Gaza Conflict: Two years on

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Host (John Donison): You're joining us on the balcony of the BBC's Jerusalem Bureau, high up. So we've got a great view. The occupied West Bank is just about a kilometer behind me, over those hills. And we're about 100 kilometers away from the Gaza Strip, where Israel is carrying out its air and ground offensive. But as international journalists, Israel does not allow us into Gaza to report independently and we do a lot of our journalism from here.

Host (John Donison): On October the 7th, two years ago, Hamas crossed the border from Gaza and attacked Israel, killing over 1,200 people at a music festival in their homes or their places of work. The Islamist group also took 251 people hostage, taking them back to Gaza, where many were held for months on end. Some are still there almost two years on. There have been short ceasefires and hostage release deals, but they have quickly collapsed. Negotiations for a new deal driven by President Trump are ongoing. At the time we're recording this, around 20 living hostages remain in Gaza and more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel.

Host (John Donison): The conflict has dominated the news agenda, sparking protests across the world. And to mark two years of this conflict, we have gathered questions from BBC listeners to put to a panel of our correspondents. I'm John Donison, and this is the Global News Podcast on the BBC World Service.

Host (John Donison): Well, I used to be the BBC's correspondent in Gaza for four years between 2009 and 2003. and I'm joined for this programme by three people who know the region very well. I've got Rushdie Abu Alouf, who's joining us from Istanbul. I've got Jeremy Bowen, who's joining us from London. And here with me in Jerusalem, Yolan Mel. So, yeah, I'm a BBC Middle East correspondent. I've been working in this region for more than 15 years now, and I would say that the last two years have definitely been the most challenging of my whole career.

Host (John Donison): I'm Roshdi Abolov, BBC Gaza correspondent I've been covering this conflict for over 23 years for the BBC I'm Jeremy Bowen, I'm the BBC international editor I was Middle East editor for years and I was based in Jerusalem in the 1990s I did my first reporting trip in fact to cover the conflict in 1991 so going back a long way I have been very busy with it in the last couple of years as well okay so we've got literally decades of experience here Yolan I'm going to start with you I mean you were working on October the 7th 2023 when you woke up that day and heard the news what was your reaction a busy day I imagine and did you think we'd be where we are today

Yolande Knell: It was a Saturday so I was on call it was the end of the Jewish holidays and I came rushing into the office pretty early and I have to say from the beginning it was clear that this was something very different from what we'd experienced before because as soon as I arrived here there were rockets on course for Jerusalem. I was rushing into the safe room where our air raid shelter is when the sirens were going off around Jerusalem and my main memory of that day is my own real disbelief as the words were coming out of my mouth telling people the news and it was a very strange experience because we We've covered wars before. We've covered rocket attacks. We've covered hostage crisis even together. And this was immediately clear that it was on a whole new scale and the kind of rule book that we'd been operating on here had to be ripped up. And I was very worried too because there were friends of mine that I was working with that day who had their friends at the Nova Festival and there were immediately going to be repercussions for people in Gaza where we have our dear colleagues and many people that I know in Gaza as well.

Rushdi Abualouf: It was just a normal Saturday morning. And you know, Saturday is a normal working day in Gaza. So I was about to drive the kids to school, I remember. And suddenly there was rockets flying from all over Gaza. And I was looking from the balcony and never went to my mind that this is, you know, Hamas is crossing the border into Israel. I thought maybe Israel did kill one of the Hamas-like commanders and Hamas is responding. And that was the view or the initial thought from not just me, all of the journalists that have been contacting me and the people. And, you know, within 10, 15 minutes, I realized that this is big when I received the first picture from one of the Hamas people in Gaza, showing the Hamas militants crossing or close to the border. I realized that it is big. I just say to the kids, don't go to school, stay. And I took the car and drove very fast to the office, because you know, our office is in central Gaza, is in the middle of, in the middle of the Rimel Street, which some of the area, some of the roof near us is overlooking the border with Israel. So I was in a high position watching almost rockets flying and all of the noises, you know, around this October the 7th day, which something that will never forget all my life.

