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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am - back with our first episode of 2024.

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza now seems like it will last even longer, with the Israeli military saying it is prepared for a long conflict, one that could last all year. But the longer the war goes on, the more devastating the humanitarian situation in Gaza becomes, and the higher the chance of more war breaking out across the region.

Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper and Middle East correspondent for The Economist, Gregg Carlstrom on the efforts to limit the conflict – and why so far it’s been failing.

It’s Monday, January 15.

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ANGE:

Gregg, the Israel-Hamas war has just recently passed the 100 day mark, and there’s still no real sign of when this conflict will end. But I first wanted to get a sense of how things are looking on the ground in Gaza?

GREGG:

They are appalling - is the short answer. In speaking with officials from the UN and aid agencies over the past couple of weeks, many of them are warning now that if things don't change in Gaza, what we might see this year is more Palestinians dying from hunger, dying from disease than being killed by conflict by the war itself in Gaza. You have 1.9 million people out of 2.2 million, so 85% of the population who have been displaced, many of them are crowded into schools and other facilities run by the UN or sleeping in makeshift tent cities that have popped up across southern Gaza, which is where the vast majority of the population is right now. Conditions are unsanitary. The World Health Organisation says there's one shower for every 4500 people in Gaza. One toilet for every 220 people. All sorts of diseases, from diarrhoea to hepatitis spreading through the population. And then you have a real concern that Gaza could be in a state of famine within the next few months.

Audio Excerpt – Camp resident:

“This is the only bread we have! We have the pot but have no food. I swear to Allah we have nothing for breakfast today.”

GREGG:

You have human rights groups, including B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group that have accused the Israeli army of using hunger as a weapon of war, deliberately starving Gaza, which is a war crime. There's also the question of Israel as the occupying power now in Gaza, something that is inarguable at this point but has troops on the ground that is the occupying power. It has a responsibility under international law to prevent famine, to make sure that there are sufficient supplies of food and medicine going into Gaza. But the Israeli government continues to refuse, as it has since the beginning of the war, to allow any aid to enter from its own territory. Everything that's going into Gaza has to originate in Egypt. There's nothing coming from Israel itself or coming from the occupied West Bank through Israel, which is how before the war, Gaza got most of its food and medicine and other supplies. So incredibly dire conditions in Gaza. But the Israeli government is still refusing to change policy and allow any supplies to flow in from its own territory.

ANGE:

And with those conditions already being so appalling and dire, what’s being said by the international community to address the situation in Gaza?

GREGG:

The main actor when we talk about the international community and this war, of course, is the United States, which has been the main supplier of military aid to Israel, not just during this war, but for decades, its main diplomatic partner, and has refused and still refuses to push for a durable ceasefire to end the conflict. And so what we've heard from American officials in recent weeks have been sort of piecemeal initiatives focussed on the situation in Gaza.

Audio Excerpt – News Reader:

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken is headed to Israel this week for his fourth visit since the war with Hamas started.”

Audio Excerpt – Anthony Blinken:

“Of course, even as we focussed on our immediate goals. We also must work toward lasting peace and security. The United States has a vision for how to get there, a regional approach that delivers lasting security for Israel and a state for the Palestinian people.”

GREGG:

Anthony Blinken, the American secretary of state, made a tour of the region earlier this month, including a stop in Israel. One of the things that he was pushing for there was for Israel to allow Palestinian civilians who have been displaced to southern Gaza to return to the north. The Israeli government has refused to allow that so far.

Audio Excerpt – Anthony Blinken:

“Palestinian civilians must be able to return home as soon as conditions allow. They cannot - they must not be pressed to leave Gaza”.

