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Hello and welcome to Spectator TV on today, the first anniversary of October 7th, the horrific

terrorist attack in the Middle East, the reverberations

of which we have felt throughout this year. To discuss this somber anniversary, I'm joined by

Elon Levi, who is a former spokesman for the Israeli government. Elon, it's obviously a sad day that should be marked and is being marked.

But I thought I'd start by asking you, is Israel in a better or worse position now than it was

on that terrible day? Israel definitely finds itself in a more intense crisis. In some ways, we have neutralized some of the bigger threats against us. When this war started, Hamas had a massive missile arsenal and could rain rockets at Tel Aviv whenever it wanted. And now that threat has been almost totally depleted. But we are now a year after the October 7th massacre fighting a war for survival on seven fronts.

The war that Hamas started on October 7th continued the next day with Hezbollah in Lebanon that joined in the fighting.

With thousands of rockets, the Houthis from Yemen, Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq, Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank,

and two massive ballistic missile attacks from Iran as well. So Israel now finds itself really

at a crunch where the threats that it had allowed to grow up on its borders thinking,

we can deter them, we can contain them. Our enemies would have to

be crazy to start a war with us. Well, our enemies started that war and now we're finding everything

coming to a crunch as Israel is trying to neutralise and dismantle those terrorist armies on our borders.

So do you think, I mean, Hamas, it obviously has not been a good year for Hamas in terms of

its numbers, but in terms of the intention of that attack, if the intention of that attack

was to lead to the destruction of Israel, do you think it has been a success in some ways?

...