kind of eventual settlement, which I doubt is going to be anytime soon, in their view, this would be something where they could come out with better terms than the previous ceasefire agreement, which really was the beginnings of what is supposed to have been a surrender agreement. So you see what's going on in the area. And by the way, I think for context, it's important to point out that in 2006 or leading up to 2006 and during 2006, the idea was that the Israelis were meant to have destroyed Hezbollah or severely weakened them, and then they were going to impose a kind of surrender agreement on Lebanon. The fact that Hezbollah emerged, let's say victorious politically at least, that was they were unable to do this. If you go back to 1982, when the Israelis had their major invasion of Lebanon and the PLO had to leave, and eventually in 1983, there's a kind of infamous agreement that the Lebanese parliament signed in May of 1983 which de facto created an Israeli buffer zone in most of south Lebanon. And that was abrogated a few months later as the internal situation continued. And kind of the second phase of the civil war started in part because of that agreement. And so we've seen over these last two, three decades that the attempt to try to give the Israelis what they want, which is at least a buffer zone across all of south Lebanon, and, you know, some fear more that is a full occupation and to turn Lebanon into a kind of a kind of Israeli proxy that has been there. Now the gamble from the other side, from those who say, look, Hezbollah like the government and those who are supporting it, and a lot of people who are against Hezbollah is they're saying it's your presence that is preventing the state from growing. It's your presence that's preventing reconstruction from the south. And it's your presence that keeps on bringing the Israelis in. And if you don't do that and if you disarm, everything will be fine and we'll be able to kind of move on and not surrender. But, you know, go with what everyone is is Syria better than us? They're signed. They're going to sign a treaty. You know, Egypt, all these countries, they've all signed treaties. Why should Lebanon be the very, very last country and suffer the most? So that's that logic on the other side.
- [39:54]
A
You know, Karim, I also wanted to ask you about the broader picture of what we've seen over the past two and a half plus years of the since the Israelis launched the genocide in Gaza. You know, just on a purely factual level, if you and actually we talked about this a bit on your excellent show recently, Maktisi street, which you host with with two of your of your brothers, and I encourage people to watch also the Maqdisi street podcast. It's really, really an excellent program. Sharif was also recently, recently on your show as, as I was, but we talked a bit about this. But I want to take it a little bit further. The Israelis have razed Gaza to the ground. They are in control of by Some estimates almost 60% of Gaza right now fully occupying it. They're building up infrastructure there. Sharif has, and Jonathan Whittall have done a lot of really good reporting on that for, for drop site. There's no question that the military capacity of Hamas, of the Qassam Brigades and Sarah Al Quds has been severely degraded the ability to continue manufacturing weapons. The rocket supply has been largely depleted or destroyed. Many thousands of Palestinian resistance fighters have been killed. It's not that there's no resistance or organized resistance. There is, but, but it's, it's, it's really been pummeled by this genocidal onslaught. You then had the decimation of the upper echelons of Hezbollah and the, the ongoing constant targeting of Hezbollah positions, fighters, weapons systems. You had the removal of the Assad government in Syria and then the Israelis bombed the entire conventional military capacity of Syria to ensure that whoever takes power there isn't going to really have a nation state when it comes to the, the weapons or institutions of defense that you would need to say, hey, we're an independent country. You have a very pliant kingdom of Jordan that is cooperating with the Israelis in even further sealing off access to the occupied West Bank. You have the Israelis continuing to bomb southern Lebanon. And the armed resistance in the occupied west bank has been largely incapacitated in part because the Palestinian Authority security forces paved the way for then the Israelis to engage in their single largest force displacement campaign in the occupied West bank since 1967. And in the case of, of Iran, yes, Netanyahu and Trump are talking about regime change. Yes, there is clearly, there are clearly ideas floating around. The Israelis are pumping a lot of so called intelligence down the pipeline in the White House. Oh, we can do this with the Kurds. We have this configuration. You have the monarchists, you know, floating there. But Iran is not Syria. There aren't multiple