GREGG:

It's also not clear, even if large numbers of people could go back to the north, that they would, because, uh, satellite imagery suggests that the vast majority of the buildings in northern Gaza, perhaps 70, 80% of the buildings, have been destroyed by fighting. Uh, the infrastructure is in ruins, so there's not much to go back to. The Israeli government did agree to an American request to let United Nations experts visit northern Gaza to assess the damage there, and then obviously start thinking about reconstruction and what needs to happen after the war. But it's not clear when that visit is going to happen. And it's also not clear when the war is going to end. Israeli officials are still talking about a very long war that will continue through most of, if not all of 2024. At the start of the year, Daniel Haidari, a spokesman for the Israeli army came out and said, this is going to be a long war.

ANGE:

Yeah right, it seems like Antony Blinken is going back to the US following this recent trip, with very few - if any - successes?

GREGG:

I think that's a fair way to put it. Yes. You know, again, on this question of the future, of what comes next in Gaza. Earlier this month, on January 4th, Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, put forth his four point plan for the future of Gaza. And so there's four points. One of them, Israel will maintain security control indefinitely in Gaza. Second, it will not rebuild the Jewish settlements that were evacuated in 2005. Third, it will not bring back the Palestinian Authority to play a governing role in Gaza. And fourth, there will be some government of of local notables, local businessmen, local politicians, people unaffiliated with Hamas who would be in charge of civil affairs in Gaza after the war, with the support of American, European and Arab countries.

That is the Israeli plan as it stands so far for what's going to happen after the war. And that is in direct conflict with what America wants. What other Western countries want, what Arab countries want, which is to see the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank, come back to Gaza. So very far apart in terms of how they see things evolving after the war. That was one goal of Blinken's visit to talk about that. Didn't get very far on that. The other purpose of his visit was to try and head off a broader war in the region, something that is more and more a concern not just for the Americans, but for everyone in the Middle East.

ANGE:

After the break… Will the war spill into a broader regional conflict?

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ANGE:

Gregg, there have been fears that as the Israel-Hamas war continues it could spill over into a much broader regional conflict. Are we seeing that happen already?

GREGG:

It already has become a regional conflict. And you could say it's been a regional conflict since October. But, uh, what's happened over the past couple of weeks is that tensions have gotten much higher, and seemingly the chances of some sort of broader conflict have increased. If you start with Yemen, the Houthis have basically shut the Red Sea to much commercial shipping, the world's biggest shipping companies all now avoiding the Red sea, avoiding the Suez Canal, sending their ships around the southern tip of Africa, which adds weeks and millions of dollars to the voyages.

Audio Excerpt – News Reader:

“Elaine, we can report that the Who have already put out a defiant statement saying that they will continue to target these ships. Of course, they say it's in retaliation for Israeli strikes in Gaza. But there is a coalition of world leaders that say these ships that they are targeting…”

GREGG:

Uh, America is standing up a naval coalition, an international coalition that is supposed to try and secure the Red Sea. They are threatening direct attacks on the Houthis in Yemen.

Audio Excerpt – News Reader

“We're just getting early details of this right now, according to two U.S. officials. Uh, they're saying that there have been joint U.S., UK airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen.”

GREGG:

And so Yemen is being drawn now in a much bigger way into the conflict. Just in the past couple of weeks. Uh, you had an Israeli airstrike that killed the commander of Hezbollah's elite commando unit in southern Lebanon.

Audio Excerpt – News Reader:

“On Tuesday, Israel released a video of what it says was a strike against a senior Hezbollah commander. Israel says Ali Hussein Barji was in charge of Hezbollah's drones in Southern Lebanon”

GREGG:

A day later, another Israeli strike, near that commander's funeral that Israel said killed another senior member of Hezbollah. And so, Israel, in sort of a qualitative sense, is upping the tempo or upping the intensity of its fighting in Lebanon. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is still signalling that he's not interested in an all out war, the sort of conflict that his group fought against Israel in 2006, which was obviously a ruinous conflict for Lebanon and he is signalling that he is not interested in that.

