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Summary

  • BBC Radio 4's Today programme is hosting a special Gaza debate - watch live now

  • Our chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet is ed on the by Michael Kleiner, president of the Supreme Court of the Israeli Likud party

  • We'll also hear from Afif Safieh, who was involved in talks that led to the first official US-Palestinian dialogue, and Baroness Helena Kennedy, Labour peer and human rights lawyer

  • Daniel Levy, a member of the Israeli delegation to the peace talks with the Palestinians in the 1990s and former adviser in the Israeli prime minister's office, is also on the show

Live Reporting

  1. Welcome to the Today debate

    Anna Foster
    Radio 4 Today presenter

    In this debate we ask a question. What we won’t provide is an answer.

    But we will give space and time to debate an important issue, and to ask vital questions on one of the most pressing topics of our time - the war in Gaza.

    We're talking about war crimes.

    A week ago, the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote an opinion piece for the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz. He described how he’d defended Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to audiences around the world. But now, he said, his opinion had changed. "Yes", he wrote, "Israel is committing war crimes".

    The decision on whether someone is guilty of war crimes will always be made in a court, not a radio studio. Words like ‘genocide’ are a legal definition of a specific crime, rather than an emotive description of events that upset us. The latter use - incorrect until a judge decides - is increasing.

    Normally, many decades before perpetrators are convicted of war crimes. Some die without ever going on trial.

    But although the ing of judgement takes time, it shouldn’t negate a conversation about events in the moment when they happen.

    Israel is refusing to let international journalists into Gaza to report what’s happening on the ground in real time. Local journalists do their best. But there’s much that we’re not seeing in the way we would with other conflicts.

    On 7 October 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups broke through the fence bordering Gaza, and rampaged into southern Israel. They killed about 1,200 people, and injured many more. They burned homes to the ground, and took 251 hostages - some of whom were killed in captivity, and some of whom remain in Gaza - held away from their loved ones for 606 days.

    In the hours that followed that seismic event, Israel declared a state of war with Hamas in Gaza. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated his aims - to release the hostages, to keep Israel safe from future attacks, and to destroy Hamas.

    To date, the reported number of people killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza stands at more than 54,000. Among them are Hamas’ most senior leaders, the people who planned and carried out the deadly 7 October attacks. That total also includes large numbers of women and children.

    Back in March, Israel collapsed a ceasefire deal which it had agreed with Hamas. It then refused to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza for more than two months, which Israel said was meant to put pressure on Hamas to release the remaining hostages. The IPC - the body which assesses famine - said the population of more than two million Palestinians was facing starvation. Several of the Israeli government have spoken publicly about their goal of displacing them from Gaza altogether.

    Hamas is a proscribed terror organisation in the UK, US and EU, with sanctions in place against the group and its . Israel is a member of the United Nations, a major non-Nato ally, and a friend of Western nations - who arm it and its right to defend itself.

    The Geneva convention was established after World War Two, to try to prevent atrocities like it from happening again. It details crimes such as murder, torture and taking hostages that should never be carried out, with times of conflict no exception. It also describes the war crimes of wilfully causing great suffering, excessive incidental death or injury, and deportation.

    Which returns us to where we began, and those comments by the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. After 20 months of this conflict, have we witnessed war crimes in Israel and Gaza?