Jeremy Bowen: I think it was clear from the first couple of hours. I was in Ukraine, actually. I was in Kiev when it all started. And I woke up and I reached my phone, as millions do, first thing in the morning. And the first thing I saw were texts on our office group chat, WhatsApp, from Rushdie saying hundreds of rockets are being fired into Israel. It wasn't clear what else was happening beyond that. And within an hour or so, it was clear that we were in the wrong place. And we set off on a journey then to Poland and onwards. It took a couple of days. by the Monday morning with my team from Ukraine. We arrived in Ashkelon, which is the Israeli town, which is just at the very north of the Gaza Strip. And we were basically there most of the time between then and the end of the year, until Christmas, more or less. And yeah, by then it was clear that, I mean, as we were driving through Poland, I was looking at the videos coming out and realizing that Hamas had done this big, push over the border and that there was a lot of fighting going on. Clearly, it was something that was going to be very very different

Rushdi Abualouf: It's very hard to imagine that they are still alive, you know, they are still surviving. Every time I talk to my father back in Gaza or my brothers or my friends, I don't know what to say to them. I mean, every day is a struggle, you know. They struggle to sleep because of the sound of the bombs. They struggle to find a clean water. They queue. Like my father moved recently from Gaza City into Khan Yunis. It took him 22 hours to drive about 20 kilometers in the back of a truck with some of his belongings or what is still left of his house. and he moved to almost like a half-destroied building in Khan Yunus. My father is 76 years old. He was born in a tent back in 1949 in Khan Yunus because his mother was pregnant when they left Jaffa about 75, 76 years ago. And now he's lived like a year in a tent and now he lives in a half-destroied building. This is just the story of one person reflecting two million people who have the same situation. Some of them were displaced 10, 15 times. Some of them, they died in the road reaching Khan Yunis. There's a woman I know, she walked 30 kilometers. And as soon as she arrived to Khan Yunis, she was taken to the hospital, then to the intensive care unit for about two or three hours, and she died overnight. So this is just simply the situation in Gaza.

Rushdi Abualouf: for me I live with guilt all the time I feel that I was pushed to leave because of my family I could have stayed more because it's worth I mean this it's it's the biggest story I have ever not only covered but I have ever seen in this place there were always something happening in Gaza for the last 25 years there was five major wars and few small battles in between I witnessed many things The first intifada, the second intifada, the killing of most of the Hamas leaders. Yasser Arafat died and I was like there covering this story. There's really this engagement. I never, ever expected to cover a story such big like this. When the 7th of October happened, I realized from the first, you know, 10 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, just one hour maximum. I realized that this is going to change the way that we feel about this conflict. And it is going to be huge. I tried to push my family to leave Gaza as soon as possible so I can, you know, do my job. Because it's very hard to be a journalist in Gaza looking for safety, running for safety every, like, hour, and then covering the story.

Yolande Knell: It's also I mean it's difficult to state how great the trauma was for Israel on October the 7th I mean where would you say public opinion is now here in Israel regarding the war because it has divided the world and it's divided Israel too in some ways that's true I mean Israel is a small country and I would say it's still extremely raw the grief and the pain from that day two years ago. And, you know, just remember how it was. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. And there is now still a widespread feeling, many Israelis will tell me this, that they believe the world has moved on and that they have forgotten to some extent the atrocities of the 7th of October that triggered such a brutal war in Gaza.

Host (John Donison): Okay, I'm going to bring in some questions now from our listeners. The first one from Sadiq in Mumbai in India, and it's a question about language, and I think it's fair to say we all have to choose our language pretty carefully when choosing this conflict. He says, why does the BBC still not refer to the war in Gaza as a genocide after experts have already labelled it as such?

