Well, and also speaking of the border there, I mean, this seems part and parcel of having these massive civilian occupation so-called protests that are shutting down the borders and blocking the aid from getting in. How widespread is that? How many different border crossings are there to block and how effective are they at doing this, Dave?

So as far as I know, the Karam Shalom border crossing is the only one that Israel has opened up for aid in to Gaza. And that's actually what the argument was about because Ben Gavir did basically told the police to stand down and not break up these protests. But then apparently the military came in and got the police to arrest some of these people who were trying to block the aid. I don't know how successful they were. I think in some cases they blocked some shipments. But so that's what Ben Gavir was so mad about. And then there's also a smotrich, Bezel El-Smotrich. He's the finance minister. He's also basically in charge of the West Bank. And he is blocking, apparently, there was this US-funded shipment of flour that Netanyahu promised Biden he would let in to Gaza, but Smotrich is blocking it. And they act like these two smotrich and Ben Gavir are kind of fringe and don't represent the Israeli government. But they have very powerful positions in the government. And these are the people who were sending all these bombs to for this war. But the US has singled them out before and made statements against Ben Gavir and Smotrich's rhetoric about resettling Gaza, about expelling Palestinians. But that's a pretty widespread view among the Israeli ministers in the government. And now,

tell me, did I read you right here that the entire National Security Establishment has supported these talks and a ceasefire plan, Shimbet Masan and the IDF, but Netanyahu has vetoed and thrown the whole thing out?

That's what it looks like. So there's these reports from Israeli media that, so there was talks in Cairo on Tuesday between Burns, the CIA director, Qatari Egyptian and Israeli officials. And the head of the Masan, the head of Shimbet and the Israeli IDF officer, I forget his name, who's in charge of basically trying to find out where the hostages aren't Gaza, drew up an outline for a hostage deal that they wanted to propose to Hamas and Netanyahu rejected it and said, no, go to the talks just to listen. We're not going to put anything new forward. And now he's vetoed the talks. He's ended them without consulting his war cabinet. Now his security cabinet, which includes Smotrich, Ben Gavir, they're very against the hostage deal. The war cabinet that was formed, that includes Benny Gantz, who's sort of an opposition figure. He was in a previous government with Netanyahu. And so there, the war cabinet's very unhappy about it. And of course, the families of the Israeli hostages are. So this is Netanyahu unilaterally ending these talks because it's in his personal interest to keep this slaughter going. If they reached a deal and there was a long ceasefire, say for six weeks, which was apparently on the table, everything would calm down the region probably. And restarting it would be Netanyahu would be under a lot of pressure not to restart it. So he wants to just keep this thing going. I think that's very clear. Yeah.

Well, and speaking of which here, give us a minute, minute and a half. If you could please on the latest from Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, where this thing is already really spread to a low scale regional war of American Israel against the

Shiites. So in Yemen, basically these US and British airstrikes continue. It's mostly the US doing it on its own, but once in a while, the British join in when they're heavier airstrikes. And there's been about 30 rounds of airstrikes. The Houthis are saying there's been 400 individual strikes on Yemen since January 12th. And it hasn't done anything to stop the Houthis as we've talked about before, as you talked about with Nasser Arby on here. It's not going to degrade their capability. They're not going to back down. So that's still happening. Lebanon, Israel border continues to escalate. Yesterday Israel launched what they said was their heaviest round of airstrikes and killed nine civilians. It was after Hezbollah fired a bunch of rockets and killed one IDF soldier in northern Israel. So that's just still brewing. Who knows what that could. You know, it seems pretty clear that Hezbollah doesn't want a major war. Israel really realistically doesn't have the capability to open a northern front, I don't think. That's something US intelligence reports have said basically without the US directly intervening. Iraq and Syria, it seems like the Iraqi government is working earnestly to get the US out. And I think that has calmed down the Shia militias, even though there was these heavy US airstrikes in the US killed about 40 people in Iraq and Syria, including a few civilians. And then the US did a drone strike and bagged that and killed a Kit-Heb Hezbollah commander. And some people tried to storm the US embassy, but it looks like right now, and I'm talking just the past few days that things have calmed down a bit. And the just about every day now, we see the Iraqi government saying they're working to get the US out. So hopefully that ends with the US leaving Iraq and Syria, but I have my doubts about that.

All right, you guys, that's Dave DeCamp, news editor at news.antiwar.com and sign up for his show anti-war news as well. Thanks very much, Dave. Thanks, Scott. And that's it for anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm at scotthorton.org, and I quit Twitter again so I can write my book. You can find 6,000-something interviews at scotthorton.org, and I am here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA. See you next week.