Hello and welcome to another episode of Battleground with me, Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

This week again, we're going to use the midweek podcast to focus on Gaza,

and we're going to carry on doing so for as long as the situation demands.

Events there are simply too important for us not to address them, so for the time being,

this midweek podcast will come to you as Battleground Gaza. Do keep listening,

because the way things are developing, the conflict there

is likely to be every bit as significant for global politics as the war in Ukraine.

That's right. It's also been as fast moving and dramatic as the opening phase of the Ukraine

conflict, though as we speak, of course, there is a pregnant pause as the Israeli government

weighs up how to proceed with

their threatened ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

We're going to start off by considering the options open to the Israeli Defence Forces in

what can only be a fiendishly difficult operation before going on to look at the possibility

of the Israel-Hammers conflict exploding into a regional war with all the dangers that will bring

with it. But a fiendishly difficult operation, those are the words of American former general

and director of the CIA, David Petraeus. He's not wrong, is he, Patrick?

No, and he ought to know having commanded troops in America's wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, both events which have some

bearing on what is now going on in Gaza. Now, to start off, we should step back and ask what

this proposed operation is trying to achieve. The Israelis say they're seeking the total

eradication of Hamas as a military

force. Now let's just think about what that means in purely tactical terms, if I can put it

like that. Now, Gaza might seem very small to the 2.3 million people who live there. It's only

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