they're breaking into the homes. I love you. Don't cry. They're getting in. These are the last messages one mother received from her son at eight minutes past ten on the morning of October 7th. For ten excruciating days, the mother of Matanzangalka had no idea about his fate. Then, came the official notice. It was one of some 250 people abducted to Gaza. Her Matanz mother, Aynav, life has come to a standstill since October 7th, 2023. Her anguish mirrored in Gaza by the grief of another woman. She came to be known to the world through a Reuters photograph, showing her cradling the shrouded body of her five-year-old niece. In this special episode of Reuters World News, we talk to both women, and examine the scars left for so many mourners in the Middle East. The October 7th Hamas attacks killed around 1200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to Israeli tallies. The fate of over a hundred hostages who had been taken remains unknown. Israel's campaign in Gaza has since killed at least 41,500 people, also mostly civilians. That's according to the Palestinian health authorities. Israel says it's trying to wipe out Hamas, which had accuses of hiding among the general Palestinian population. Hamas denies this. Now, as the Israeli army focuses on taking out Hezbollah commanders as well as Hamas, the war has spelled across the region. We speak to our correspondence about the ongoing pain, on what lies ahead for a region where even more people are being dragged into an escalating conflict. I'm Tara Oakes in Liverpool. This is Kristen Bell. And Adam Rody. And we're dating. In our new show, nobody wants this. Right, right. We're not really dating. No. In real life, we're married. Right. Married to other people, not each other. This is complicated. Right. It's just like our love lives, and nobody wants this. A show about what happens when a bold and sometimes provocative podcast host finds her unlikely match in a sweet, traditional rabbi. You can watch every episode of Nobody Wants This Now, only on Netflix. My name, Lubele, is a senior correspondent in Jerusalem and has spoken to a now about her ongoing fight for her son's liberation. Hi, Mayan. Thanks so much for having me. Mayan, tell us about enough, she's become something of a face for the hostage family movement. She now became the face simply by speaking out and being possibly one of the harshest critics against Netanyahu and his government. At the same time, she's done things like blocking roads and bonfires on roads and shading herself to fences. She's been confronted by police. At some point, she descended inside a cage from a bridge outside the defense ministry. So she does all these things to try and obviously attract attention, to show the urgency, to wake people up, to just to keep her son and the other 100 remaining hostages on the agenda of the public. What struck me about enough when I met her was how strong she is. She is not giving up. At the same time, she describes the anguish, the torment of a mother who has not seen her son for a year and simply doesn't know what he is enduring. She describes it being difficult for her to eat because she doesn't know if Madan is hungry. She feels killed as a mother for not being able to protect her son on the day of the kidnapping. She breeds short labored breaths and when she describes the moment that she imagines that she'll be reunited with her son, she says that she imagines there'll be lots of tears and she'll be able to breathe again. Enough says her son knows that mom is no pushover and is fighting to save his life. A woman sits, her face not visible as it's buried in the shrouded body of a child. The Reuters photograph of Inasa Boo Mamah and aunt holding the remains of her five-year-old niece, Sally, was taken days after Israel began its military offensive on Gaza. It has become one of the most vivid images of Palestinian suffering during the year-long bombing of Gaza, Israel's response to Hamas's October 7th attack. Sally was killed with her mother, baby sister, grandparents, uncle, aunt and three cousins. Today, she's back in her badly damaged home in Khan Eunice in southern Gaza. She sat in a must of rubble from Israeli bombardment, strewn across a small graveyard by the family house. "Beneath," she said, "they sell these grave." Before October 7th, Gaza had faced an extensive Israeli blockade following Hamas's takeover of the Palestinian territory in 2007. There was little work and imports were severely restricted, but her family was settled, Abumamah said. Abumamah lived with her husband near her brother Ramirez's house, allowing her to spend a lot of time with her nieces, Sally and Sabah, and her nephew, Ahmed. A video saved on her phone shows five-year-old Sally playing and singing at her home in Khan Eunice. When Abumamah heard about this strike, she went straight to the NASA hospital in Khan Eunice. There she saw Ahmed, then four, and grabbing him by the hand, soon found Sally dead in the mortuary. It was there that wrote his photographer, Mohammed