Global News Podcast - Israel Gaza War: One Year On

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

A year on from the Hamas attack on Israel, Jackie Leonard and Katya Adler from The Global Story put BBC listener questions to our Middle East correspondent, Yolande Knell, and the BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard and I'm here with Katya Adler of The Global Story and we will be joined by the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner

and Yoland Nell in Jerusalem to answer listeners' questions about everything that's been happening since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. And because it's a fast-moving story, we should tell you that we're recording this at 13 hours GMT on Thursday 3rd October. Among other things, listeners have asked for clarity about the main groups and their alliances, about the international reaction and the political calculations that determine how various parties respond,

and, the big concern, the dangers of the violence spreading. So, let's get started. Hello, I'm Katya Adler from The Global Story. And to help us answer the questions, we're joined by the BBC's security correspondent and Middle East expert, Frank Gardner. Hello, Frank. Hi, Katya. And our Middle East correspondent in Jerusalem, Yolande Nell. Hello, Yolande.

Hello there. So, before we get to some of our listeners' questions, let's get a bit of context on this war from you, Frank, and Yoland. Let's travel back in time to the 7th of October last year. Yoland, you were working in the Bureau in Jerusalem that day. I mean, it happened in the morning, didn't it? What do you remember? And just for our listeners to know, I mean, you live in the region. You're not a reporter parachuted in now and again. So this must also have a personal impact on you. Yeah, I mean, you live in the region. You're not a reporter parachuted in now and again. So this must also have a personal impact on you. Yeah, I mean, it was a time where we were relatively short-served. Most of my colleagues were off because it was the Jewish holidays, of course, and it was a Saturday morning.

And when I saw the first sort of early morning red alerts, they started coming through by about seven o'clock in the morning local time. They were coming through on my phone, warning of incoming rocket fire from Gaza. You know, I thought I better get to the office, but it didn't seem to be with such huge urgency at first. We just had no idea of the scale of things that was unfolding. And it wasn't very long. I was in the office trying to absorb the impact of what I was basically saying on air, almost doubting the words coming out of my mouth, because I just couldn't quite believe it. And at the same time, I was running in and out of the bomb shelter that we have here in the office, because there was just so much missile fire, and it was even reaching Jerusalem. And since then,

I mean, Hamas said it launched in that period several thousand rockets, mostly aimed at the communities next to Gaza. And we now know, of course, that hundreds of Hamas fighters were using that rocket cover to break through about 50 sites out of Gaza into the surrounding area in Israel. They were riding motorbikes through holes that they cut in the perimeter fence. They were paragliding in. In some cases, they stormed some of the heavily fortified military bases that I've visited in the past as a journalist. And they even sort of filmed themselves doing a lot of this

and going into the Kibbutzim, which are close to Gaza. And then very quickly, I remember on the Israeli TV that was just rolling in the office, they were talking about these massacres. They were talking live to some people that were at this, you know, now notorious Nova Music Festival about how there were these armed Palestinian squads also on the streets of Starot. And, you know, that all turned into being the deadliest day in the 75-year history of Israel, as it was at that point.

People murdered systematically and ruthlessly. We know that there were, according to a UN report, there are reasonable grounds that they say that rapes were committed during the attack and also that there was the news emerging that hostages were being taken back to Gaza. That was so difficult to absorb all of this. I mean, what happened quite quickly, of course, that day of the 7th of October is that we had in this very unusual step, but you know, under the circumstances, it was Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, and the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came out late morning, he made this declaration,

we are at war. And, you know, that was just the beginning of what's gone on to be a really sort of almost relentless aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip. And Frank, the attack, as we were hearing there, obviously came as an enormous shock to a great many people. But were there signs at the time that an attack might have been imminent? Yes, there were. I mean, look, a number of junior to middle ranking officers in the IDF and in the Israeli intelligence did report signs that Hamas were practicing some kind of a incursion into Israel that they were practicing breaking through border fences and taking people hostage. They pass this up the line, and it was ignored by their senior officers.