But the worry in Washington is that even if Hezbollah is not interested in all out war, Israel does seem like it is. It's not just Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, who has actually been cautious about the use of force in Lebanon, some of the politicians in his war cabinet, many of the generals in the army would like to see Israel expand its northern front, have a bigger fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Israeli public also shares that view. There was a survey that came out in December by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, which found that 57% of Israeli Jews want to expand fighting on the northern front. That's up from 48% in October. So there is both political and public support in Israel for going to war with Hezbollah and trying to degrade its capabilities, weaken it as a military force. All of that adding to concerns around the region and in Washington that the region is on the edge of a bigger conflict.

ANGE:

And a lot of those conflicts sound like they’re on the precipice of tipping into more war. How are America’s efforts to ease those tensions broadly going?

GREGG:

They're trying to lower the intensity of the fighting in Gaza. The hope in Washington, I don't know how realistic this is, to be honest, but the hope in Washington is that, uh, if there is less day to day bombardment, if the death toll in Gaza is lower, if there are fewer scenes running on loop on Arab news channels of bombed refugee camps, destroyed hospitals that civilians that that might do something to lower tensions across the region and give groups like the Houthis in Yemen or Hezbollah in Lebanon some sort of off-ramp to to cease the aggressive behaviour that they have been conducting over the past few months. Again, I'm not sure how realistic that that, uh, idea is, but that's what the Americans are pushing for.

Part of that was this push for Israel to change tactics and slow the tempo of its operations in Gaza, move away from sort of heavy bombardment and big armoured columns going through the strip and focus on targeted raids in parts of Gaza. And there is some evidence that the Israelis are going along with that now that they're beginning to, uh, withdraw some of their troops from northern Gaza and demobilise some of the reservists that they called up after October 7th. But again, the Israelis are saying this is going to be a long war. That reservists who might be demobilised now in Israel can expect to be called back up, uh, at some point later this year. So there is no intention within the Israeli army or the Israeli government to stop the war, even if, uh, there is some talk now about perhaps changing tactics and lowering the tempo of that war.

ANGE:

And in the meantime Gregg, what’s the future looking like for Palestinian civilians who are largely still confined to the South of Gaza?

GREGG:

I think there are two questions for civilians, one short term and then one longer term. The short term question is how you scale up the aid effort to meet the huge needs for food, for clean water, for medicine in southern Gaza.

The longer term question, obviously, is, you know, for civilians, what is left after the war?

At least a fifth of Gaza's population already has no homes left to return to after the war. Many businesses across the strip have been destroyed. Hospitals, schools, all sorts of other infrastructure and it's not clear how that's going to be rebuilt. The Israelis are expecting that, uh, rich countries in the Gulf countries and the West will step in after the war, as they have after previous Gaza wars, and cut a big check for reconstruction. And that will begin the process of rehabilitating Gaza. But, uh, a lot of those countries, certainly, uh, here in the Middle East, that the countries in the Gulf, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, they have said they're not interested in footing the bill unless it is part of a bigger diplomatic process that will create a Palestinian state. And that is something that the Israeli government has no appetite to do. And so the longer term concern, I think, is that even if the war ends later this year, that it's not going to be paired with that diplomatic process, not going to be paired with a serious effort at reconstruction. And you're going to end up with Gaza, even after the war, as a camp for permanently displaced people who have no homes to go to, no jobs to go to, and are entirely reliant on foreign aid to survive for the foreseeable future.

ANGE:

Gregg, thanks so much for your time

GREGG:

Thank you.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

Taiwan has elected William Lai as president, in an election that was widely seen as decisive for the future of China-Taiwan relations. Lai has been branded a ‘troublemaker’ by the government in Beijing, which has long held ambitions to bring Taiwan under its control.

And…

Mary Donaldson has become the first Australian-born person to become a Queen, being crowned as Mary of Denmark overnight. Queen Mary and her husband, King Frederik, visited the Danish parliament and ascended the throne in a ceremony that saw the formal abdication of 83-year-old Queen Margrethe.

I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow, with an episode looking into a major Australian hospital in financial strife.

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