Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at background briefing.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the humanitarian tragedy underway in Gaza with 9,425 killed and 24,000 wounded

according to Palestinian officials in the West Bank, joining us as a mother and daughter who

have lost 36 members of their family. Garda Haggiel, a third-generation Palestinian refugee who worked as a translator for the Guardian

in Gaza from 2000 to 2006. She is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Political

Science at the University of Alberta, Canada, and also joining us is her daughter,

Rada Agil, who spent the last two years volunteering and living in Gaza.

Garda has an article at The Guardian, which we will discuss, from my hometown in Gaza,

The Unthinkable News, 36 of my family members are dead.

Then, with Hezbollah poised to open a second front in the Israel-Hamas war,

we will get an analysis of the much-anticipated speech by the leader of Hezbollah,

and speak with a longtime Lebanese-based journalist, the Nazi Kambanus,

a senior fellow at the Century Foundation

and Director of the Center for International Research and Policy. Until recently, he was working

as a journalist based in Lebanon, and his books include A Privileged to Die, Inside Hasbalah's

legions and their endless war against Israel. Once upon a revolution, an Egyptian story,

and most recently, Shia power comes of age, the transformation of Islamist politics in Iraq, 2003,

2003. Then finally, with the U.S. again drawn into the Middle East while needing to pivot to Asia,

we will get an assessment of U.S. Chinese relations into the Middle East while needing to pivot to Asia, we will get an assessment of

U.S.-Chinese relations ahead of next Saturday's APEC summit in San Francisco, where Biden and Xi will meet.

Joining us is Jiangxi, who is a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for China's economy and institutions

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