I think Israel thought, if there's going to be trouble, it's going to be on the West Bank. Gaza's calm. Why on earth would they want to cancel 25,000 work visas by making trouble there? It was a failure of imagination. Yolanda, you've been talking to us about the hostages. We have had a question from listener Alexander Muemma. He says, please update us on matters concerning the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. What do we know? So far, there's something like 117 hostages that have been returned home alive. Some of those were rescued. There were four of them, of course, released at the start of the Gaza war. 105, most of them women and children and other foreigners that were

returned during that brief week-long truce that we had November between Israel and Hamas. Now, 37 were brought back dead. So you still have, according to the official tallies, 101 hostages in Gaza, at least half of whom Israeli authorities believe are still alive. Just to add some extra complications, there are two hostages in that figure as well, who are Israeli citizens that were held prior to the 7th of October. But I mean, importantly, we've had, in terms of their situation, these 10 months of successive rounds of negotiations to try to get a ceasefire and hostage release deal, but they have themselves not produced another truce. They've not freed a single hostage. In recent days, I've gone back to some of

the hostages whose stories I've been following up on over the past year. Hadas Kolduran, who is a woman who survived the near-Oz attack, she's the mother of two children, her youngest, that were taken hostage with her ex-husband from the kibbutz. Her son and daughter came home back at the time of that truce last year. Her ex-husband remains in captivity nearly one year on. And, you know, her life, as with so many of these hostage families, has just been taken over by campaigning. And she talks about how her 16-year-old daughter feels so much is on her shoulders. She actually last saw her dad in the tunnels, and he said to her, don't forget about me.

Yolanda, you talked about the effect on the hostages' lives. I mean, the hostage situation has effectively divided Israeli society, hasn't it? And the attacks on the 7th of October have scarred Israelis. I mean, they've not felt so vulnerable for decades. But what about Gaza? I mean, we've mentioned the immense Israeli military response. Israel said it was going to wipe out Hamas. But we've just heard story after story of women and children, civilians made homeless, being killed in the military strikes. What does Gaza look like a year on? I mean, one of the frustrating

things for us as journalists, of course, is that Gaza, which I personally visited so many times in the past, and I know you have been there a lot as well, Katya, I mean, it just doesn't exist in the same way anymore. But we are not able to go there as foreign journalists. We've not seen with our own eyes, although, you know, it's very clear from testimony from the footage that we do see that it's just transformed. You've got almost 2 million Gazans, it's more than 85% of the population that have been forced out of their homes since last October. Some of the people have been displaced multiple times. You know, the number of people killed, and we're

relying here on the figures from the still Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, but these are figures used by the UN, more than 41,615, 96,000 more than that, I'm sure, injured. Other people, thousands of them reportedly still under the rubble. And it's just shocking. Two thirds of the buildings in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed since the war began, according to the latest UN figures that have come out where they use very high resolution satellite imagery. And they say that this amounts to something like more than 163,000 structures. I mean, it's just phenomenal. We have farming areas destroyed, buildings of cultural importance. I mean, people are just living in these dire conditions. Somebody was showing me a video

earlier that was shot on the coastal road in Gaza just the day before any of this happened. Of course, most people in Gaza had no clue that this was on the cards. And there's, you know, just people looking kind of relatively carefree. They're by the sea. And it's just shocking to think that that's in Gaza City. So many buildings there, so many of our colleagues' homes. They've fortunately, many of our kind of full-time colleagues been able to leave the Gaza Strip. But most of them, when I'm speaking to them, they don't have homes to go back

to, if that was even a possibility. They've lost loved ones. And they've just seen everything that they care about really destroyed in Gaza. So obviously, we've been hearing about the impact on Gaza on the Gaza Strip. Frank, our colleagues at BBC Search have identified that one of the most searched questions online at the moment is, why is Israel attacking Lebanon? So how did Lebanon get pulled into this conflict? So the day after the Hamas attack on Israel, in other words, October the 8th, Hezbollah, which is the Iranian-backed Lebanese, both a military force and a political entity prescribed as a terrorist organization by many governments, including Gulf Arab governments and Western ones. Hezbollah decided that in solidarity with their Palestinian brethren, as they put it, that they would start firing rockets across the border from South Lebanon into northern Israel. And they've kept that up for 11 months, or nearly a year now. And it's been enough to drive out somewhere between 60 and 70,000, some estimates put it more than that,

