Hello and welcome to the Battleground Big interview with me, Patrick Bishop.

Well today we've got a fascinating bonus interview for you. This was initially planned as an insert for our Friday episode last week, but we felt it was so good it deserved its own episode. I hope you enjoy it.

My guest today is Tim Butcher, an old friend who's the author of several amazing books,

starting with Blood River, his account of his epic 3,000-kilometer trek in the footsteps of Henry Stanley through the Congo,

braving all manner of hardships and dangers.

More to the point, he was also the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem,

and in 2006 covered the Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is what we're here to talk about today.

Now, Tim, that was a war that lasted 40 days. This one is set to last very much longer.

Let's tell us about the background to it, and then perhaps we can move on and talk about what lessons we can learn from that experience and apply them to what's going on in Gaza today.

Of course, well, thank you for having me on.

It's a great privilege to be discussing such an important topic and connecting it to the past.

We all know that military men, generals often fight the last war on today's battlefields.

And in some ways, these are lessons that come to my mind when I see what's going on in Gaza today.

Because that conflagration, that war on the Lebanon-Israel border in the summer of 2006,

it has a direct impact, I would say, because we learned

some very important lessons there. The background was that Israel and Lebanon, of course,

had been skirmishes and fighting and indeed full-blooded invasions across the border for a number

of years. And the pertinent parts are the IDF, the Israeli defense forces on the south defending

Israel, and effectively only He Israeli Defence Forces on the South defending Israel,

and effectively only Hezbollah on the northern side.

And they were at loggerheads. They had a long history of fighting, but had been relatively calm.

And I say relatively calm because elsewhere in Gaza, there'd been, guess what?

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