Yolande Knell: We stand on this balcony all the time. I stand here and I use all those words genocide. I use the word terrorist and I use them with attribution, whether I'm talking about the Israeli military or Hamas or a UN Commission of Inquiry report or the British government. And that's because the BBC has these editorial policies. that we as correspondents, we can comment on those, we can help to shape those, but in the end we all agree to adhere to those. And that's really with the objective to make sure that our journalism is as impartial, it's as accurate as it possibly can be. And the guidelines are supposed to be for our coverage all around the world, where we're catering for a diversity of audiences, right? So the guiding principle that we have is to use descriptive terms to, for example, describe those who are carrying out violence. So that might be using the word attacker or gunman or bombers, whatever that might be. And then we try to explain the facts of what has occurred and what the consequences are. And the idea is that that should be meaningful to our audiences wherever they are. And they can make their own value judgments.

Rushdi Abualouf: Yes, definitely there is a difference between West Bank and Gaza. I have been to the West Bank many, many times, and the people there, they do support Hamas. Many of the people that I met, especially in places like the south, like in Hebron, some of the areas like Jenin and other places, there's a great support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad in those especially two areas, like the refugee camps. And it's partially because they believe that the Palestinian Authority and Fatah are corrupt and they want some alternative. And this is exactly what happened in Gaza back in 2006, when we believe that not all of the people who voted for Hamas were Hamas people or in favor of Hamas but it was on the other side trying to punish PA and Fatah for you know long corruption existing in Gaza

Host (John Donison): Jeremy, I mean, one of the big differences I found covering this war between Israeli and Palestinian opinion is that Israelis feel that Hamas started this on October the 7th. Palestinians feel that this goes way back to the creation of the State of Israel in 1947, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, the war in 1967, where Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Jeremy Bowen: Yeah, I mean, not all Israelis, clearly, but there is a deep-rooted conflict here, an unresolved conflict that doesn't just go back to the independence of Israel in 1948 when they won their independence war and the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, as they call it. The conflict over who controls the land between the River Jordan and the sea and the Mediterranean Sea started when Zionist Jews came from Europe to Palestine, which in those days was, well, at the very beginning, was still being run by the Turks and then the British. And so it goes back more than a century. If you read accounts of, I mean, I recently was reading an account in a memoir by a journalist who was in Jerusalem in the 1920s, the late 20s, when there was quite a lot of violence. It is extraordinary reading it because it feels a lot like now. And that is 100 years ago. And you can see the similarities and the issues.

Jeremy Bowen: Just after the 7th of October attacks, I spoke to, well, he's a writer, but he used to be a politician. In fact, for a while, he was the speaker of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, Avramberg. And he said to me, I said to him, look, assess the level of trauma for Israelis on this thing. He said the Jewish state, as he put it, was our vaccination against our history, the history in Europe of pogroms leading up to the Holocaust, six million Jews dead in the Second World War, killed by Nazi Germany. And we thought that we had a vaccination against the past, which was the state. And now we've found out this was like three weeks after it started, he said this to me. He said, we've suddenly realized the vaccination isn't working anymore. And that, I think, for him, was the root of this enormous trauma that people were suffering.

Jeremy Bowen: And on the other side on the Palestinian side on both sides these ghosts of history were raised Rushdie has said that his dad was born in a tent and he found himself in his 70s back living in a tent So many Palestinians see what's happening at the moment and they look at the very inflammatory statements about removing Palestinians, not just from the Gaza Strip, but from the West Bank by hardline, ultra-nationalist, extremist Israeli politicians, some of whom are in the cabinet. And they see a continuation, a desire to finish the job that was done of removing Palestinians in 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were either fled or were forced out by military force from their territory, including many who ended up in Gaza, like Rushdie's family, and were never allowed back.

Jeremy Bowen: So the past, the ghosts of the past are being raised and are roaring. And this, I would say, the events in the last two years, they are as big a moment in the long history of this conflict as 1948 or when Israel was created, or 1967 when the current shape of the conflict was created, when Israel captured the totality of the Palestinian territory by capturing the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, man the Gaza Strip. So, I mean, these are historic as well as deeply tragic and dreadful times.