of Israeli residents from northern Israel. They've had to leave their moshavs, their farms, their businesses, their homes, because of this incoming rocket fire, which is returned, by the way, by Israel with drone strikes, artillery, airstrikes. But it's been this sort of cross-border, low-level rumbling tit for tat. is that Hezbollah might have been planning to use, in fact, they say they have evidence that they were planning to use their so-called Radwan force, which is their kind of, people call it elite, special force, kind of commando force, to make a breach in the border fence and come across, storm across, kill, kidnap, and drag residents of northern Israel back into Lebanon. In other words, repeat

exactly what Hamas did in the south, so that Israel would now have a hostage crisis on both ends of its country. Now, obviously, we're recording this on Thursday, the 3rd of October, and this is a very fast moving story. But what is the situation as we speak now in Lebanon? It's getting worse and worse. So Beirut has just undergone its first airstrike right in the centre of the capital, a place called Bashura. Up until now, all the airstrikes have been in the Dahia, which is the the Bornea, the suburbs in the south of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold. At the same time, Israel has invaded South Lebanon. It hasn't gone very far. They are trying to make this a what they call a limited targeted operation. It's notthine tunnels that Hezbollah has been digging. This is not going to be an easy process. They already lost eight soldiers yesterday.

It's going to be a long, costly and bloody business. And as ever, the people who are going to pay the biggest price are going to be the Lebanese civilians. They already have done over a thousand people killed so far. A lot of those are Hezbollah fighters. It's a decapitated organization with its leader and its leadership gone, but it's fighting on, and that is helping to propel a much bigger crisis between Israel and Iran, where the two sides have got their fingers on the trigger. Iran already sent a load of missiles at Israel, ballistic missiles. Israel has vowed to retaliate.

That's where the Middle East is really holding its breath. This is a collaboration between the Global News podcast and The Global Story, getting answers to listeners' questions from our security correspondent, Frank Gardner, and Jerusalem correspondent, Yoland Nell, including the biggest concern, what might happen next. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads?

Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC podcasts. So let's talk about Iran's role in the current spreading conflict in the Middle East. I mean, on Tuesday night, Iran launched almost 200 ballistic missiles towards Israel. That's unusual, isn't it? Iran's second such attack on Israel this year. It launched about 300 missiles and drones in April. But that's pretty exceptional, even though, right,

Iran is such a big player in the Middle East and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So for much of the last 45 years, Iran and Israel have fought a kind of cold war, a kind of shadow war where they have attacked each other's interests, but not fought any conflict directly. That changed after April the 1st. If you remember, the Israeli Air Force targeted, they did an airstrike on Iran's consulate in Damascus. They attacked a diplomatic premise, they bombed it, they killed several members of Iran's Revolutionulate in Damascus. They attacked a diplomatic premise, they bombed it, they killed several members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, including the one-star brigadier general who was coordinating the flow of weapons from Iran through Syria to Hezbollah, which would

then be used to attack Israel. So Israel said, it's an unjust self-defense. Iran took 12 days to respond to that. And then they carried out that direct attack on Israel with around 300 drones, crews and ballistic missiles, all of which or 99% of which were shot down by a kind of coalition of the US, Britain, France, Jordan, possibly the UAE, as well as Israel. Iran clearly didn't want to cause a lot of damage. It felt it had to respond. It had to do something to show strength. But it telegraphed what it was going to do. It gave everybody plenty of time a week to prepare. This last time was a bit different, because Iran feels that it owes Israel on two scores. On July the 31st, Israel assassinated, well, everyone assumes

it was Israel. It hasn't claimed it, but everyone knows it was. They assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran, in the heart of the Iranian capital, with a bomb. And then they assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, who has been the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon since 1992, and possibly Iran's most important person in the entire Middle East. He's the new Qasem Soleimani, who President Trump assassinated, not personally, but ordered his assassination back in 2020. So Iran felt, look, we can't simply stand by and watch the dismantling of our biggest ally, Hezbollah, the assassination of our leaders and friends,

