Hello, welcome to a new episode of Real Politics. I am your host, Firas Madad, back from a bit of a break in Lebanon.

And I thought that I would start with a update on where we are with the war is the Middle East, what Israel is trying to achieve, what are the limitations, and what does it mean if you are in Europe so I'd like to

start these things with a map so we have here a map of Israel showing us a little bit

about where the fighting is and what's happening and the first area of focus obviously obviously, should be Gaza, where the Israelis are trying to capture the city of Gaza itself.

They've captured the towns around Gaza City here in the middle, and they've isolated Gaza itself. They're trying to force a

million civilians to evacuate, but according to the Israeli zone numbers, they say that only 10,000

have left. So they're going to try to conquer this territory, this very small area, a few square kilometers, really,

which has a million people in it still, 990,000 according to the Israelis. This is going to be

an incredible challenge. So why are the Israelis trying to do this? Well, the first reason is, unless they take

territory from Hamas and destroy their infrastructure thoroughly and clear areas and expel the Palestinians

from them, they can't say that they've won. The problem is that with so many civilians there, it's going to be

quite a challenge. The second reason is because the Israelis are saying that they want to force

at least a big part of the residents of Gaza to leave the area entirely. Go where? That's a big question. Probable answers are Europe, the West,

the Anglosphere in general, Egypt, but Egypt absolutely doesn't want to take part in it. And we'll

touch on that in a minute. But the idea is to take this city completely because of its proximity to other important Israeli towns like Sderot and Ashcalon, and Ashdod, where Hamas being able to position itself there allows it to fire rockets at Israel. Hamas hasn't been firing

rockets for a while, but if they ever recover, they will rebuild and they will resume that.

The problem that's facing Israel is that for the last 30 years,

ever since arguably, ever since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon,

they haven't won any wars decisively.

So in 1982, they managed to kick the PLO out of Lebanon,

but that only ended up creating Hezbollah,

and then eventually Hezbollah forced the Israelis out

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