Will Iran attack Israel again? Plus Beirut's community kitchen
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We need to find a solution to see how we're going to go on in this region for all of us, for the Palestinians, for the Israelis and for the Lebanese and all of the region. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent. President Zelensky has for the first time acknowledged that his forces are conducting a cross-border offensive inside Russia. I just find bombs and I find dead people, but it's a really scary thing for me.

I'm Roland Oliphant. I'm in the studio with Venetia Rainey. This is your Monday morning update on everything that's developed or most of what's developed in the Middle East. Let's start, Venetia, with the latest death toll figures as we understand them today.

Yeah, so both civilian and military since October 7th, 2023. Gaza's death toll is more than 43,300 people. The West Bank's is more than 700 people. Lebanon's is more than 2,900 people. And Israel's is at least 1,610 people with 101 hostages still being held in Gaza, both alive and dead. And that Israeli number is the vaguest out of the others because we can't get precise data on all of those numbers from the Israeli military, but we're working to bring you an updated number every week.

I'm just going to run through changes on the ground, which aren't enormous, but the immediate kind of situation on the battlefield is that Israel over the weekend has continued its operations actually all across the Gaza Strip. So we're hearing a lot about its controversial operation in Jabila in the northern Gaza Strip, but it's also been conducting raids and airstrikes in the center and in southern Gaza. Also some activity in the West Bank.

Palestinian officials have said Israeli settlers are behind an attack in which several cars were torched in Al-Bria, which is near Ramallah, where the Western Bank Palestinian Authority is headquartered. It's worth mentioning at this point that Israeli officials are now claiming that Iran is trying to pour a lot of resources into the West Bank.

apparently as a potential alternative to Gaza, having accepted that Hamas has basically been destroyed. That's the claim that's been put out over the weekend by some Israeli officials. And then southern Lebanon. So the ground operations against Hezbollah are still mostly confined to this quite tight ribbon of land along the border in basically three main sectors. So there's an area near the coast in the west. There's another area around the towns of Maroon Al-Hassan, Bilda, kind of further inland. And finally in the northeast is

where the Israelis have advanced as far, we think, as far as a town called Qiyam. But bear in mind, that's still only about five kilometers inside the country. So when we say in advance, we're still talking about the ground operations being limited to a very narrow area. And remember, Benjamin Netanyahu said over the weekend, very explicitly restated that the goal is to push Hezbollah beyond the Latani River, which is, I don't know, like,

20 miles inside the country, something like that. So still obviously quite a long way from going there. But we have also had reports that Hezbollah and Israel are in indirect talks about some kind of ceasefire.

which could involve Hezbollah making that withdrawal, but we don't know anything about the progress of that talk or how likely they are to accept that. And another little interesting development. So yesterday or the day before, the Israelis have raided into Syria, a very local raid. So they seem to have popped across from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to grab a Syrian man who they say was photographing and reconnoitering their positions, potentially in advance of some kind of attack or something.

So in itself, not a major development, except it's a first known Israeli ground incursion into Syria since this war began. So you can add up yet another potential front cooking off there. So that, that Venetia is the, that's the kind of battlefield overview this morning.

Thanks, Roland. So tell us about this Lebanese man who's apparently been abducted from Batroun, a town in northern Lebanon. Do we know much about it? It's a bit of a strange story. This is an interesting one. So this is, as I was saying, the ground fighting, the kind of infantry conventional battle is on that narrow ribbon of land down south. But it seems like the Israeli special forces, they're kind of equivalent of the US Navy SEALs or Britain's Special Boat Service. It's an outfit called...

Shaiatet 13, I apologize for my Hebrew pronunciation there, launched a raid in a town called Betrune, which is actually 20 miles north of Beirut. So right up the coast, right? A long way from where anything else is happening. So what we understand happens is that 12 Israeli commandos come ashore under the cover of darkness in speedboats.

