I'm John Batson with my colleague, Jonathan Shanzer, Executive Director, Secure

Free Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

We're looking at the war fighting in the Middle East in several stages.

We're checking in on Lebanon now, having left Gaza.

We're headed back to Yemen, but Lebanon has been quiet,

which worries me, Jonathan, because the smuggling must continue in order to rearm and reinvigorate

Hezbollah. The numbers there are daunting. The government is completely untrustworthy.

Is there any development here that doesn't look negative?

Well, actually, right now what we're hearing out of Lebanon is that the mechanism for the Israelis and the Lebanese government, the Lebanese armed forces, to identify his Bala threats and then to ultimately have Israel

remove those threats, that that mechanism is actually working quite well.

This was something of a surprise to me.

I was operating under the impression that Israel was acting alone when it targeted

his Bala assets across Lebanon. As we

understand it right now, the Israelis have been calling in the problematic things that they're

seeing in South Lebanon or even north of the Latani. The Lebanese armed forces in most cases,

in fact, maybe all of them, are unable to take the appropriate

military action. And so Israel does it for them. But apparently the Lebanese armed forces or the

Lebanese government, they're not unhappy with this situation. It's actually helping them gain

control over their territory.

This is something that I think a lot of Lebanese people would welcome, even if they don't

necessarily welcome the idea of additional Israeli airstrikes.

But according to reports, anecdotal reports on the ground right now, the Lebanese government,

...