I'm John Batchel with my good colleague, David Ayud of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.

The ceasefire underway means that the surrogates are looking to Tehran for leadership or not.

David, Hezbollah, waged war on Israel all during the critical months of late 23 through 24 into 25.

And then, after the Israeli and U.S. strike on the suspect nuclear weapons sites,

Hezbollah appears to have stood down.

Despite rocketing and harassing Israel for many months long after it was resolved that they had no leadership, they've continued a harassing

fire and yet silence these last days. Can we explain this? It's odd, Peter, David. It's very odd. Well, I don't know that it's odd.

I think that, you know, we assume that a proxy can only serve its patrons through action.

Sometimes, you know, the best thing you can do is not to act, especially when, you know,

take into consideration that Hezbollah is Iran's main asset.

Iran does not want to lose Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has taken a beating from the Israelis.

They're internally trying to reorganize.

So yes, could they inflict pain upon Israel if they had gone to war?

They could have.

Could they have fought Israel to a stalemate?

Or would this war just opened up more excuse for the Israelis to continue

demolishing Hezbollah? At the same time, internally, within Lebanon, what Hezbollah doesn't

want these questions that are being pushed by the United States, that many Lebanese are pushing

about the fate of Hezbollah's arms to become an active disarmament effort. There's Lebanese street anger.

They want that to calm down, to die down with time and not for it to become street violence

or, you know, pressure from the ground up on the government to disarm Hezbollah for it bringing

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