we've got to respond. And there would have been a furious debate between the hawks and the more pragmatists in Iran's security establishment. Do we hit Israel hard? Or do we hold back in case they hit us back harder? They've chosen to hit pretty hard with this flurry of ballistic missiles, some of which got through, but they were aimed at military sites, not civilian ones, Iran says. Israel has now vowed a really tough response. They're currently under Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year. But there is a widespread belief that when that ends, after Friday evening, that Israel is going to retaliate in some way against Iran. And Iran has said, if you do that, we will hit you back even harder. And looking at this, this most recent attack, Frank, what does it tell us about Iran's possible intentions next? Well, what Iran would

like is to leave it at that they want to keep their proxies in place by proxies that their allied militias, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, various militias, they've got Iraq and Syria. But it looks like matters are coming to a head because Israel, under the prime ministership of Benjamin Netanyahu, which for much of the time is immensely unpopular amongst Israelis, he's a very controversial figure. He dropped the ball on October the 7th. He knows that when war ends, he will have to go to court and face corruption charges and also be accused of having the biggest security lapse in Israel's history. But for now, he's riding high in public opinion because he's taking on Israel's enemies. He's taking out the

Houthis oil installations in Hodeidah. He looks like he's poised to hit quite possibly at Iran's export terminal at Kharag in the Gulf, Kharag Island. He may even possibly, if the hawks get their way, tackle Iran's nuclear facilities. It's going to be very difficult to make much impact there because they're buried hundreds of meters beneath the mountain or several mountains. But there is speculation that they could try to use this opportunity when the West is saying we are all with Israel to defend it. But the rest of the region is saying, guys, please don't do this, you know, because this could catastrophize in any number of ways. Iran has made it clear

that if it's attacked, it will hit back not just at Israel, but at those countries that support Israel, that provide it with support. And that will probably include US bases that are up and down the Gulf, not just in Syria and Iraq, but in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman. Well, let's talk about some of the other countries that are involved in all of this. And if we mention that Iran is sponsoring Hamas and Hezbollah and others, we have to look at the role that the US is playing in all of this. Let's hear another question from a listener. This one comes from Anne in Oregon in the United States.

Hi, this is Anne Castleton from Portland, Oregon. I listen to the Global News podcast every day to keep up on international news. I have followed the news in Gaza and now Lebanon since the very beginning. And I'm just puzzled. It seems to me like President Biden and most people are very concerned about how much killing Israel has done in Gaza of citizens and non-Hamas people, and now the same thing in Lebanon. And yet we continue to supply them weapons and money. So I don't know why we do that. So Yolanda's question there about Washington's continued support for Israel, why is the US such a big supporter of Israel? And has this always been the case?

I mean, certainly the US was the first country to recognise Israel as an independent state way back in May 1948. There was a lot of historic sympathy for the idea of a homeland for the Jews. But you can see that relationship has changed, it's taken shape over the years, so that by the 1960s, you know, the Cold War, Israel's a vital counterweight to sort of Soviet influence in the Middle East. And it's sort of started turning into this mutually beneficial alliance with lots of military and strategic economic aspects. And over the years, you know, we've seen the US as a superpower, Israel's closest ally, really trying to sort of shore up peace for Israel with its neighbours, Jordan and Egypt, helping it to sign these new peace treaties under President Trump with new Arab countries, and trying, you know, it's been a broker

over the years when there were direct peace talks happening between Israel and the Palestinians. It's tried to help mediate a ceasefire and hostage release deal over the past 10 months during this war, helping with the indirect talks going on between Israel and Hamas, tried to resolve disputes with Lebanon, including recently by sending its envoy there. And, you know, you could say that Washington has gained out of all this a sort of a foothold in the Middle East. It gets very useful intelligence, technological partnerships with Israel. And it's really very much part of how the US shapes its foreign policy towards the Middle East. Israel's very much at the heart of it. And remember, it's cumulatively, it's the largest

recipient of US foreign aid. And I was looking at a figure recently saying, you know, that over the years, if you if you work out how much foreign aid has gone to Israel, it's more than $300 billion in economic and military assistance. I mean, that's just an extraordinary amount. Well, absolutely. As Israel's biggest ally, richest ally, most powerful ally, the US generally assumes it's got a lot of influence over Israel. But that doesn't seem so evident at the moment with Joe Biden having a massive amount of influence over Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Is that just the public perception? Is it the same behind the scenes? And does it matter, since we're so close to the US election, who the president is?

