Why Israel-Hezbollah threatens Trump’s Iran peace plan | If You're Listening | ABC NEWS In-depth

Do you remember back in February when Donald Trump said this?To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.Stay sheltered.Don't leave your home.It's very dangerous outside.Bombs will be dropping everywhere.

When we are finished, take over your government.

It was his first message announcing the beginning of the war in Iran.Trump boldly told the Iranian people to be ready to overthrow their government.

This will be probably your only chance for generations.For many years you have asked for America's help, but you never got it.No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight.

It was very inspirational rhetoric.

Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future.that is close within your reach.This is the moment for action.Do not let it pass.Now when was the moment for action exactly?

Did we miss it?Were any destinies actually seized?Because now Donald Trump is telling us that the war is over.It seems that the promise to help the Iranian people overthrow their oppressors has been tossed down the memory hole.The new deal Trump is negotiating appears to be essentially the same as the Iran nuclear deal struck by Barack Obama and torn up by Trump in 2018, except it's a bit worse.Well, it's much worse.

But regardless of what you think about Trump's deal, I think most people around the world think that the war being over is a good thing.Even if it's not.deal is embarrassing for one side.Unfortunately there's a big thorn in Donald Trump's side here and it starts with B and ends with E .B.

Netanyahu.In all fairness to B .B.Netanyahu who happens to be a good man gets a little excited sometimes.

But he happens to be a very good man.A condition of the US -Iran peace deal is the end of hostilities in Lebanon.But Iran and the US aren't fighting in Lebanon.Israel and Hezbollah are.And in bad news for Trump and his peace deal, Bibi Netanyahu doesn't want to stop.

We have a little dispute over Lebanon.I say you can do a little softer touch, Bibi.You don't have to knock down a building every time somebody walks into it that's from Hezbollah.

No matter what Trump says, Bibi doesn't appear to be slowing down.

We established a security zone in Lebanon and we shall keep it as long as is necessary to protect our people.

The thing is, this isn't the first time Benjamin Netanyahu has dug Israel into southern Lebanon and refused to leave.

We are not going to be deterred.We're not going to relent.

The last time he did it, it cost him his job.But this time, he's convinced it's going to end differently.In fact, this time he's worried that if he's forced to pull out of Lebanon by Trump's peace deal, that's the thing that will cost him his job.The story of what's really going on in Lebanon is complex.We're going to spend the next couple of weeks looking at it.Firstly, we'll see what happened last time Israel did this.

And then we'll look at what's different this time.It's an incredible story.It involves puppet states, exploding pages, spies, and helicopter crashers.And at the end of it, you'll see why this storyconflict is creating such a paradox for Trump and Netanyahu.I'm Matt Bevin and this is If You're Listening.

I've been covering various conflicts in the Middle East on this show for quite a long time.like since before my beard went grey.Nearly three years ago, for instance, we did an episode about the origin story of Hezbollah, the militia that Israel is fighting in Lebanon.Feel free to go back and watch that episode if you like.But for the purposes of today, I'm going to bring 2023 brown beard me in to give you a quick rundown.Right, brown beard?

Sorry, are you ready now?

Our job is weird, do do do do do do.

You have no idea, buddy.Now, tell us about Lebanon.It's the most religiously diverse country in the Middle East, by far.More or less evenly balanced between Christians and the two major branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia.

Only 15 % are Shiites.And Iran is the only Muslim country led by a Shiite, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Sunnis and Shiites do not always get along.

Historically, the division between Sunnis and Shiites has led to intense conflict, which has at times erupted in war.

But in Lebanon, the mountains have separated these groups.You have to be a lot angrier to attack someone over a mountain than across a plain.This has maintained a centuries -long balance.But in the 1970s, something rapidly changed.

Happy?

Yes, thanks.

A lot of good grabs in this, yeah.

Very, pretty happy with the grabs.

I agree.Nice job.Uh, you go get some lunch or something.

Kebab, kebab, kebab, kebab.

Yeah, thanks.for that.Still dealing with the ramifications of my 2023 kebab addiction.Anyway, yes, the thing is, the ancient balance of religions in Lebanon was shifting.After wars in the Middle East through the late 60s and early 70s, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees upset the balance.Palestinians tend to be Sunnis and they were moving into an area dominated by Shias.

Nearly 30 years ago they fled from the state which is now Israel.As refugees, they moved into other Arab countries, determined to win back the land which they believed to be theirs.