armed factions in there where you can say, hey, we're going to throw our weight behind them. But it does seem like regardless of if they succeed in removing the Islamic Revolution government from Iran or not is irrelevant in a sense because what the Israelis have always wanted is what they're getting right now, which is to pull the United States into a massive, massive bombardment of Iran where their naval assets are being targeted, where their Conventional missiles are being targeted and the US Is openly saying that they said the Iranians were holding a conventional gun to our head by having weapons of self defense. It's been the primary weapon of deterrence that's existed in the region. Hezbollah and Iran combined with the resilience of the Palestinian resistance. And then, you know, more recently you've had the Houthis, but that those three factors have been the prime resistance against Israel. And so regardless of if there still is a Hezbollah or there still is a Hamas or a Qassam or a Surah Al Quds, or even if there still is an Islamic revolutionary government in Iran, Israel is still getting what it, what it wants. And at the end of the day, in terms of the long view, what Israel believes very clearly is that no matter what the outcome is right now, their position to wage their war of annihilation and expansion and has gotten stronger. Now, the history, the arc of history is very long and you don't know what's going to happen. It may seem like the Israelis are winning the day right now. And certainly on a tactical level, you know, they've achieved things because the United States has facilitated it, that Netanyahu has been agitating for since he first took power as prime minister and even before that in Israel in the 1990s. But my question for you is, given that reality right now, and, and you referenced the idea that this is sort of the war to end wars or the, the sort of great battle that Nasrallah also spoke about frequently before he was assassinated, how do you see the regional dynamic playing out, whether or not the Islamic Republic survives as an institution, given this just campaign of obliteration and, and really offensive, wiping out of the core components of these parts of the axis of resistance.
- [45:23]
D
Yeah, Jeremy, I think just the way I see it is that you got these three ways to look at it. I think inside Palestine, you have, you know, the Israelis. It's a genocidal state that wants pure ethnic cleansing. And we're seeing this, as you said, we're seeing this taking place now. It's also an expansionist state, this idea of Greater Israel. But it's not just this ideological idea of Greater Israel. South Lebanon in particular has always been on their scope in different iterations. At one point it was resources and water, then it became security, and now it's kind of ideological. So however you want to slice it, South Lebanon at least has always been on the Israeli radar. Again, occupation, zone, security, disarming, whatever it is, it's always been part of that. And Southern Syria is Golan Heights, etc. That's all going to be in the same orbit. And then more regionally, you have the idea of it requires total and utter domination in the region. And as you had said before, Iran at this point is the last or the last possible force that would prevent an Israeli domination of the region. And they're already talking about Turkey, so that if Iran falls, you've got got Turkey that's lined up in the next and maybe the final kind of iteration of this, the Gulf now is also being destroyed, and the Israelis are, I'm sure, perfectly happy with that as well. So you have these kinds of these three layers that are taking place, and they're all taking place at the same time, and they all require American support. So if you don't have American support, and the way I view it is that, and we've discussed this, as you said on our podcast, I think the Israelis understand and Netanyahu understands that the era of total and complete American support, which is we're seeing now, is sooner or later coming to an end. And I think they're trying to build themselves up for that post American phase where they can have utter domination of the entire region that requires surrender in Lebanon, Lebanese signing surrender treaties, Syria signing a surrender treaty. The larger regional thing, Abraham Accord, which is sort of basically an Israeli controlled area in which the Gulf plays a kind of minor role, and the defeat of Iran and potentially defeat of Turkey in this, if you keep going further, and then it could go further than that. So you're in a situation where as long as you have this Israeli state that is receiving this unfettered support by America and the kind of liberal establishment in Europe and other parts, we are going to be in constant war. I do not see. I mean, so if you go back to the question of resistance, go to the question of Hezbollah. I think their calculation now is to say, look, if Iran falls, we're doomed, Hezbollah