I think it definitely matters who the president is. And it's often remarked in the media here how much President Biden talks about himself as being a Zionist, despite the fact he's a Catholic, really considers himself to be such a lifelong supporter of Israel. But at the same time, he's had for a long time this very difficult relationship with Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. So I would say that the U.S. definitely still has significant influence. I mean, it's as we've seen in the past year, it acts as a diplomatic shield for Israel at the UN. It is still this major giver of military aid, but it's also been mostly keeping this flow of aid, tank and artillery ammunition, the bombs, the rockets, the small arms that Israel has relied on to wage war. It's kept

those mostly coming. It's not really wanted to use its military aid much as leverage since the 7th of October. And, you know, it also gets involved in Israel's defence. We saw that just with the latest ballistic missile attack by Iran, where US destroyers helped to shoot down some of the incoming missiles, you know, warships that were in the east of the Mediterranean, that sort of whole defensive footing by the US in this region has really been built up over the past year. And we keep hearing from the US about its ironclad support for Israel. But then you'll get from Israel that the government and Mr. Netanyahu, in particular, really insisting that they make their own decisions about national

security. And you can see Mr. Netanyahu has really angered President Biden, the Americans on occasion, during these months of hostage and ceasefire deal negotiations for Gaza. He's often seen by people in Israel, as well as the international community, as prioritizing his own political survival, overdoing some kind of a deal. And there have just been so many moments over the past year, you know, where, for example, the US urged Israel not to go into Rafah in the very south of the Gaza Strip with ground assault. It did. It urged it to take a ceasefire deal with Lebanon just before all of this latest flare up. It didn't. And it asked it not to launch a ground invasion against Hezbollah. As we understand,

that wasn't listened to either. I mean, I would say, though, that the US does seem to get to limit Israeli actions. It tries to act as a moderating influence and as this sort of strong ally. And we've seen that have an effect, for example, back in April, when Israel was planning its response to the major attack that we had then from Iran. And it does seem that the US kind of helped to limit that. It's so worried about a spiralling regional war, that we then just had Israel taking out an air defence outpost near Isfahan. I mean, importantly, it's not the same message coming from Washington. It seems to be more supportive this time. Although President Biden has been saying that the nuclear sites in Iran are off limits. So we have to see how Israel responds to the discussions it says it is having with the Americans at the moment.

Well, indeed, without a doubt, there has been an escalation in this conflict in the last week. And so many of our listeners want to know what is likely to happen next. Given Iran's missile strikes on Israel, people do want to know how likely is it that Israel will attack Iran? And what might the next few weeks look like? I mean, Israel is vowing to sort of respond forcefully. This is what the Israeli Prime Minister has said. There is this kind of idea in Israel that if you get hit, you have to hit back harder. And that is the way that you restore deterrence. Now, we're talking about attacking strategic sites. If you look in the Israeli media, there's so much speculation about

what a target list might be, whether this could be sort of oil and gas production sites, whether there could be targeted assassinations carried out within Iran. And of course, nuclear sites have been talked about. They've been seen, Iran's nuclear program has been seen for more than 20 years now by the Israelis as being a real threat. It's not clear, though, if Israel would want to kind of pursue those nuclear sites without the Americans being on board. I mean, I think we have to brace ourselves for another phase, yet another phase in this regional war with the US and with other international parties, with other countries in the region potentially getting sucked into that. And how can this all end? Yolande, there's often this, we hear about the two-state solution being