Salem, took the picture of Abumamah cradling her dead niece, her body wrapped in a white sheet. Ahmed's sitting on his aunt's knee as she revisited the rubble of the house. Now back home, Abumamah says there's no point in moving anymore. Taking Sally's favourite outfit, a black dress with traditional red Palestinian embroidery, and pressing it to her face, she said all the family prayed for now is for the bloodshed to stop. I think it's not going to happen, but it's not going to happen. A year since the October 7 attacks, and today the Middle East is on a knife's edge. Israel is taking aim at Hezbollah, with a ground incursion into southern Lebanon and a bombardment of Beirut with airstrikes. When Iran has launched a barrage of missiles at Israel, a retaliation for their moves on Lebanon, the United States and Israel have warned that a response will come from what might be next. We turn to James Mackenzie in Jerusalem and Don Derpy in Washington DC, who talks to my colleague, Gail Issa. Don, James, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. I'm really happy to be here, thanks. James, how will this phase of the conflict look compared to what we've seen happen in Gaza over the past year? Well, first of all, Lebanon is a sovereign state, and that's not the case with Gaza. Physically, Israel has complete control over the borders of Gaza. It has a border with Egypt, but the Israeli army has gone around that, too, and the Egyptians certainly have kept their borders very tightly shut, because they want to be confronted with handling two million Gaza refugees. As a result, the army is quite free to come and go within Gaza, it's small and contained in a way that southern Lebanon isn't, and Hezbollah is just more powerful, more is stronger, better organized, better armed, larger army in effect. People are reluctant to talk about an army when it's not the military force of a state, but effectively it's an army in a way that Hamas isn't. Invasions of foreign countries aren't easy to do for any army, any time, and especially when it's such a sort of charged political environment as this one. So given all the factors that you've just highlighted, how is that informing Israel's strategy in Lebanon? Well, the military and the government have been careful to set quite limited aims in Lebanon compared to what they had in Gaza. In Gaza, the government repeatedly said for total victory, they want to destroy Hamas, and remove it from the governing and military force completely from Gaza. That's not what they've said in Lebanon. In Lebanon, they've stuck very closely to the goal of bringing the people of northern Israel who have been evacuated from their homes back. Having said that, what we saw earlier this week when eight soldiers were killed in one of the first encounters that took place between Israeli troops on the ground and the Hezbollah fighters, I think that shows you the risks that any kind of operation of this type runs. Just the way things pan out on the ground, you get mission creep. The objectives expand, the conditions change, and they'll find this situation very different from the one they were anticipating or planning on. Yeah, and from the U.S. perspective, there's definitely some worry about mission creep. Israel's incursions into Lebanon have not previously turned out all that well. U.S. knows this, Israel knows this too, of course, and I think there have been some quiet urgings for them to make this a limited operation. At the same time, there are people in the national security establishment who recognize that Israel has actually had some real success in weakening Hezbollah, right, with the pager attacks and the killing of Nasrallah. So there's sort of some mixed feelings there, but definitely a concern that this conflict could get out of hand if it's not managed carefully. The point Don makes there is a very good one about this sort of strategic moment, and that's the kind of, this is the sort of temptation, as it were, for them to continue with the fighting that is that they feel that they're on the front foot, they've really inflicted very heavy blows on Hezbollah, and this is the time to keep going. And so that's going to complicate any diplomatic efforts to end the fighting. Okay. So Don, over the last year, the U.S. has drawn various red lines it doesn't want crossed. Is there a red line for the U.S. when it comes to Israel's offensive in Lebanon? Not that they've stated. The only sort of public thing that President Biden has come out to say is to ask Israel not to strike Iran's nuclear facilities, which is not directly Lebanon, but these things are all tied together. We don't know what the U.S. might be telling Israel privately. But it's true throughout this conflict, the U.S. is set out, if not red lines, at least strong advice to the Israeli government on how to act in Gaza and Lebanon and elsewhere. And we've repeatedly seen Prime Minister Netanyahu's government here really walk across those lines. So I think there's a little bit