Jeremy Bowen: And Jeremy, right from the beginning of the conflict, there were fears that it could spread to the wider region, and it did. Yeah, it did, and it has. There were, right from the start, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon started a sort of limited, and it became a tit-for-tat, war across the border into Israel, which had a pretty devastating effect on northern communities. They had to leave. Then Israel eventually, of course, hit back very hard and caused massive damage to that organization. The Houthis in Yemen got involved. And there's been a chain of events. The regime in Syria, the Assad regime fell, and you can connect up the reasons why it fell, not wholly, but partly, to what was going on in Gaza and in the wider region. Israel has subsequently bombed, with the decisive help of the Americans, the Iranian nuclear facilities. There's a great deal that is still going on. The whole picture in the region has been transformed by the war.

Jeremy Bowen: I think Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel would say that this has been Israel's strength and resolve, has transformed the strategic situation decisively in their favor. The contrary opinion to that is that, yes, Israel has secured a series of victories by using its extraordinary military forces backed by the Americans, and in not just militarily, but diplomatically, politically, and so on. But longer term, living by the sword in a region that really would be a lot better off if it was at peace. Netanyahu made a speech a week or two ago where he compared Israel to Sparta in ancient Greek, self-reliant, strong, quite happy to continue battling its neighbours if necessary to secure its own people. And frankly, that speech didn't go down very well in Israel because it's a country which has had a lot of links with elsewhere in the world. And what they're seeing now, the Israelis, are increased pressure from the outside world, from allies in Europe, a Palestinian state being recognized by Britain, France, and numbers of other Western countries, which up to now haven't done it. The Israeli Prime Minister and former Defence Minister have had arrest warrants against them issued by the International Criminal Court. There is a genocide case against Israel going on in the International Court of Justice. There's even talk about suspending Israel from sporting activities, from UEFA, from the European football authorities, from the World Cup qualifiers. There are all kinds of ramifications going on. And of course, at the same time as all of that, there is this massive humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, more than 65,000 people, mostly civilians have been killed. And that is continuing. Those figures are from what we refer to as the Hamas-run health ministry, but whose figures are normally relied upon by international organization as being the best around. And actually, some studies, including in The Lancet in London, the Medical Journal, have said that they're a big underestimate of what's been going on there.

Host (John Donison): Okay, I'm going to bring in some questions now from our listeners. The first one from Sadiq in Mumbai in India, and it's a question about language, and I think it's fair to say we all have to choose our language pretty carefully when choosing this conflict. He says, why does the BBC still not refer to the war in Gaza as a genocide after experts have already labelled it as such?

Yolande Knell: We stand on this balcony all the time. I stand here and I use all those words genocide. I use the word terrorist and I use them with attribution, whether I'm talking about the Israeli military or Hamas or a UN Commission of Inquiry report or the British government. And that's because the BBC has these editorial policies. that we as correspondents, we can comment on those, we can help to shape those, but in the end we all agree to adhere to those. And that's really with the objective to make sure that our journalism is as impartial, it's as accurate as it possibly can be. And the guidelines are supposed to be for our coverage all around the world, where we're catering for a diversity of audiences, right? So the guiding principle that we have is to use descriptive terms to, for example, describe those who are carrying out violence. So that might be using the word attacker or gunman or bombers, whatever that might be. And then we try to explain the facts of what has occurred and what the consequences are. And the idea is that that should be meaningful to our audiences wherever they are. And they can make their own value judgments.