bandied around, not just as key to ending the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, but also between Israel and the wider Middle East. First of all, briefly, could you just explain what is the two-state solution? Well, this is the international formula for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. As written up in UN Security Council resolutions, it's basically the idea of two states, Israel and a newly created Palestinian state living peacefully side by side. The Palestinian state on the basis of pre-1967 borders. So the Palestinians hope for their future state on the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and with East Jerusalem as its capital. But I mean, this has been the basis of years of these

on and off direct peace talks brokered by the US that really froze back in 2014. OK, Yolande, thanks for explaining the idea of the two-state solution. But how realistic is it right now? Here's a question from our listener, Frédéric Dussier in Paris. The two-state solution seems to be the sole political solution in the region. Could you tell us who is today actually supporting this solution on both sides? I mean, Israeli side and at once, Palestinian and Arab sides. Thank you. Frank, even though the two-state solution keeps being mentioned in Arab countries, as well as the the United Nations as a solution to quietening

things down generally in the Middle East, never mind from Israel and the Palestinians. On the ground, how much realistic hope is there of that taking place? Under the current governments in Gaza and in Jerusalem, zero, no chance. Prime Minister Netanyahu is not interested in a two-state solution, nor is Yahya Sinwar. So you've got two government leaders who don't, they don't want to live side by side. So I only see this clearing the way when there is a more peaceful ruler. I don't know what system of rule it's going to be in Gaza, but involving the Palestinian authority in some way, but not Hamas. And when the current government in Israel is replaced by one that is prepared to allow Palestinian self-determination,

that is prepared to give them a country with contiguous borders that allow it to actually exist as a state. Obviously, Israel is going to need some very cast-iron security guarantees to make sure that the new nascent Palestinian state doesn't simply become a platform for lobbing rockets into Israel. But that can come down the line. The fact is, you've got to first of all accept their right to have that and East Jerusalem as their capital. They were offered that by previous Israeli governments, Ahud Barak, for example, discussed giving them 98% of the West Bank, East Jerusalem as their capital. Yasser Arafat wasn't interested. He didn't like that. He turned it down. He wanted right of return for all Palestinian exiles who were living as refugees in other Arab countries from 1948.

Israel is never going to commit demographic suicide by allowing that. But once you put the whole thing on a path for a recognizable path for a two state solution, you start to marginalize the men of violence, you marginalize the extremists. And if you give people a realistic hope, which there isn't at the moment, if you give people a realistic hope, then you will carry the mass of body, which there isn't at the moment, if you give people a realistic hope, then you will carry the mass body of opinion on both sides of the frontier with you. We're hearing a chorus of calls for peace and for a ceasefire. This question came from Pakistan.

Hi, this is Mikuram from Islamabad, Pakistan. Is there any way to stop these wars and bring all the stakeholders on the table? So that's the big question from Mikuram in Pakistan. Is there any way to stop these wars and bring all the stakeholders on the table. So that's the big question from Mikharam in Pakistan. Is there any way to stop these wars? How do you get people to sit down and talk? Well, several countries have spent much of the last 11 months trying to get a ceasefire for Gaza. And they did get one in November, as Yolanda referred to, which secured the release of over 100 hostages. But I attended a couple of weeks ago in the UK Foreign Ministry, the Foreign Office, the joint presser between Antony Blinken,

the US Secretary of State, and David Lammy, Britain's equivalent. And they said, look, we're 90% of the way there for a ceasefire in Gaza. But it's the last 10% that's really difficult getting that over the line. And there are a couple of big sticking points here. One is that Israel is not prepared to relinquish control of the border between the southern end of the Gaza Strip and Egypt, because it's been used as a massive conduit for smuggling weapons into Hamas up until now. So they don't trust anybody else to keep security on that. But Hamas under Yahya Sinwar, who's probably hiding out in a tunnel somewhere underneath Gaza surrounded by living hostages, he or Hamas say, well, we're not interested in signing this unless we can be sure that all Israeli forces are going to leave Gaza and not come back. So they can't bridge that gap at the moment. So without a Gaza ceasefire, Hezbollah don't want to lose back. So they can't bridge that gap at the moment. So without a Gaza ceasefire, Hezbollah don't want to lose face. So they want to carry on lobbying rockets into northern Israel.