They go to a residential building about 400 meters from the shore. They tell passersby that they are actually local Lebanese security forces. And they abduct a Lebanese ship captain by the name of Imad Ahmaz, who the Israeli military say is a senior Hezbollah operative.

Now, the thing raising questions here, of course, is that generally speaking, with senior Hezbollah operatives so far in this war, the Israelis have been content to kill them with airstrikes and so on. So a high-risk, spectacular commando raid to get some guy out, it's got some tongues wagging, and we had a...

An unnamed Lebanese anti-Hezbollah Lebanese politician told our colleague Melanie Swan that there is some suspicion this guy was a double agent and the Israelis weren't abducting him, they were extracting him.

Okay, one to keep an eye on then. We'll see if he pops up again, I suppose. Now, let's talk about UNRWA, the Palestinian aid agency. Last week, the Knesset passed a bill banning UNRWA from operating in Israeli territory. Quite unprecedented stuff. What more do we know? So, Israel has passed a law banning cooperation with the United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency, which is the agency that for decades has basically been providing basic services to Palestinian refugees. So, it has become...

It's been an almost permanent presence, kind of part of the furniture, part of the infrastructure of the occupied territories. The Israelis are now saying this is part of the problem. They've accused it of collaborating with Hamas, saying that dozens of its members took part in the October 7th attacks. And this morning, Monday morning, Israel has formally notified the United Nations that it will sever ties with the agency starting from January. Now, this ban has been...

strongly condemned by Israel's allies, the United States and Britain included. The British government has floated the idea of another arms embargo on Israel as a result. Doesn't look like they're paying much attention. Very bullish from the Israeli spokespeople about this, saying it's time for UNRWA to just basically disappear from the scene. Now, UNRWA did fire nine employees in the wake of October 7th, saying that there was

there was evidence they may have been involved but it does deny these accusations of systematic collaboration with Hamas and the real issue the reason that you know the Americans the Brits and other people are so agitated about this is that UNRWA is it is the mechanism by which aid is distributed in Gaza and

and elsewhere. So UNRWA's spokesman is saying that this is probably going to cause the complete collapse of aid efforts in Gaza because UNRWA is the mechanism through which everyone else's aid gets distributed. It is the backbone of that operation. He also said there's probably going to be a collapse of essential services in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, including education,

healthcare, sanitation. The Israelis have rejected that argument. They do say that actually we will provide the aid instead. But...

I mean, the significance of this, obviously there are warnings of massive knock on humanitarian effects here. If this goes through, if the Israelis succeed in this, it is again another example of just completely changing the rules of the game, changing the landscape of the Middle Eastern conflict as it has existed and as we've been familiar with it for decades. So I think it's an other example of that sense that the Netanyahu government

is really trying to seize an opportunity to completely change the paradigm of the conflict.

Let's talk about another story to do with the Netanyahu government because he's in a bit of hot water at the moment. There's a scandal to do with some leaked documents that may or may not have been edited. Can you tell us a bit more? So this is absolutely mad. And we don't know that much because there's a lot of Israeli reporting restrictions around this. But this is what we do know. Friday afternoon, just before Shabbat began in Israel, which of course starts at sunset, an Israeli court announced the arrests of...

Several people suspected of a breach of national security caused by the unlawful provision of classified information, which had harmed the achievements of Israel's war aims. One of those arrested is believed to be a spokesman for the prime minister. Absolutely mad. So what's this all about? So this goes back to...

leaking to the media some months ago of a Hamas strategy document that was found by IDF forces in Gaza. And the material seemed to have been manipulated or edited to make it seem as if the Palestinian group was looking to smuggle hostages out of Egypt and then to Iran or to Yemen. Now, this was published in the German tabloid Bild and in the British outlet, The Jewish Chronicle.

