Hello and welcome to the CR podcast, Unpacking Europe. I'm Ananita Chandr-Shaker and today I'm joined by Luigi Skatsyedi, Senior Research Fellow at the CER.

In this episode, we'll be discussing the conflict in the Middle East, which has now expanded from Gaza to Lebanon and Europe's role in it.

So Luigi, could you start by saying a little about the lead-up to Israel's current Lebanon offensive and the dangers of the situation escalating further to include Iran.

Yeah, happy to and happy to be on the podcast. So it's been just over a year since Hamas of

October 7th attack on Israel, which led to over 1,200 deaths and 250 taken hostage. And it's

been a year since Israel launched its retaliatory military operation

against Hamas in Gaza, which has now led to at least 40,000 deaths. The final toll is likely

to be a lot higher, given the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But for much of the last year, the conflict

was contained to Gaza. Its Bola in the north began targeting Israel

with rockets soon after October 7th, and Israel struck back, but fighting was generally limited.

But what happened is that gradually each side's red lines were crossed. Hesbola hit Israeli civilians,

and Israel proved more and more willing to carry out strikes in Lebanon on Hezbollah

leaders in Lebanon and elsewhere. And that culminated a few weeks ago with the highly publicized

attacks on pages and walkie-talkies that were really quite striking in their sophistication

and indeed in the killing of Hezbollah's leader Nasrallah. And then at the end of September, Israel started ground operations in Lebanon.

And at the same time, Iran has become involved more directly in the conflict.

First in April, when it carried out overt and direct strikes on Israel,

and then in October, when it did so again.

So we're now in a situation where the conflict could easily expand further on several fronts.

Before turning to the possibility of a broader conflict,

I want to focus on why it's not been possible to prevent escalation

and how you would characterize Europe's role so far.

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