Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. I'm Stephen Carol and this is Here's Why, where we take one news story and explain it in just a few minutes with our experts here at Bloomberg. Since the Hamas attack on Israel on the seventh of October and the war in Gaza that's followed, tensions in the Middle East have been running high, with little sign of improvement.
Israel is threatening further military action after striking Hasbella targets in Lebanon in response to a rocket attack that killed a dozen young people in the Israeli occupied Golan Heights.
Hamas says Israel killed its political leader Ismail Hania in an airstrike on Tehran. The recent headlines have been dominated by repeated attacks, assassinations, and fears of a wider regional war, but in the background, there's also been talking negotiations over a truce in Gaza and attempts to de escalate the conflict between Israel, Iran and the Hamas and Hezbala groups, which are backed by Tehran. So Here's why diplomacy still matters in the Middle East. Our head of Middle East
and North Africa coverage, Stuart Livingston Wallas joins me. Now, Stewart, there's been so much violence over the past few months, what are diplomats doing about it?
So it's basically been an escalation, I would say, certainly on the military fund, but particularly on the diplomatic front. Now, it's also true to say that diplomacy has a thread that's been running pretty consistently in the region, but particularly since this all sort of started on this latest phase
start in October. But really we've had these two assassinations, one in Beirut of the Hesbala leader and one of her Nie, who was one of the Hamas or the Hamasis political leader in Tehran, and I think the feeling was that Iran would have to retaliate in some fashion, and because it was so deeply embarrassing for someone of her nearest in Tehran who had been invited to the inauguration of the Iranian president basically gets assassinated under their noses,
So it's not a great look for them. And I think the fear was that Iran would have to respond, or felt it would have to respond far more aggressively than it did in April. So April, the April incident was the one where it sent something in the order three three hundred and fifty drones that missiles directly at Israel and now they were successfully intercepted, almost without exception.
But the real worry was that if they did something even bigger than that, however well calibrated they thought it would be, so you had an exponential increase in the risk that it would hit a target or hit a population that was perhaps not intended, but would in turn force Israel to respond on an even grander scale. So you've seen lots of leaders come in there. You have the usual actors that you've seen in the last several
months of people like Anthony Blinkholm. But I think more importantly you have Russia that has sent its former army chief Gantataey Iran for discussions. You have the French president again contacting Iran directly, and I think the messaging around this is very clear, Please do not escalate. There is nothing to be gained from escalation. And what's interesting is that, at least so far, it seems.
To be working quite about progress towards a broader ceasefire or truce in Gaza. What sort of progress has been made in those discussions.
I think there were worries that when Hernia, that is that her mass's political leader was assassinated, they gave that job to basically the leader in Gaza, sinwall and Sinhwar is sort of the hard liner on this, I mean, the kind of all our hard lines, but he is a particular hardliner. He's also perceived as one of the masterminds of the October seventh attack on Israel from Gaza.
The reality is that he was probably making most of the final decisions on the ceasefire negotiations in any case, So I think our big takeaway from this is that, hey, it clearly was her Mass trying to send a message to the wider world of what their intention was, but at the same time, it probably didn't change the ultimate
decision maker. I think the feeling within certainly diplomatic circles trying to de escalate the situation is that you have to have some sort of resolution in Gaza before you can hope to make progress on any of the other
multiple conflicts now, particularly Lebanon. That is one that continues to worry us, particularly at Yemen Gaza, and what's happened in Gaza since October has really been the foundation for a lot of the rhetorica around why these groups, and they are for the most part Iranian fact are unleashing these assaults on the wide region. And I remind everyone
it's not just Israel that they're attacking. There is this ongoing series of attacks on commercial shipping moving through the Red Sea, the Gulf of Hermad and so on, and that really has had a global impact. Has progress been made, I mean, we hear repeatedly from particularly the US administration that they're getting cl There's no reason to disbelieve that.
But again, there is a fundamental block here, which is that Israel has said that it must or its intention is that it must destroy the her Mass leadership and ensure that her Mask can never again have any sort of sway in Gaza before it's prepared to accept some sort of peace. Obviously, its counterparty with its negotiations is her Mass that is very unlikely ever to agree to that. So whether they can find some sort of path to some sort of peace remains to be seen.
The top US Depromt Anthony Blinken, Secuty Estate, has made many visits to the Middle East since last October. How important is US influence in this region.
Extremely because the short answer, I mean it's waxed and waned over the years. So it looked fairly clear a couple of administrations and goes, probably starting with Obama but then certainly into Trump, that the US appetite for sort
of mass deployments in the Middle East was very much diminishing. Now, in part that was a function of the fact of the rise of China, and there were obviously going to be increasing pressure over the next several years in the Western Pacific, and enormous though US military power is, it couldn't necessarily deploy on the scale it needed to, both in the Middle East and in the Pacific as well as many other places. And so you saw this move out of the region. I would say it's somewhat by
the US. You had the Abraham the Calls, which are the sort of piece deals between some of the Arab nations and Israel, and in some respects that was the US trying to find some sort of balance of power in a scenario where the US would remain present, perhaps not on the scale that people have got used in previous years. Now, clearly that's been derailed pretty dramatically by what's been happening in Gaza and elsewhere in the region, and so the US has had to effectively move back
into the region. It's sent in a carrier strike group, it's sending in squadron of fighter jets, it's having to send in additional destroyers. So in some respects it's had to u turn as a function of the fact that this threat is now spread right across the region.
Who are the other key actors in the diplomatic efforts, Well, the other.
One we haven't mentioned to date, and who is a very, very weighty actor in all of this is Katar, and Katar is often the one that gets forgotten about. I mean, just to set the scene for people, this is a relatively small sliver of land that juts out into the Persian Gulf. But by the end of this decade, they're going to be controlling something like a quarter of the
world's liquefied natural gas supply. Now, with all this money that has come in in the last I suppose twenty five thirty years, they are building out on several fronts. So the one I suspect everyone is aware of is obviously hosting the World Cup, but they've obviously been buying companies. They've been buying real estate or around the place. But the other key thing that they're doing is becoming effectively one of the major negotiators and mediators in the region.
So they've been involved in all sorts of things, everything from hosting the Taliban to hosting her Mass and that obviously was done in coordination with the US. They host a gigantic US base, hosts a very substantial Turkish space, and they're really kind of the mediators between lots and lots of warring parties all over the world. Now they're key in this one because they were, or they have been and continue to be one of the really strong
players in these ceasfile negotiations. They were certainly one of the mediators involved in the rather short lived seas far that we saw several months ago that led to the release of some hostage and a temporary cessation of hostilities in Gaza, and they continue to do so.
Okay, Stuart Livingston Wallace, our head of Middle East and North Africa coverage at Bloomberg, thank you for more explanations like this from our team of twenty seven hundred journalists and analysts around the world. Search for quick take on the Bloomberg website or Bloomberg Business App. I'm Stephen Carol. This is here's why. I'll be back next week with more. Thanks for listening.