So this all came out in September and the claim was first put out by Benjamin Netanyahu himself. He talked about these things and then suddenly these reports based on these documents appeared in Bild in Germany and in the Jewish Chronicle here in Britain that seemed to back up what he was saying. Except then the IDF said, we have absolutely no proof.

no awareness of the existence of any documents saying that whatsoever. They launched internal investigation and this is where it's ended up. So there's really big questions here. The actual charges believed to be connected with, you know, the leaking of classified documents, that kind of thing. And of course, this massively feeds into that already really febrile domestic Israeli division around, you know,

do you like Netanyahu or don't you? We know the country is massively divided. That doesn't necessarily affect your attitude to the war itself, but we know he's in hot water about that. But there's also this question about kind of media integrity. So the Jewish Chronicle did retract that story and find the journalists who wrote it in the aftermath. But there are still going to be questions around how if it turns out, obviously, that this stuff was not only leaked, leaked documents to journalists is something that happens and there's a thing about that, but

deliberately leaking doctored documents that are misleading. I think the thing is self-explanatory really. So a very interesting development to keep an eye on.

And finally, let's zoom out a bit and look at Iran, because there have been some rumblings recently of them possibly attacking Israel again. Can you tell us a bit more? So amid all this, and I appreciate we've been quite granular with the battlefields kind of on Israel's periphery and stuff going on in Gaza and so on. But remember, this is all part of a bigger confrontation as well. And it suddenly seems over the weekend that

which we had thought had kind of cooled off a bit has not cooled off. So on October 26, last week, we

We know that the Israelis struck Iran in retaliation for an Iranian attack on Israel, which had been retaliation for and so on and so forth. And we thought at the time that, OK, the Israelis had kind of restrained their response. They hadn't hit nuclear sites. They hadn't hit oil depots, that perhaps that would be the end of it. And there was a lot of messaging from the United States and others saying to Iran, like, don't hit back. Let's just stop this cycle of nuclear.

retaliation and there was a little bit of rhetoric out of Iran at the time that made it look like, okay, maybe they don't want to escalate again. Well, that has all changed. So yesterday, Sunday, Esmail Korsari, who's a former IRGC general and Iranian MP who sits on Parliament's National Security Committee,

basically announced publicly the country is preparing a new and much more powerful strike against Israel in retaliation for that October 26 Israeli strike. And the rationale for this is that, well, we lost people. So Iran says that five people were killed, four air defense system operators, and one civilian. Now, he said that this new round of strikes has been unanimously approved by the country's Supreme National Security Committee. He said it would be much harsher than October 1. Remember on October 1,

Iran launched nearly 200 missiles at Israel. He said this shortly before that, before this was kind of announced publicly, the Wall Street Journal had published a story where he had been speaking to both Iranian officials and Arab diplomats from Arab countries who said the Iranians have warned us they're going to do something. So their sources, you know, they cite specifically an Egyptian source here. He said they've been told that Iran's conventional army was going to be involved in this because the conventional army had lost people.

So in other words, this time it won't just be the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It will be the official army playing some role in this because it had lost four soldiers. So it's felt that they have to take part in that. They also interestingly said the attack could use Iraqi territory.

Um, so this raises the prospect of Iranian backed militias in Iraq getting involved and unlike Iran's two previous strikes in Israel would be limited, not be limited in scope and use more powerful warheads than previously used. So worrying stuff, how true it is. We don't know, but there's a UK based Saudi outlet called Alaaf.

which has reported that Israel has already warned the Iraqi government that if Iranian-backed Iraqi militias get involved in this, Israel will strike targets in Iraq. The United States has suddenly announced it's deploying B-52 bombers to the Middle East. Iran has responded saying, well, that's a destabilizing presence. You shouldn't do that. And meanwhile, we've got reports saying that the United States has warned Iran via Swiss diplomats. The Swiss are the intermediaries who

handle relations between the United States and Iran, that this time it will not be able to restrain Israel in its response if this happens. So I'm afraid we are back once again in this ratcheting of tensions, which may end up with an even bigger exchange of rockets across the Middle East, and by extension, back on the brink of that huge regional war that we've all been scared of tumbling into ever since October 7th.

