Mehul Srivastava

I think the best way to think about it is as two separate but interconnected ceasefires.

There's the U.S.

and Israel war in Iran, and then Israel's war with Hezbollah.

And Hezbollah is supported by Iran, and Iran's other proxies in the region have been decimated over three years of war with Israel.

Hezbollah remains standing and projecting itself as being the protector of the Lebanese homeland has become part of Iran's posture.

Well, you have to look at it through two lenses.

One is Israel has elections coming in October, and some 60,000, 70,000 residents of northern Israel have been displaced from their homes for about two and a half, three years now.

The Israeli army has invaded Lebanon, has occupied hundreds of square kilometers of southern Lebanon, but Hezbollah is not defeated.

It has rockets, and it has declared its intention to defend Lebanese territory by attacking at least northern Israel and further on.

I mean, the last 10 days, we've seen the most strained relationship between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

There was a quite infamous phone call by now reported by Axios and confirmed by Trump himself later on, where he shouted at Prime Minister Netanyahu.

He called him effing crazy.

He blamed a lot of the hatred against Israel on Netanyahu himself in order to get him to call back this major raid.

But then a week later, Netanyahu carries out a precision airstrike, supposedly.

We don't know whether this was greenlit by Trump, but we definitely know that he was unhappy about it because this resulted in a flare-up that almost jettisoned any progress that may have been made in order to end the larger regional war, which is what has pushed oil prices up and has blocked off the state of Hormuz.

Well, I think that we've had now with Donald Trump, who's well known to be quite a plain speaker, a very clear assertion of the relationship between the United States and Israel, where he very clearly understands that U.S.

military assistance, U.S.

diplomatic assistance is crucial to Israel, especially at a time like this at a war.

He told EFT on Sunday in an interview with one of our columnists very clearly, he won't have any choice.

I call the shots.