Israel doesn't want to lose face by backing down from its ever enlarging incursion, invasion into Lebanon. And meanwhile, they've got this standoff with Iran. So it's a very brittle situation at the moment that involves all of those players. And I don't think anybody is really listening at the moment to calls for restraint. Yolande, if we kind of end now where we started, if you like, with Israel and Hamas. So for now, Hamas's infrastructure, its leadership has been heavily damaged by the Israelis, but the organisation is hanging on with leaders inside Gaza and outside as well. What are its goals then right now? Is it survival or is it more ideological? One of our listeners, Elena, emailed us this question. She wants to know about the goals stated in the Hamas charter, she says, especially Article 7 and 13.

Both imply the total annihilation of all Jews, she says. I haven't heard much mention of Hamas goals in the recent news. How relevant is the Hamas charter to the conflict as a whole? I mean, certainly if we go back to the Hamas covenant, which kind of gives its vision, it does give us a clue as to how much it was sort of underestimated, how much people maybe had forgotten the extent to which this was a highly ideologically driven organisation, with members prepared to die for that ideology. And the idea that Hamas had been in government, that we'd seen this very different side to it,

away from the military, the armed wing. I mean, under Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza at the time of the 7th October attacks, really seen as being their mastermind, the organisation that had really gone back, perhaps, to some of those founding principles. But when it comes to the endgame in this current conflict, I mean, I would say that has changed over time.

And at this point, Hamas really wants to be able to survive as an organisation in some form. I think, you know, what we get as mutterings from the talks that have been going on is that, you know, they are ready to ostensibly give up power in Gaza. They recognise that that will be necessary, but they still want to be able to exist. That means leaving some of those leaders in place, many of them, of course, senior figures outside of Gaza. And Israel's official war goal is completely at odds with this. I mean, it has been negotiating indirectly with an organisation that it says it wants to dismantle both politically and militarily.

But you've also got the other official war goal of Israel to bring the hostages home. Another one is to ensure Gaza does not pose a threat to Israel. So you can see just the complications here for both sides as they try to kind of negotiate their way out of it. You've also got now what's added to all of the complications in this region with the expanding war. Israel has added officially to its war goals that it wants to return Israelis safely to their homes in the north of the country. You'd have 60,000 people who were

displaced by fighting between Israel and Hezbollah that went on in parallel to the war in Gaza. Israel saying that, you know, it had to deal also with that threat from Hezbollah just next door. Now, as the conflict sort of goes to the wider Middle East to bring in Iran and its other proxies, other regional players, it's a very worrying moment. You know, there are some in Israel who see in the military and political establishment, particularly in this far-right government, that there have been recent military successes. Now it's time to deal with other threats, to push more, even with the Gaza war still dragging on, even with the risks of the ground invasion of Lebanon still not entirely clear. There are some who want to make a sort of transformative change in the Middle East,

even deal with that threat from Iran's nuclear program. I mean, it's obviously not clear if that's achievable. It's just a really high stakes moment. And it's so difficult to call where this is going to go. I think the best analogy that I can leave you with is imagine a forest fire, there are lots of different pockets of it. And there are pockets that are burning away representing various conflicts in the Middle East. There's one that's been burning away for the last 11 months, that's Gaza. There's another one that's flared up in a different part of the forest, that's Lebanon. There's a smaller one that's burning away in Yemen. But the one that terrifies people is the forest fire where the flames are getting very close to a petrol refinery.

And that is the current standoff between Israel and Iran. If those flames reach the refinery, it's going to be a very big fire and a very big explosion. Thank you, Frank, for joining us. You're welcome. Thank you so much, Jo Land. Thank you. It's really good to speak to you. And that's all from us for now. But there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. Our thanks to Katia Adler, to Frank Gardner and Yolande Nell, and indeed to everyone who sent in

their contributions to the discussion. Our apologies if we didn't have time to get to yours. If you would like to comment on this podcast, do please send us an email. The address is Thank you. your BBC podcasts. This edition was mixed by Jack Graysmark. The producers were Judy Frankel, Pete Ross and Alice Aylett-Roberts. Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard and until next time, goodbye. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts

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