So that's, there's obviously a lot going on. That's pretty much the picture of this week. There are developments outside the Middle East that are going to affect things. Obviously, tomorrow, the United States election, we'll be watching it and there will be knock on effects. We'll be talking about that next week. In the meantime, Benicia, I believe you've been speaking to somebody inside Lebanon about how, basically about how ordinary people are dealing with the humanitarian fallout of what's going on there. Who have you been speaking to and what they say?

Yeah, so I interviewed Kamal Muzawak. He's a really well-known social entrepreneur. He runs a network of markets, restaurants, boutique guest houses, community outreach programs. His projects bring together a really wide group of people, farmers, chefs, refugees, politicians, in an unashamedly inclusive and non-sectarian way, which is fantastic.

quite unique in Lebanon. Following the Beirut port explosion, for example, he set up a community kitchen to help feed people. And that community kitchen is now kicked into gear again to help feed all the people who've been displaced. Up to a million people have been displaced in Lebanon. They're scattered all over Beirut, up in the mountains, all over the country. So I spoke to him about the work that they've been doing. Fantastic. Let's listen to it. Kamal, tell us a bit about Matba al-Khel and how it's been working in the last few weeks since Israel's invasion of Lebanon to help people who've been displaced. Kamal, tell us a bit about Matba al-Khel and how it's been working in the last few weeks since Israel's invasion of Lebanon to help people who've been displaced.

Manbach al-Kil simply means the kitchen of everybody. And since there is a million displaced, internally displaced persons in Lebanon, from South Lebanon following the Israeli invasion to the country, so we needed to do something. So in our soup kitchen, that we call Manbach al-Kil, the kitchen for all, we started cooking between 4,000 and 5,000 meals a day, every day, to feed the displaced.

And how are you giving out those meals? How do the logistics work in Beirut for a community kitchen?

Well, logistics is quite complicated. We are not on the ground. We do not know the beneficiaries and we do not distribute. So we collaborate with specific organizations like the Red Cross or the Lebanese Food Bank who are on the ground, who are identifying the beneficiaries and who are picking up the food at our premises and distributing it. So what we do from our side is simply produce and cook the food.

And many of your employees working in the community kitchen are refugees themselves, right? Syrian, Palestinian, Lebanese refugees.

Well, there are different people who are working in this operation. It's a very big operation. It's like on an industrial scale. So there is a team of Tawle and Sokot Tayeb, who are certainly from different Lebanese regions, and some of them are Lebanese and Palestinian refugees too. But we do have extras that come, daily workers who come and are working in the kitchen, and we have a lot of volunteers too.

I know Matbah al-Kahl was first set up to respond to the Beirut port explosion and the needs after that. How does it compare the situation in Beirut now to how it was then? Well, both are huge catastrophes, but like the Beirut port explosion was a point in time. So it was an explosion at 6 p.m. on August 4th, and it was a catastrophe. It was the third biggest blast in the history of humankind. But, you know, like it happened.

at a second and that's it and we had to do what we had to do after that but with the Israeli war now it's like ongoing since a month nearly and we don't know when it will end like we're expecting every second that it will be the last second. Obviously a lot of your work is with farmers and producers and I know you're running a crowd fund to help them can you tell us a bit more about how they've been affected by this war?

Some of them lost family members. Some of them have been displaced. Some of them lost part of their businesses, whether farms or kitchens. And all of them are not selling anymore. And these farmers, if they do not sell for the week, they do not have enough money to live by for the week. So this is why at one point we said like Madbakh al-Kil as a soup kitchen is quite important.

to look at emergencies, but at the same time, we need to look at our farmers and producers. So this is where we launch the crowdfunding, and the crowdfunding is completely independent from the soup kitchen, from Madbakhal Kil, and it's gathered towards only the farmers and the producers, supporting those who have been

relocated or have been displaced and supporting others in creating financially supporting them, first of all, now as an emergency, and later on trying to create other markets in safer and better areas. What can you tell us about the impact on Lebanon's agricultural industry? Obviously, a lot of the areas that have been bombed have been more rural areas and obviously impacts farms, forests, places where Lebanon gets a lot of its foods from.

