Why only Lebanon can drive Hezbollah out. But it won't

The Times of Israel Daily Briefing

The Times of Israel

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4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2026

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.

Lt. Col. (res) Sarit Zehavi joins host Amanda Borschel-Dan for today's episode.

This week, Hezbollah resumed striking Israel soon after an announcement out of DC that the Jewish state and Lebanon had agreed on Wednesday to renew their fragile ceasefire and create a number of “pilot” security zones inside Lebanon from which the terrorist group would be banned.

From her vantage point, only 10 km from the northern border, Zehavi, the head of the Alma Research and Education Center, explains how this plan was unrealistic from the start: Hezbollah is not going to willingly vacate its territory and the Lebanese army -- many of whose members openly support Hezbollah -- is not the force to uproot the terrorist group from southern Lebanon.

Zehavi gives us an overview of the options on the table -- none of them good -- and hypothesizes that the only way Hezbollah will be driven out of Lebanon is if the government takes a principled stance and risks civil war.

And finally, Zehavi, a member of Forum Devora, speaks about how the organization is promoting the equal representation of women in key decision-making positions in the fields of national security and foreign policy.

Check out The Times of Israel's ongoing liveblog for more updates.

For further reading:

Rockets, drones trigger warnings in north after Hezbollah rejects Lebanon ceasefire proposal

Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Ari Schlacht.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Times of Israel's daily briefing. Today is Friday, June 5th. I'm Amanda Borchelle
0:09.6	Dan here in Jerusalem, joined by Sarit Zahavi from the far north. Sarit is a lieutenant colonel in
0:16.8	the reserves and the head of the Alma Education and Research Center.
0:22.7	Sarit, thank you so much for joining me today.
0:23.7	Thank you for having me.
0:24.7	It is such a pleasure.
0:30.2	And today we're going to drill down on what is happening in Lebanon, what has been happening, and what could be happening in Lebanon.
0:32.6	So Sarit will give her views after the break.
0:44.0	Thank you. We'll give her views after the break. As American nears, it's 250th anniversary.
0:48.5	For American Jews, it raises questions about whether the story of belonging that once felt secure still holds.
0:55.8	On the latest episode of Identity Crisis from the Shalom Hartman Institute,
1:00.5	host Yehuda Kertzer sits down with journalist and author Nicholas Lehman
1:04.6	to explore those questions through personal history, American history, and Jewish tradition.
1:10.7	Their conversation traces the promises and limits of American inclusion,
1:15.0	the moral weight of the past, and the challenge of sustaining Jewish identity
1:19.3	without pretending that those tensions have disappeared.
1:22.6	Listen to Identity Crisis from the Shalom Hartman Institute, wherever you get your podcasts.
1:50.0	And we're back. I'm Amanda Bchelle, Dan, joined by Sarit Zahavi, the head of Alma.
1:55.8	Sarit, you are located in the north, unlike many of the policymakers here in Israel.
2:00.1	And I would like to hear, first of all, what it has been like where you live right now.
2:02.4	Where are you located? I'm located 10 kilometers from uh the Lebanese border this is where i'm a center here and i myself live nine
2:08.9	kilometers from the border this means that basically we are under fire for a few years now
	...

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