Rushdi Abualouf: Yes, definitely there is a difference between West Bank and Gaza. I have been to the West Bank many, many times, and the people there, they do support Hamas. Many of the people that I met, especially in places like the south, like in Hebron, some of the areas like Jenin and other places, there's a great support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad in those especially two areas, like the refugee camps. And it's partially because they believe that the Palestinian Authority and Fatah are corrupt and they want some alternative. And this is exactly what happened in Gaza back in 2006, when we believe that not all of the people who voted for Hamas were Hamas people or in favor of Hamas but it was on the other side trying to punish PA and Fatah for you know long corruption existing in Gaza

Host (John Donison): Jeremy, I mean, one of the big differences I found covering this war between Israeli and Palestinian opinion is that Israelis feel that Hamas started this on October the 7th. Palestinians feel that this goes way back to the creation of the State of Israel in 1947, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, the war in 1967, where Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Jeremy Bowen: Yeah, I mean, not all Israelis, clearly, but there is a deep-rooted conflict here, an unresolved conflict that doesn't just go back to the independence of Israel in 1948 when they won their independence war and the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, as they call it. The conflict over who controls the land between the River Jordan and the sea and the Mediterranean Sea started when Zionist Jews came from Europe to Palestine, which in those days was, well, at the very beginning, was still being run by the Turks and then the British. And so it goes back more than a century. If you read accounts of, I mean, I recently was reading an account in a memoir by a journalist who was in Jerusalem in the 1920s, the late 20s, when there was quite a lot of violence. It is extraordinary reading it because it feels a lot like now. And that is 100 years ago. And you can see the similarities and the issues.

Jeremy Bowen: Just after the 7th of October attacks, I spoke to, well, he's a writer, but he used to be a politician. In fact, for a while, he was the speaker of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, Avramberg. And he said to me, I said to him, look, assess the level of trauma for Israelis on this thing. He said the Jewish state, as he put it, was our vaccination against our history, the history in Europe of pogroms leading up to the Holocaust, six million Jews dead in the Second World War, killed by Nazi Germany. And we thought that we had a vaccination against the past, which was the state. And now we've found out this was like three weeks after it started, he said this to me. He said, we've suddenly realized the vaccination isn't working anymore. And that, I think, for him, was the root of this enormous trauma that people were suffering.

Jeremy Bowen: And on the other side on the Palestinian side on both sides these ghosts of history were raised Rushdie has said that his dad was born in a tent and he found himself in his 70s back living in a tent So many Palestinians see what's happening at the moment and they look at the very inflammatory statements about removing Palestinians, not just from the Gaza Strip, but from the West Bank by hardline, ultra-nationalist, extremist Israeli politicians, some of whom are in the cabinet. And they see a continuation, a desire to finish the job that was done of removing Palestinians in 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were either fled or were forced out by military force from their territory, including many who ended up in Gaza, like Rushdie's family, and were never allowed back.

Jeremy Bowen: So the past, the ghosts of the past are being raised and are roaring. And this, I would say, the events in the last two years, they are as big a moment in the long history of this conflict as 1948 or when Israel was created, or 1967 when the current shape of the conflict was created, when Israel captured the totality of the Palestinian territory by capturing the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, man the Gaza Strip. So, I mean, these are historic as well as deeply tragic and dreadful times.

Jeremy Bowen: And Jeremy, right from the beginning of the conflict, there were fears that it could spread to the wider region, and it did. Yeah, it did, and it has. There were, right from the start, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon started a sort of limited, and it became a tit-for-tat, war across the border into Israel, which had a pretty devastating effect on northern communities. They had to leave. Then Israel eventually, of course, hit back very hard and caused massive damage to that organization. The Houthis in Yemen got involved. And there's been a chain of events. The regime in Syria, the Assad regime fell, and you can connect up the reasons why it fell, not wholly, but partly, to what was going on in Gaza and in the wider region. Israel has subsequently bombed, with the decisive help of the Americans, the Iranian nuclear facilities. There's a great deal that is still going on. The whole picture in the region has been transformed by the war.

