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Israeli drones have killed at least eight people in Lebanon despite an announcement Monday by U.S. President Donald Trump that both Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to stop fighting. Trump's intervention came as Israel threatened new strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut, leading Iran to suspend indirect negotiations with the U.S. to protest Israel's expanding military offensive in Lebanon. Since March 2, Israel has killed more than 3,400 people in Lebanon while seizing large swaths of the country and displacing about one-fifth of the population.
Lebanon is "a weak state, it doesn't have a lot of leverage, and a lot of people are concerned," says Associated Press reporter Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut. "They sort of feel beholden to the regional and global powers on their fate."
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Tehran had said it would suspend negotiations over Israeli strikes in Lebanon.
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We get an update on the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran from journalist Negar Mortazavi, following the Pentagon's so-called self-defense strikes on two Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz Monday despite an official ceasefire and ongoing peace negotiations. The "chaotic" ceasefire "has been violated from day one," says Mortazavi, who notes that Israel's continuous attacks on southern Lebanon are delaying attempts to end the war — and that this is exactly the intention of the Israeli government. "Clearly, Netanyahu doesn't want this war with Iran to end," she says. "Every step of escalation is definitely going to harm the final outcome and narrow the path to a final agreement." Mortazavi also comments on the new political reality for Iran's Gulf neighbors in the aftermath of Iranian strikes on U.S. military bases hosted in the region. "The Iranian message is: If war comes to us, it will not stay inside our borders."
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