After they were repeatedly pushed out of other Arab states, they ended up in the mountains of southern Lebanon.Thus, the Lebanon became their last refuge.Their presence in Lebanon led to two overlapping conflicts.

One was a Lebanese civil war.The war has lasted 12 months.It has ruined a country and destroyed a nation.There is supposed to be a ceasefire in the Lebanon.But it means nothing.There have been 28 ceasefires and each of them has been followed by even fiercer fighting.

The other conflict was between the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a militia led by Yasser Arafat, and Israel.The PLO were using their newfound stronghold in the south of Lebanon to launch terrorist attacks on towns in the northern Israeli region of Galilee.The largest and most vulnerable town in the Galilee region is Kiryat Shomona.It sits at the bottom of a cliff, with Lebanon at the top.Kiryat Shomona is the soft underbelly of Israel.

The people there were constantly under threat of attack from terrorists.Ten metres below ground, the schoolchildren of Kiryat Shmona spend one day each week studying in classrooms designed to withstand rocket and shell attacks.

The PLO used this proximity to their advantage.The PLO's tactic was to break the nerve of Kiryat Shmona and trigger an exodus from Israel's northern settlements.Suffice to say, Israelis who lived in the Galilee towns, like Kiryat Shomona, were seriously concerned about their safety.

The town has full -time psychologists helping people to deal with fear.The government promised that it would fight back.

Israel served notice on the guerrillas that it's prepared to match murder with murder.

But that was a long -term project.In the short term, the best way to protect these citizens was to establish a buffer zone between them and their attackers to make the area less vulnerable.How were they going to do this?Well, the Israeli government figured they had two choices.Option one was to establish a buffer zone within Israel by evacuating everyone from the Galilee region and abandoning Kiryat Shomona.But that was unlikely to be popular with the residents of the area who would need to leave their homes.

Option two was to somehow establish a buffer zone inside Lebanon, north of the border.That would mean that everyone in Kiryat Shomona and the rest of the Galilee region could stay put.But it would mean Israel taking control of a large area of southern Lebanon, which was filled with people who might not like that very much.Doing that with the Israeli military would be very difficult.Convincing the Lebanese military to do it would be impossible.They were in the midst of a civil war, and anyway, they weren't keen to do Israel any favors.

But if you can't do it, then Lebanon won't do it.Who else will?

A right -wing Christian militia has carved out a state within a state in southern Lebanon.Known as Free Lebanon, its 100 ,000 residents live a precarious existence between combatants engaged in a 30 -year war of attrition.

In 1979, in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, a tiny new nation was created.The State of Free Lebanon.It joined a long tradition of countries with names that are Let's say aspirational at best.Your Democratic People's Republic of Korea and your Free China, which at the time were not democratic or free at all.

Free Lebanon is the name that Christian and right -wing militia have given to the 10 to 20 kilometre wide corridor that runs along the southern Lebanon border.

The state of Free Lebanon was a very, very strange little entity.It was set up by a Catholic officer who had defected from the Lebanese army, a guy named Saad Haddad.

What we are asking is Lebanon for all the Lebanese but each one should have the freedom of practicing his faith without being persecuted.

Major Haddad had swiped a few tanks before he left the army and said that they now belonged to what he was calling his South Lebanon army.He then used that army to carve out the territory and declared that it was the only truly Lebanese part of Lebanon.Then he declared himself president of the new enclave.

He does have his own administration, his own militia, he's planning a television station and his first airport and from his radio station here he can beam his message to all of Lebanon and to most of the rest of the Middle East as well.

Now this radio station was not at all what you'd expect in this part of the world.It was amazing.of Haddad's propaganda and American Christian evangelical music.

W -O -R -D and K -I -N -G dedicated to bringing a measure of peace to a troubled world.Now back to music here at W -O -R -D and K -I -N -G.

In the morning, I will sing of your love.

It probably won't surprise you to find out that the business of running a micronation complete with a militia and radio station isn't cheap.In fact, it's one of the more expensive things that a person can do.Fortunately, though, Haddad had a little bit of help propping the whole thing up.

Haddad's so -called free Lebanon can only exist with Israeli support.

It wasn't really a country at all.

It was a puppet state, created for one purpose.In the context of 1970s Lebanon, This wasn't actually all that unusual.

The civil war was so chaotic that the central government basically wasn't operating.There were lots of little mini states all over the place.

The militia of the right are fierce in defense of the territory they still hold.Those who hold the high ground are impregnable.

