"A taste of their own medicine" - how Israel's neighbours look at its war with Iran
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The feeling here is there's a lot of support for what Iran is doing to Israel. A lot of people have said to me, well, finally they can have a taste of their own medicine. Now their hospitals are being hit and their children are dying. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip. We'll own it. Know that China is doing very poorly right now. You're gambling with World War III. I was saved by God to make America great again.

I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battle Lines. It's Friday the 20th of June 2025, now one week into the Israeli-Iranian air and missile war.

It is a fast-moving situation and by the time you listen to this things may have moved on dramatically. But as we sit down an Iranian missile has struck southern Israel's main hospital injuring 30 people. Israel has vowed to hold Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, accountable. Israel's air force has struck Iranian nuclear facilities in Natanz and Iraq.

And the Iranian regime has imposed an internet blackout shortly after somebody hacked the Iranian state television network to display calls for a general uprising. But most significantly of all, President Donald Trump has approved Pentagon plans for an attack on Iran, although he has not yet decided whether to give the go-ahead. To discuss all of this, I brought together some of the finest minds and writers in the Telegraph newsroom. Safiya Yan, our senior foreign correspondent, joins us from Beirut.

Our health editor, Paul Newkey, is in Tel Aviv. And David Blair, our chief foreign affairs commentator, is with me in the studio. And Sophia, I want to start with you, partly because for the past week we've been talking about this enormous war between Israel and Iran. But it sometimes seems that that has come to overshadow the fact that that is just the latest escalation in a multi-front war that's been going on for some time now.

You're in Beirut. Could you tell us a bit about what's going on there, what you've seen and what you've heard? Well, here in Lebanon, as it is with many countries in the Middle East, there's a real sense that the country does not want to get involved directly in this conflict between Israel and Iran. It's messy, it's complicated, could be really disastrous. But unfortunately for a lot of countries in the Middle East, it's something that you can't avoid.

And this is very much true for Lebanon, which is just north of Israel. So actually, I'm not very far from Paul. We're Paul sitting right now. But because of the proximity of where Lebanon is, you can see the missiles in the sky at night. You can hear the Israeli drones. You can see these two powers going at it. And it's a constant reminder that this war is just right next door. And of course, Lebanon is of particular concern for Israel.

both the Israelis and the Iranians, because there is a group here, a militant group, Hezbollah, that Iran has backed for many, many, many years. And they are the centerpiece of Iran's axis of resistance. Now, the group has been decimated after many attacks from the Israeli side, attacks that have continued. Even as recently as just last night, they assassinated a Hezbollah commander in the south of Lebanon. And this is happening even though Hezbollah and Israel agreed to cease fire last November.

So this feeling that this is very much live is something that is top of mind for everyone. So it feels like Israel is still at war in Lebanon, even as it's fighting with Iran and in Gaza and elsewhere. Yeah, absolutely. It's something that, you know, there are scenes of people having a nice time, especially in Beirut, going out for dinner, having a glass of wine, enjoying themselves. But in a way, it's sort of their attempt to sort of make peace

if you will, themselves in terms of what's happening, just trying to find some semblance of normality. Just the other day, actually, a very loud explosion, the sound of an explosion rang out across Beirut and people in different parts of the city could hear it. Everybody sort of jumped. I could see that. I jumped. It was,

It turned out in the end, thankfully, that it was just a truck tire popping. But that when a sound like that occurs in the midst of all of this, because you can hear all the war sounds and you can see what's happening, it's something that really keeps everybody here on edge. Paul, you're in Tel Aviv, I believe. We spoke to Henry Bodkin on Monday when we were only a few days into this. Could you bring us up to date on Beersheba, I suppose, but also just...

the sense of how Israel is coping with the Iranian retaliation. Yes. So I arrived here two days ago via Jordan, which feels very normal, actually, crossed into the West Bank and down to Tel Aviv. Israel is much, much quieter than when I was last here. It feels like another lockdown. I was last here in October, actually, for the last Iranian strike. So it's much quieter.

There's anxiety and there's tension in the air, but there's also humor, as there always is in Israel. One of the first jokes I heard was, you know, we're going to be the first nation to be made extinct through tiredness. And that's because the, you know, twice a night, three times a night, these sirens are going off and everyone's having to get themselves into bomb shelters.

And people are taking that very, very seriously now because the blasts that these missiles are causing are unlike anything Israel has seen before. They really make the rockets fired by Hamas and Hezbollah previously seem like sticks. One blast site up the road from me has taken out pretty much everything in a 300-meter radius.

You mentioned the hospital hit further south this morning. That was actually part of a raid that hit directly three targets, one of which I visited just south of Tel Aviv this morning, a housing estate being hit by one of these ballistic missiles. And again, utter devastation. Four or five buildings, multi-storey buildings completely destroyed, hundreds of walking injured, and four people very seriously injured.

But miraculously, no one killed. And that is because everyone is really sticking by the rules and getting themselves into these bomb shelters. It sounds like a hackneyed question because people have been asking this of Israelis and of correspondents in Israel since this began a week ago. Given this amount of punishment, given that they're facing a level of threat that I'm not sure Israel has really faced in decades, to be honest. I mean, this kind of scale of ballistic missile threats is...

and the likely civilian casualties they're likely to take. What's the mood like about Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to launch this war? Henry was telling us on Monday that opinions seem pretty, pretty solid. Public opinions seem pretty, pretty supportive of the war. Does that remain the case?

Yes, I think so. No one I've spoken to has knocked it. The head of the octopus, as they call it, has long been Israel's greatest foe, Iran. And people are frankly relieved that Netanyahu has at last, after...

