Jared Malsin
speaker
208 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Apr
Jared Malsin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The Lebanese Hezbollah movement, which is both a militia and a political party and is strongly allied with Iran, decided to intervene in the war on Hamas's side, launching rocket and drone attacks on northern Israel.
For the longest time, Hezbollah said, no, this is an ironclad demand. And according to our reporting, they quietly backed down from that in the last few weeks. And that has happened since this series of devastating airstrikes by the Israelis and this eruption of full-scale war in Lebanon.
And then on the Israeli side, this deal is in part designed to allow the Israeli army to regroup and rearm themselves. And that's important because, you know, Israel relies on these part-time reservist soldiers. And a lot of them, they're not showing up in increasing numbers. And they're still fighting on other fronts, in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech in primetime local time where he made the case for the deal saying that Israel wanted to focus on its confrontation with Iran, that it wanted to isolate Hamas, and that he wanted to allow the Israeli army to regroup and rearm itself.
Netanyahu said he's not going to elaborate on that. Look, so this is all happening in the context of this. The war in Gaza has spawned this larger regional war. That has resulted in Israel and Iran exchanging direct fire for the first time in history. So there's been a lot of concern about the worst case scenarios of full scale war between these two archenemies in the Middle East.
The significance is that in the last deal, so in Resolution 1701 that ended the last war almost 20 years ago, they called on Hezbollah to not have its military forces in the area south of the Latani River. There's also a history here where Israel has kind of used the Latani as they don't want threats to their security in that area.
In the 1970s, they launched what's called Operation Latani to kind of roll back Palestinian militants from that area. And this has been their consistent demand is they don't want militants in that area.
They have signaled their support for it. The Lebanese government says that they have agreed to it and... We've spoken with Hezbollah officials who have spoken positively of it. There is some ambiguity here where they have not come out publicly with an endorsement.
There could be a number of reasons for that, one of which is that it does amount to a climb down from their previous policy of maintaining the linkage with Gaza.
It's a huge concession because it was their entire rationale for getting involved in the war in the first place. They were saying, we are doing this to help Palestinians. It is an act of solidarity with them and an act of solidarity with Hamas, who is an allied group and also part of this constellation of pro-Iranian militias in the region.
And it's a big deal in the sense that they came under a lot of pressure from Lebanese society to stop this. There was a lot of suffering here, a lot of people who had to leave their homes, whose homes were destroyed, a lot of people killed and injured. Obviously devastating for the economy.
What they get is calm. They have suffered a huge setback in this war with basically a generation of their leaders being killed in these airstrikes. It has brought this pressure from regular Lebanese people who, when you talk to a lot of them, will say, you know, why is this happening? You know, what does this have to do with Lebanon? Why are we getting involved in another country's problems?
And there's a sense that they needed to regroup. And there's both the military pressure and pressure from Lebanese people.
That is a really important question. So for the Israelis, one thing that they've insisted on throughout the negotiations is this so-called freedom of action where they want to be able to strike Hezbollah in response to perceived threats from them in order to maintain their security.
A lot of the negotiations that unfolded over the last couple of months were around this point, and they apparently got some kind of guarantees from the US that are separate from the actual bilateral deal itself. They would have that ability. The text of the agreement itself, as you said, just says that both sides have a right to self-defense.
And it talks about, you know, these are two sovereign countries that both have that right.
It will be enforced by, there's supposed to be an international monitoring committee that includes the U.S. and France, and they join these other parties that are already on the ground, like U.N. Peacekeepers, which are a part of UNIFIL, which is the U.N. peacekeeping organization that already has thousands of peacekeepers here.
Well, it's a huge exhale here. You have to imagine this has been two months of constant airstrikes, of people having to leave their homes and staying with relatives, sleeping in their cars, camping in the street, staying in schools. this huge displacement crisis. And now those people are going back.
I mean, there's lots of people piling in their cars and driving around with mattresses strapped to the top because a lot of people who left the South, for example, they took out the mattresses out of their houses. They said, OK, we're leaving. We're going to go sleep somewhere else. And now you can see them driving back the other way.
I talked to a guy today who, he lives in the southern suburbs and the building had been fine for the entire war until last night when it was hit. And he showed up this morning and he kind of, you could see this look on his face of just like his heart sinking, realizing it's like, you have all this anxiety of like, is my house gonna be safe? Is my house gonna be safe?
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