The Palestinians were basically running their own state in the South.The conservative Christians in Beirut were running their own state in the West.So really, what's one more state?It just so happened that the southernmost mini -state, the State of Free Lebanon, protected by the South Lebanon Army, was a puppet state of Israel.Interestingly, the residents of the area didn't kick up all that much of a fuss about their new leadership.South Lebanon is mostly populated by Shiites, who hated the Sunni PLO just as much as the Israelis did.

The whole situation very much had the enemy of my enemy is my friend energy.So it did at least have a theoretical chance of working.The Israelis, along with Saad Haddad and his South Lebanon army, were using this conveniently placed stronghold to fight the PLO.So the local Shiites were more than happy to stay out of their way.The problem wasn't in the theory.It was in the execution.

Saad Haddad's army wasn't really up to the task of preventing PLO guerrillas from getting through his narrow territory into Israel.

Operating as it does with vintage weaponry such as Second World War Soviet tanks and plagued by desertions, this militia could not withstand a determined Muslim onslaught.

Which meant the buffer zone wasn't working.And attacks on Israeli civilians in the Galilee region continued.

Prime Minister Begin claims more than 150 Israelis have been assassinated on the country's northern border during the last 12 months by PLO guerrillas in southern Lebanon.

So in 1982, the Israeli military launched a full -blown invasion of Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the PLO.

As the tanks rolled north across the border, they promised to bring a lasting peace to the population of northern Israel.They called it Operation Peace for Galilee.

The effects of the invasion were horrific.Lebanese civilians and Palestinian refugees were killed as Israeli forces swept through the country.

What started out as a punitive raid into Lebanon four weeks ago has turned into what some are calling the brutal final solution to the Palestinian problem.

In terms of achieving its objectives, the invasion went about as well as the Iran war in 2026, in that it failed spectacularly.The PLO leadership, includinghead honcho Yasser Arafat, escaped to Tunisia.And hundreds of Israeli soldiers and thousands of Lebanese civilians were killed.By 1985, Israel realized that to fully achieve their objective of destroying the PLO, they would have to occupy all of Lebanon indefinitely.And that wasn't going to be popular with their international allies.

So they withdrew to the buffer zone area that Saad Haddad had been guarding for them.The pretense of the state of free Lebanon was dropped at this point.This was now clearly an area of Lebanon under Israeli occupation to provide security for Israeli citizens living in the Galilee.

Now by this stage Saad Haddad had died of cancer.

And his death, paired with Israel's invasion and occupation, had made the job of maintaining the security zone in the south of Lebanon much harder.All those things had seriously upset the people who actually lived in the zone.

And it operates amongst a Shiite Muslim population, which Israel managed by its occupation to turn from a relatively neutral neighbor into an implacable foe.

The Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon had initially greeted the Israelis as liberators, hoping that they would crush the predominantly Sunni PLO.But the botched invasion and occupation that resulted in so many Lebanese civilian casualties had turned them against Israel.As the Israelis retreated, the citizens of the Galilee were again under threat.

Once again Israelis in the north are preparing themselves for a new onslaught.Their enemy may have changed, the Palestinians have been replaced by Shiite Muslims but they are nevertheless preparing for the worst.

Now an important thing to note here is what those Shiite Muslim militants are called themselves.Hezbollah, a political and military movement supported by the Iranian government under Ayatollah Khomeini.With Iranian financing, Hezbollah created their own quasi -state entity which was pretty similar to Saad Haddad's South Lebanese army.They even had their own TV and radio stations.Obviously though, it was a lot less Christian music and youth pastor vibes and a lot more of this.And like, a lot of big, scary weapons.

But while Hezbollah had replaced the PLO as the primary threat to northern Israel, they were a slightly different kind of threat.While the PLO was focused on terrorising civilians, trying to trigger an exodus, Hezbollah was a bit more strategic.They were primarily a challenge to the Israeli military, using civilian attacks as a tool of retaliation and pressure, not the main event.For the people of Galilee, they were a worry, but not one that made Kiryat Shomona unlivable.They just needed to ramp up their protective efforts.The kids did their lessons in the

bunkers.The Israeli Defense Force and the South Lebanon Army patrolled the clifftop above them.To them, Hezbollah was more of a vague existential risk rather than something that invaded your nightmares.For the Israeli military, though, it was a different story.

Nightfall is not an end, but a beginning of the fighting.A machine gun fires toward where the last Hezbollah attack came from.