Yes, and it's a season for olive oil and the South is very important. It's one of the main areas of production of olive oil and most of the people couldn't pick their crops for the year. So it's not a crop lost for a month, it's a crop lost for a year. So the Bekaa Valley and the South of Lebanon are the main agricultural areas in Lebanon and these are the main hit areas by the problems.

Are farmers able to keep working? Not all of them, no. This is why we created the crowdfunding. Some of them are in deer emergencies and others less. And I know you also work in tourism. You run a series of bed and breakfasts and guest houses that try to sort of help very local economies and bring tourists into these amazing, beautiful Lebanese villages and towns in the mountains. How has that been impacted by the events over the past year?

Well, very easy. It's zero. So it's not time to go to a restaurant anymore. It's not time to go to a bed and breakfast. We kept our bed and breakfast, Beidouma, in the mountains, in the Lebanese mountains above the north, northern coast. We kept it. We closed it for a while. Now we opened again. But like it's very little businesses who cannot keep the house functioning. But like it's better than zero.

So you last visited Lebanon in September. What did you see when you went there and what was the mood on the ground? Well, it has been high tension since a while. In the city, in people's mind, like people are really exhausted and they couldn't take it anymore because of the economy, because of the threats, because of the sporadic bombing that was happening. And it was before the heavy attacks on Lebanon. So people were already on the verge by then. And now everybody's just wrecked.

Are you seeing a massive brain drain? I'm just thinking anecdotally, I know a lot of people who have left Lebanon in the last few months. I think the brain drain happened since a long time and it's happening more and mainly after August 4. And personally, I never left Lebanon, you know, until August 4. The Bay Report explosion you're referring to. The Bay Report explosion on August 4, 2020. And on that day, I said, like, I'll give it a month.

If nothing will happen in a month, obviously, but if not a slight change or a beginning of change happens, so nothing will ever change. So this is why early September I was still in Lebanon, but like I settled in France too at the same time. I guess that's the story for many Lebanese half living elsewhere and with their hearts back in Lebanon. Is it hard to watch from abroad everything that's been going on?

Well, you don't sleep. Our best way of taking information is Instagram. You need to see what's happening. But like we do not have to complain. People are living, hearing the bombs or under them and dying from them. What do you see as the way forward? I wonder what you think about some people in Lebanon who feel that Hezbollah's targeting and the killing of Hassan Nasrallah might be an opportunity for Lebanon's politics to move forward a bit. Do you see any sort of silver lining?

I don't see any silver lining. It's not about Nasrallah himself. You know, Nasrallah goes, there someone else will come. It's about injustice and it's about getting over with these problems in this area. No one's wrong, no one's right. Everybody's wrong and everybody's right at the same time. We're at a situation, either one side is going to erase all of the others or vice versa, or we're going to say like, okay, we're going to,

stop and see what we can make of what we have. And if we don't get to this point, if we have like just another ceasefire, it's useless. We need to find a solution to see how we're going to go on in this region for all of us, for the Palestinians, for the Israelis and for the Lebanese and all of the region. Do you feel hopeful that something like that can come about? Not at all. I don't see signs of it coming soon.

Does that mean you'll be staying in France for the near future then? You don't see a future in Lebanon for yourself either?

You know, every day it's like everybody asks me, like, what are your plans? Every day it's like I'm going to Beirut tomorrow. And every day it's expecting that it's going to be better. And I'm going to go to Beirut tomorrow. There is only one plane, you know, one flight to Beirut, which is through the local carrier, Middle East Airlines. But it's useless to go now and just to be under the bumps. Like I need to go to be doing something or building something. Great. Thank you so much for joining us, Kamal.

Thank you.

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