Mark Mazzetti

They basically said, if you want to sit down and talk about an end of the war in Iran, well, Hezbollah and Lebanon are part of the ceasefire as well.

because Hezbollah and Lebanon are absolutely central to the idea that Prime Minister Netanyahu has set forward about the security of Israel.

As much as he talks about Iran and the threat from Iran, the threat from Hezbollah, as he's laid out, is far closer, obviously, to home and central to his own political future.

Well, there's no easy path, and you could see at the end of last week everyone sort of groping around trying to figure out how to sort of handle all of these thorny issues at once.

There was an announcement that Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government would begin discussions with the Lebanese government

about the future of the conflict.

But of course, the Lebanese government is not speaking for Hezbollah and no one's dealing and negotiating directly with Hezbollah.

So that appeared to be a little bit of a fig leaf to sort of appear something was happening where no one really expects much out of that.

And given that all of these issues are so closely stitched together, it does seem like this is all very intractable at the moment.

Yeah, we've talked a lot about how instrumental Prime Minister Netanyahu was in convincing President Trump to go to the war against Iran.

But ultimately, as Ronan said, in this relationship,

Trump holds the leverage in ending it.

And he can tell Netanyahu when the war will end.

Well, I think it's not clear to Trump yet that Hezbollah and Lebanon are the number one sticking point preventing a deal with Iran.

But the more Hezbollah and Lebanon become central to whether this war ends or not,

the more I think the United States and Trump will lean on Netanyahu to end the campaign.

I think that's partly right.

There are many things the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu are aligned on in terms of what they see as important to the security of the Middle East.

However, once a war begins...

things go out of your control.