of reluctance to set out any really clear preferences from the U.S. side this time. Even before Israel began sending troops into southern Lebanon, the last few weeks have really shaken Hezbollah's foundations. Exactly where does the group stand at this point? That's a good question. And I don't think there's really a very clear answer to it at the moment. They lost their leader, who was a very, very important figure for them and for Iran. And they've lost a lot of lower-level commanders and leaders as well. Israel has been conducting some very intensive, and they say, in any case, targeted strikes. The Israeli officials say they've destroyed quite a large proportion of the Hezbollah missile stock. On the other hand, it did have a long time to build up these stocks. This infrastructure, this tunnel network, all these kind of things that Israelis say they've found near the border of southern Lebanon. As the operation goes forward, we'll get a better sense of how strong Hezbollah remains. But for the moment, I don't think anybody's saying it's anywhere close to being defeated yet. So if it's nowhere close to being defeated, then is it too early to say what might be happening in terms of internal politics? So the delicate Lebanese sectarian balance, what might that look like with the weakened Hezbollah? Well, I think if Hezbollah is severely weakened, I mean, there's certainly all kinds of things that could happen. It's too early to say what will happen, but it certainly has the prospect of really upsetting things in Lebanon, which, as you say, has got very complicated sectarian politics and the potential for a major shake-up if a power as sort of enormously preponderant as Hezbollah has been is weakened or badly affected, obviously that will just completely change the game in Lebanon. Don, given all the turmoil with Hezbollah at the moment, do we have any sense just how far Iran might be willing to stick its neck out for Hezbollah for the rest of its proxies? That is really unclear, and it's probably one of the biggest questions here. Iran has preferred to act via its proxies, Hezbollah being the most powerful one. And now with Hezbollah weakened, right, it does effectively remove what Iran has seen as it's probably its most effective deterrent in the region. So you saw Iran respond to Israel with this ballistic missile attack, which was pretty well repelled by the Israelis with assistance from the United States. And the question now is whether they might go a step further. If Israel were to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, for example, or perhaps its oil protection capacity, you really might see Iran in a position where they feel they can't afford to be seen as restraining themselves and the possible weakness that that might convey. And they might seek to act out in some other way. And what that might be, who knows, right, it could be another direct strike on Israel, could be a strike on US troops in the region or allies around the region. That is one of the variables here that is really concerning to US officials and others. Okay, so given everything that's happened in the last year, Netanyahu has had kind of a bumpy ride in terms of his popularity. James, where does he stand now? He's certainly in a better place now than he was after October the 7th, let's say. He was very widely blamed and he was in absolute disaster, just a massive failure on the part of the military, the security establishment, the whole sort of policy which they'd followed with regard to Hamas, which was very much Netanyahu's policy. Since then, as time has passed, he has slowly recovered. The polls still suggest that he wouldn't win an election, but he's in a much stronger position than he was before. He's bolstered his coalition and that's given him really quite a solid majority in parliament. So there's every chance that he could see out his term without any election, which is very unusual in Israeli politics. There's very widespread popular support for both the war against Hamas and the war against Hezbollah. Israelis just see both of them as a really existential threat to their country and even opposition politicians aren't really arguing with the policy that they're following in Lebanon at the moment. There was a really palpable change in mood in Israel following the news of the assassination of Hassan Asrallah and I think a lot of people in Israel who had lost a bit of confidence in the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces after the October the 7th failures regained a bit of the old Israeli confidence in the strength of their military intelligence establishments. They saw this attack on the Hezbollah pages, which is very widely attributed to the Mossad although they haven't commented themselves, and that's certainly benefited Netanyahu. It seems like we haven't heard that much about the ongoing fight in Gaza as the focus has slipped onto Lebanon. What's been happening in the Gaza Strip? So what's been happening in Gaza, essentially what's been