Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest in an interview recorded on the 1st of July is a diplomat for whom all the politicking

and advocacy has become desperately, painfully personal.

Husam Zomlott is a Palestinian born in a refugee camp in Raffa at the southern end of the Gaza Strip.

He's a trained economist. He's served as an advisor to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas,

and he was the top Palestinian diplomat in Washington before his current posting in London.

Since October the 7th last year, when armed militants

from Hamas launched their attack on southern Israel, triggering a ferocious Israeli assault

on Gaza, Zomlott has lost 15 members of his own extended family. With the overall death toll

now put at more than 37,000 by the Hamas-run Health Authority,

many other Gaza families have experienced similar scale of loss.

And still, the war goes on.

Still, more than 100 Israeli hostages remain in captivity.

And still, all international efforts to broker

a ceasefire, founder, when faced with the unbridgeable gap between Israel's war aims and Hamas's

determination to resist. In the midst of such prolonged trauma and entrenched confrontation,

is there any room at all for diplomacy,

for the exercise of international leverage on the combatants? Well, Osam Zomlott joins me now.

Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you, Steve. You are a diplomat, but as this conflict in Gaza passes its nine months, does it feel to you like

this is a conflict entirely beyond the reach of diplomacy? It is a conflict that is within the reach

of diplomacy, of common sense, of international law, of our very universal values, but it's a dismal failure of

international diplomacy and international order like never before. I believe the post-World

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