Hello everyone. Thank you so much for coming for this extra special bumper live edition of the

spike podcast, live of the Battle of Ideas and wow what a turnout is standing room only. This is absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for your support.

If you don't know, I'm Fraser Myers, I'm the Deputy Editor of Spikes and host of this podcast.

I'm joined as ever by Spikes editor Tom Slater over here on my far left.

Hello.

Then we have the founder of the Equiano Project in Laya Falar in Iman.

Right at the end we have host of Trigonometry, co-host of trigonometry, constant in kissing,

and the author of Beyond Grievance, Rakeeb Essam.

So, hello.

So, today. Hello. So today we will talk about the elephant in the room, obviously the big story from the Middle East.

We'll talk about how that affects us in particular at home. We'll discuss a year on since

Elon Musk took over Twitter what that means for freedom of speech and we'll touch

a bit on the trans debate particularly in light of the fumbling over conversion therapy.

So let's kick off. I mean the big story overnight is of course the expansion of Israel's incursion into

Gaza it's been the most intense night of fighting both on the ground and in terms of aerial

bombardments since the conflict began.

Tom, I mean, do you want to just out a few thoughts on this first?

Well, no, obviously, the images that everyone will have seen on social media are

incredibly arresting.

It is a reminder, you know, war is hell, not least because there's often the fact that

innocent civilians are almost inevitably caught in the crossfire.

And there's obviously been a lot of moral condemnation

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