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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted the first direct talks between Israel and Lebanon in decades on Tuesday in Washington. Hezbollah, which was not a party to the talks, made clear it will not abide by any agreement that results from their negotiations.
Israel's demand that Hezbollah be disarmed is "anything but reasonable," says Daniel Levy, former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. "What [Israel] is doing here is trying to put something that sounds reasonable on the table, but with the intention of embarrassing and humiliating the Lebanese government," which Levy says does not have the capacity to disarm Hezbollah.
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After the first round of ceasefire negotiations in Pakistan collapsed over the weekend, we speak to two former nuclear negotiators about prospects for ending the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, including what another nuclear deal might look like. Robert Malley, a U.S. negotiator for the 2015 nuclear deal (which President Trump withdrew from in his first term), says Trump's "mercurial" behavior makes it difficult to predict his objectives and the course of any future talks. "Iran was in full compliance with the JCPOA" and was blindsided by the U.S.'s decision to pull out of the deal, says Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who served as spokesperson for Iran's nuclear negotiation team from 2003 to 2005. Now its leaders "don't know whether the U.S. is really for diplomacy or not."
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