is doomed, Lebanon is doomed. So this is a situation where we need to enter and in whatever capacity possible and support, support this particular attack or, you know, do whatever they can do in order to support this larger regional war, because otherwise the Israelis with the Americas are going to just pick off each of these entities, you know, one at a time, in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, et cetera. And so you need this larger support, let's say, that's coming. And, you know, in particular, Hezbollah kind of focusing its attacks in the Galilee and these areas and trying to engage Israeli radars, engaging Israeli military and even troops that are going to be there. So I think this is for them an existential situation as it is in Iran. I don't think we're going to come to a stop anytime soon. I think it's going to escalate. Unless something strange happens, I think there's going to be a big escalation. I don't know if the Israelis are going to be able to invade fully to go into the south. I think Hezbollah still has quite a strong ability to resist on the ground if the Israelis were to enter. So they're going to just do as they're doing in Gaza. They're going to absolutely pummel and destroy as they've done over the past 15 months, but increase it not just the one or two or three kilometers near the border, but that's, I think, going to go 4 and 5 and 6 and they're going to keep on pushing forward and ensuring that nobody can return to those areas. And then they're going to try to get the Lebanese, the government to sign off on an effectively totally demilitarized zone and have the Lebanese army basically, you know, basically be a police force in southern Lebanon. I think that's what the Israelis want with a very polite government. But I just want to like, as a final point to add here, the government itself certainly doesn't see itself in that situation. They see themselves protecting what they see on the other side as an existential threat, which is that if you don't stop the war and if you don't sign an agreement and effectively if you don't sort of throw yourself to the American and Gulf international support, then Lebanon will cease to exist as far as they're concerned.
- [50:17]
A
You know, just as we're, as we're wrapping up here, there are reports now coming out of Iran that either Israel or the United States struck the building of the assembly of Experts. You know, the, the Iranians are in the process of, are going through the established process of trying to elect and choose a new supreme leader of Iran. I mean, we don't, we don't have a lot of information about what's taken place here. But both the Israelis and the United States have indicated that they are not going to, that they're going to do everything they can to prevent any process like that from taking place and that anyone who is named is going to be immediately becoming a target. There's also been threats from US Officials and Israelis that what we've seen these past four days is just the beginning and that there's going to be an even greater intensification of these strikes. Karim Makdisi with us from Beirut. I want to thank you for all your work and again hope that people check out the Maqdisi street podcast that Karim and his brothers do. One of the absolute smartest shows and very, very relevant right now. Thank you, Karim.
- [51:32]
D
Thank you very much, Jeremy and Sharif and Murtaza.
- [51:37]
A
Murtaza Sharif, thank you very much. I know all of us are on deadline for stories, so we're going to wrap this up as quickly as we can. Murtaza Sharif, thanks so much for doing this with me today.
- [51:49]
C
Thank you, Jeremy.
- [51:52]
A
And that does it for this broadcast of the Dropsite News livestream. Again, you can subscribe@dropsitenews.com we have a phenomenal team of people that work Monday through Friday on putting out what I think is really the best daily newsletter that can hit your inbox first thing in the morning, US Time. And it's an extensive rundown of, I mean, these days it's been 70, 75% of it is just giving a rundown of what's been happening in Iran. We continue our dedication to reporting on Gaza and Palestine in general, also the occupied West Bank. We have a great team of people that work together to put that newsletter out. We don't have a paywall. None of our stuff. You don't have to pay for any of it. If you choose to voluntarily become a paid subscriber, that's a huge part of how we're able to do our journalism. If you appreciate this work, go ahead and click that subscribe button. You can also gift subscriptions to people, but again, we have a firm commitment that we are not putting our content behind a paywall. So you can subscribe and you'll get every single one of our articles by going to dropsitenews.com on behalf of our entire team of people, I want to thank you so much for your support for tuning in. Tell a friend, even tell a foe, about our work. I'm Jeremy Scahill. Thanks so much for joining us. Sam.