Gradually, the Israeli military casualty list grew, past a dozen, then past a hundred.And then one day in 1997, something happened that changed the Israeli population's appetite for the continued occupation of this part of Lebanon.

They began burying the dead in Israel, the first of 73 funerals after a tragedy that has left the Jewish state stunned.

The 73 dead were soldiers killed when two air force transport helicopters collided in just east of Kiryat Shomona.But the government knew that this disaster could have serious ramifications, not because of what had happened, or even how many people had died.but because of where the helicopters were going.

The soldiers on board the doomed helicopters were being ferried to South Lebanon, where Israel's continuing occupation claims a steady stream of Israeli lives.It's increasingly unpopular and debate about its worth is intensifying.

The people of Israel were fed up with the death toll on their northern border.But the prime minister at the time, a young fellow by the name of Bibi Netanyahu, insisted that this terrible accident wouldn't change anything about their strategy in Lebanon.

We're not going to be deterred and we're not going to relent.We shall defend our country.We shall reduce the risk.Ultimately we shall achieve the peace.

But protests by the families of soldiers deployed to Lebanon grew.And the following election, Netanyahu was defeated by a candidate who had made a clear promise.

The new leader has promised to withdraw Israeli soldiers from their buffer zone in southern Lebanon, without risking the security of Israel's northern residents.

A year later, the IDF were out of southern Lebanon.And that area belonged to the Lebanese people again.

Lebanon is celebrating liberation.Two decades of Israeli occupation of the southern 10 % of the country finally came to an end in the early hours of the morning.The last Israeli tank rolled back across the border.

And you might be asking, what happened to the South Lebanon Army, the outfit set up by Saad Haddad back in the 1970s?

Well...Israel says it's preparing to accept 10 ,000 refugees, soldiers and supporters of the Israeli -backed militia, the South Lebanon Army.

The puppet state collapsed instantly, like any puppet does when its strings are cut.Hezbollah claimed the former state of free Lebanon just hours after the withdrawal.

Death to Israel is the chant from Hezbollah fighters.It's not new, but now they're right on Israel's doorstep.

Hezbollah fighters advanced right up to the border fence and started shouting taunts at the Israelis on the other side.

We can't do anything when women and children are here, this Hezbollah fighter tells me in German, but in the dark, you'll see, we'll kill them all.

And yet despite the clear threat of escalation, the violence did not escalate all that much.For the next 23 years, excepting a flare up here and there, the border zone was relatively peaceful.but Hezbollah didn't want Israel to think they were no longer a threat.This prolonged window of peace gave them a lot of time to arm themselves.

Hezbollah has about 100 ,000 missiles south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon there.All those missiles are pointed in towards Israel.

They were waiting for their moment to unleash those missiles.And that moment came in 2023.

Israel has now launched artillery strikes into Lebanon after Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a number of mortar attacks.

Following Hamas's attack on Israel on the 7th of October 2023.Hezbollah entered the war on Hamas's side.

And we've already seen Hezbollah in southern Lebanon firing rockets into northern Israel.

The attacks led to Israel doing something they hoped they would never have to do.They started evacuating Galilee towns.

After days of escalating clashes on its border with Lebanon, Israel has declared some areas closed military zones.forcing residents to leave.

The risk has emptied towns across the north.

Its women and children are gone, as its men prepare for war.In the eastern Galilee alone, where Kiryat Shomona is located, over 39 ,000 residents were displaced.And the people who left wondered when they'd be able to return to their homes.

So you're worried about going back?

Yes, of course.I'm terrified.I have a child, she's 10 years old.I don't want her to live like this.It's a problem.

Any conflict with Hezbollah is bound to be broader and could be even deadlier than the war in Gaza.The group is far bigger than Hamas.

For a country built on the promise that Jews would always have a safe place to live, beingto evacuate the Galilee again was a massive humiliation.It was an admission of strategic failure, essentially handing territory to the enemy.The people who fled were promised it was only temporary, they would be able to return home soon.But that was a promise that seemed like it would be very hard for Bibi Netanyahu to keep.Every day the Galilee was empty was another day that Netanyahu had failed to protect his people.

It was a failure that would surely cost Netanyahu dearly when he needed to face an election in 2026.But here's the thing.Unbeknownst to the people of the Galilee, unbeknownst to almost anyone, an incredibly audacious plan was underway.A plan which Netanyahu and his government hoped would eliminate the threat of Hezbollah once and for all.It was a plan that had been underway for years.A trap that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was unknowingly setting for himself.

That story is next on If You're Listening.