happening in Gaza for some time, the Israeli army's been pursuing the Hamas militants to remain. It's kind of organized military structures seem to have fallen apart and the fighters are operating sort of guerrilla fighters in the rubble. So it's a different kind of operation than the one they had at the beginning of the war. It is, as you say, sort of happening kind of out of sight at the moment because the main focus of the war has switched to the northern front, but it hasn't gone away. Yeah, and just to add to what James was saying, from the US perspective, one of many reasons why they did not want to see Israel invade Lebanon is that the US feels that you've got to solve the crisis in Gaza first, and there have been these ongoing ceasefire discussions really since the start of the conflict, and the US is still saying, and as recently as this week, that they have not given up on the idea of a ceasefire in Gaza. I think that that is sort of the first thing that you need to do if you want to start wrapping up this broader conflict. OK, so Don, how might the US election and a new US leader change the dynamic in the region? For Harris, the expectation is that her policy, if she becomes president, would be very similar to what Joe Biden has pursued. However, people have noted that in her rhetoric, she's much stronger in her empathy toward the plight of the Palestinians, which has given some hope among activists in the US and elsewhere that perhaps she might take a tougher stand against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. But we'll have to see. And what about Donald Trump? So with Donald Trump, in his first administration, many of his policies really were very beneficial to the Israeli right wing. The US decided to endorse the movement of a capital to Jerusalem, recognize Israeli sovereignty of the Golan Heights, and so forth. His administration also did achieve the Abraham courts, which was something that in the United States, many Republicans and Democrats thought was a good thing, established a little bit of stability in the region, potentially. Question has been, can that go further and can Saudi Arabia sort of join that and assign some sort of a diplomatic recognition with Israel? That's probably something that he would push for very strongly. It's also something that I think Harris would push for pretty strongly. It's been extremely hard to get, however, because for the Saudis, unless you have something that looks like a path toward a two-state solution, it can be very difficult for the Saudis to sign a deal with Israel. And what about a two-state solution? Where does the prospect of a two-state solution stand right now? Yes, well, I mean, there's no sign of any move towards a two-state solution on Israel's part. There's obviously been more talk about the two-state solution certainly being revived internationally since the start of the Gaza war, but repeated statements from all manner of politicians from Netanyahu down, so that they have absolutely no interest in that, because they don't trust any Palestinian authority at the moment. They just don't trust that Israel's security would be guaranteed if they were a Palestine right next door. They don't believe that Israel could exist under those circumstances. So I do think it's worth saying that early in this conflict, Joe Biden had come out with firm support for Israel. And as Israel's war in Gaza ramped up, he came under a fair amount of criticism, both in the United States and from overseas, for insufficiently in a recordizement applied to the Palestinians. But the administration did quite quickly pivot toward sketching out a broader vision here, which was you get a ceasefire, you have a discussion about some sort of a pathway to a two-state solution. From there, maybe it was a deal with between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and you could try to wrap up some of this broader conflict. That has proven incredibly hard to do. And as we said earlier, time and time again, efforts to achieve a ceasefire have come to not. And now it's much more complicated now that another front has opened with Lebanon, because now you need to get a ceasefire in Lebanon before you can perhaps look for a ceasefire in Gaza. Don, James, thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you to my aunt Lou Bell for sharing a naps story. And thank you to our colleagues in Gaza for bringing us in NASA's story. Thank you also to James Mackenzie and Don Derphi for their analysis and insights. Reuters World News is produced by Sharon Reich-Garson, Jonah Green, David Spencer and Christopher Warren Jasper, as well as Gail Issa, who you've heard on this episode. Sound design, engineering and music composition are all by Josh Sommer. Our regular host is Kim Vanell. Carmel Krimmons and myself, Tara Oakes are senior producers. Our executive producer is Lila de Kretza. We'll be back on Monday with our Daily Headline show. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app. of the news. [MUSIC PLAYING]