Jeremy Bowen: I think Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel would say that this has been Israel's strength and resolve, has transformed the strategic situation decisively in their favor. The contrary opinion to that is that, yes, Israel has secured a series of victories by using its extraordinary military forces backed by the Americans, and in not just militarily, but diplomatically, politically, and so on. But longer term, living by the sword in a region that really would be a lot better off if it was at peace. Netanyahu made a speech a week or two ago where he compared Israel to Sparta in ancient Greek, self-reliant, strong, quite happy to continue battling its neighbours if necessary to secure its own people. And frankly, that speech didn't go down very well in Israel because it's a country which has had a lot of links with elsewhere in the world. And what they're seeing now, the Israelis, are increased pressure from the outside world, from allies in Europe, a Palestinian state being recognized by Britain, France, and numbers of other Western countries, which up to now haven't done it. The Israeli Prime Minister and former Defence Minister have had arrest warrants against them issued by the International Criminal Court. There is a genocide case against Israel going on in the International Court of Justice. There's even talk about suspending Israel from sporting activities, from UEFA, from the European football authorities, from the World Cup qualifiers. There are all kinds of ramifications going on. And of course, at the same time as all of that, there is this massive humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, more than 65,000 people, mostly civilians have been killed. And that is continuing. Those figures are from what we refer to as the Hamas-run health ministry, but whose figures are normally relied upon by international organization as being the best around. And actually, some studies, including in The Lancet in London, the Medical Journal, have said that they're a big underestimate of what's been going on there.

Host (John Donison): Jeremy, I mean, one of the big differences I found covering this war between Israeli and Palestinian opinion is that Israelis feel that Hamas started this on October the 7th. Palestinians feel that this goes way back to the creation of the State of Israel in 1947, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, the war in 1967, where Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Jeremy Bowen: Yeah, I mean, not all Israelis, clearly, but there is a deep-rooted conflict here, an unresolved conflict that doesn't just go back to the independence of Israel in 1948 when they won their independence war and the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, as they call it. The conflict over who controls the land between the River Jordan and the sea and the Mediterranean Sea started when Zionist Jews came from Europe to Palestine, which in those days was, well, at the very beginning, was still being run by the Turks and then the British. And so it goes back more than a century. If you read accounts of, I mean, I recently was reading an account in a memoir by a journalist who was in Jerusalem in the 1920s, the late 20s, when there was quite a lot of violence. It is extraordinary reading it because it feels a lot like now. And that is 100 years ago. And you can see the similarities and the issues.

Jeremy Bowen: Just after the 7th of October attacks, I spoke to, well, he's a writer, but he used to be a politician. In fact, for a while, he was the speaker of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, Avramberg. And he said to me, I said to him, look, assess the level of trauma for Israelis on this thing. He said the Jewish state, as he put it, was our vaccination against our history, the history in Europe of pogroms leading up to the Holocaust, six million Jews dead in the Second World War, killed by Nazi Germany. And we thought that we had a vaccination against the past, which was the state. And now we've found out this was like three weeks after it started, he said this to me. He said, we've suddenly realized the vaccination isn't working anymore. And that, I think, for him, was the root of this enormous trauma that people were suffering.

Jeremy Bowen: And on the other side on the Palestinian side on both sides these ghosts of history were raised Rushdie has said that his dad was born in a tent and he found himself in his 70s back living in a tent So many Palestinians see what's happening at the moment and they look at the very inflammatory statements about removing Palestinians, not just from the Gaza Strip, but from the West Bank by hardline, ultra-nationalist, extremist Israeli politicians, some of whom are in the cabinet. And they see a continuation, a desire to finish the job that was done of removing Palestinians in 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were either fled or were forced out by military force from their territory, including many who ended up in Gaza, like Rushdie's family, and were never allowed back.

Jeremy Bowen: So the past, the ghosts of the past are being raised and are roaring. And this, I would say, the events in the last two years, they are as big a moment in the long history of this conflict as 1948 or when Israel was created, or 1967 when the current shape of the conflict was created, when Israel captured the totality of the Palestinian territory by capturing the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, man the Gaza Strip. So, I mean, these are historic as well as deeply tragic and dreadful times.

Jeremy Bowen: And Jeremy, right from the beginning of the conflict, there were fears that it could spread to the wider region, and it did. Yeah, it did, and it has. There were, right from the start, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon started a sort of limited, and it became a tit-for-tat, war across the border into Israel, which had a pretty devastating effect on northern communities. They had to leave. Then Israel eventually, of course, hit back very hard and caused massive damage to that organization. The Houthis in Yemen got involved. And there's been a chain of events. The regime in Syria, the Assad regime fell, and you can connect up the reasons why it fell, not wholly, but partly, to what was going on in Gaza and in the wider region. Israel has subsequently bombed, with the decisive help of the Americans, the Iranian nuclear facilities. There's a great deal that is still going on. The whole picture in the region has been transformed by the war.

Jeremy Bowen: I think Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel would say that this has been Israel's strength and resolve, has transformed the strategic situation decisively in their favor. The contrary opinion to that is that, yes, Israel has secured a series of victories by using its extraordinary military forces backed by the Americans, and in not just militarily, but diplomatically, politically, and so on. But longer term, living by the sword in a region that really would be a lot better off if it was at peace. Netanyahu made a speech a week or two ago where he compared Israel to Sparta in ancient Greek, self-reliant, strong, quite happy to continue battling its neighbours if necessary to secure its own people. And frankly, that speech didn't go down very well in Israel because it's a country which has had a lot of links with elsewhere in the world. And what they're seeing now, the Israelis, are increased pressure from the outside world, from allies in Europe, a Palestinian state being recognized by Britain, France, and numbers of other Western countries, which up to now haven't done it. The Israeli Prime Minister and former Defence Minister have had arrest warrants against them issued by the International Criminal Court. There is a genocide case against Israel going on in the International Court of Justice. There's even talk about suspending Israel from sporting activities, from UEFA, from the European football authorities, from the World Cup qualifiers. There are all kinds of ramifications going on. And of course, at the same time as all of that, there is this massive humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, more than 65,000 people, mostly civilians have been killed. And that is continuing. Those figures are from what we refer to as the Hamas-run health ministry, but whose figures are normally relied upon by international organization as being the best around. And actually, some studies, including in The Lancet in London, the Medical Journal, have said that they're a big underestimate of what's been going on there.

Host (John Donison): Jeremy, I mean, one of the big differences I found covering this war between Israeli and Palestinian opinion is that Israelis feel that Hamas started this on October the 7th. Palestinians feel that this goes way back to the creation of the State of Israel in 1947, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, the war in 1967, where Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Jeremy Bowen: Yeah, I mean, not all Israelis, clearly, but there is a deep-rooted conflict here, an unresolved conflict that doesn't just go back to the independence of Israel in 1948 when they won their independence war and the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, as they call it. The conflict over who controls the land between the River Jordan and the sea and the Mediterranean Sea started when Zionist Jews came from Europe to Palestine, which in those days was, well, at the very beginning, was still being run by the Turks and then the British. And so it goes back more than a century. If you read accounts of, I mean, I recently was reading an account in a memoir by a journalist who was in Jerusalem in the 1920s, the late 20s, when there was quite a lot of violence. It is extraordinary reading it because it feels a lot like now. And that is 100 years ago. And you can see the similarities and the issues.

Jeremy Bowen: Just after the 7th of October attacks, I spoke to, well, he's a writer, but he used to be a politician. In fact, for a while, he was the speaker of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, Avramberg. And he said to me, I said to him, look, assess the level of trauma for Israelis on this thing. He said the Jewish state, as he put it, was our vaccination against our history, the history in Europe of pogroms leading up to the Holocaust, six million Jews dead in the Second World War, killed by Nazi Germany. And we thought that we had a vaccination against the past, which was the state. And now we've found out this was like three weeks after it started, he said this to me. He said, we've suddenly realized the vaccination isn't working anymore. And that, I think, for him, was the root of this enormous trauma that people were suffering.

Jeremy Bowen: And on the other side on the Palestinian side on both sides these ghosts of history were raised Rushdie has said that his dad was born in a tent and he found himself in his 70s back living in a