20, perhaps 30 years of promising has at last done it. I think in that sense, people are behind it. There is, though, a huge anxiety about whether the US is going to get involved. People desperately want the US to get involved. That's a question on everyone's lips. The unspoken question is, what if they don't? What if Trump decides that

He's not going to do it, that it's too big a risk, that the risks outweigh the benefits for him. His advisers will be telling him, look, we had nine years in Iraq, thousands of people killed. You got your presidency by promising to put America first and having no more foreign wars. There's real anxiety about whether America will come in and support Israel. And the question about what would happen if they don't

Well, that's a difficult question. It could just drag on as Sophia has outlined in Lebanon. It could drag on like it's

dragging on in Gaza. It could become a forever war. And that, I think, is at the back of people's minds. David, let me bring you in here. You've been watching this conflict for a week, same as all of us. And we were talking a lot yesterday about exactly that question that Paul has raised. It is the question everybody's asking. Is America going to join the war? I think

Paul has put his finger on the crucial question that is now going to change everything one way or another. And I think various questions follow from that. If America does join, does that mean that Iran's supreme leader might crack under the pressure and try and seek a deal, which would inevitably involve him sacrificing the whole of Iran's uranium enrichment program, which he has spent decades building up in the teeth of international pressure?

But then if we suppose for a moment that Trump decides against direct U.S. involvement, can Israel defang the nuclear program completely on its own?

which would mean destroying or otherwise disabling the Fordow uranium enrichment plant, which is that the world now knows is buried in a mountain and is said to be resistant to every possible bomb, except possibly the enormous bunker busters that the U.S. Air Force has, but which Israel does not. And then the further question from that is whether America enters the war or not. Is the Iranian regime going to survive this?

It's pretty clear what Khamenei is playing for. He's playing to come out of this with a nuclear program that he could rebuild as rapidly as possible, perhaps in a period of months, and with the regime still in power. But is that realistic?

given the sheer weight of pressure that's now on him. Even if America doesn't join the war, Israel's air campaign has been astonishing in its effectiveness, in its ability to knock out the entire Iranian high command in the way in which it's probably already damaged or disabled every centrifuge in the Tans, which is, of course, Iran's biggest enrichment facility. Even if the Americans don't enter, can the Iranians withstand all that?

And finally, one final thought on something that is not happening.

As Sophia mentioned earlier, Hezbollah is not firing rockets into northern Israel. The vast arsenal which Iran spent decades equipping Hezbollah with precisely for this moment, for the moment when Iran found itself under attack directly from Israel, the whole idea of Hezbollah is that it will be able to strike back on Iran's behalf. And that is not happening. No one expects it to happen. Hezbollah is plainly incapable of doing anything at all.

And that's a testament to the extraordinary success of the Israeli air campaign last year and the way in which Iran's methods of retaliation have been so severely degraded, which is what has given Benjamin Netanyahu his chance. Let's focus on this Fordow question very briefly. I know by now I think all listeners will know, you know, the name of the bomb and the fact that it's dropped from a B-2 and the 60 meters and all of that. But I think...

I think that you and I have been debating actually for a long time is this conventional wisdom even before this was you would need the Americans to drop this bomb. It now looks like the Israelis are waiting for the Americans to come and drop that bomb, which speaking to Paul's point of what happens if the Americans don't do it. Is it possible that the Israelis have a plan B or not? My hunch is that they would not have launched this campaign unless they did have a plan B.

they must believe that they could disable Fordow without the Americans or they wouldn't have embarked on this. They may turn out to be wrong, but there must be a plan of some kind. You don't really need a plan B per se. There are different outcomes.

which would suit Israel in different ways. The ideal outcome would be America joins in, they topple the regime, they get in a new regime that they can negotiate with and that agrees not to enrich uranium and chase a nuclear bomb. But if America didn't join, Israel would have, in any case, severely degraded and pushed the nuclear program, probably by years, if not more. So

In a way, from Benjamin Netanyahu's point of view, it is a win-win. For the public, however, I think, you know, the public of Israel, they want a normal life again, as anyone would. Unless the victory is absolutely decisive and the regime is toppled, that doesn't look very likely.

So I would say that the length of time by which the Israelis may have been able to delay further progress on Iran's nuclear program, I mean, that really remains to be seen. They killed a lot of these top scientists, but the expertise was passed down. I mean, it's very much institutionalized. And so there is a thinking that it could just be a matter of time before they get back to where they were and perhaps

Now, it's possible that the establishment, the Iranian officials that are running these programs feel that it's now or never, that if they don't, after this round of hostilities, find a way to move toward getting a nuclear weapon, that they may never be able to get one. You know, the thinking has been for a long time. There has always been a debate. You know, if they've got that, would that be enough of a deterrent?

You know, this is how the North Koreans think, for instance. And so this has been a discussion. And it's possible that this latest bout, this escalation is going to push North

senior Iranian officials to think that they have to really go for it. And that is, of course, if they don't get to the scenario that Paul outlined that could potentially still happen, which would be that the regime falls. I mean, there's so many questions about what could happen next. And it is moving so quickly right now. I mean, who knows what will happen in even the next six hours? Let's talk about those next six hours. We've talked about Trump considering it. What are the considerations that will be running through Donald Trump's head?

about whether to say go or don't go? The considerations that should be running through his head, and they may be very different from those that are running through his head, but let's stick with the first, the things he should be thinking about. He needs to be thinking about Iran's options for retaliation,

against US bases in the region. So far, Iran has concentrated its retaliation purely against Israel. But of course, it has the option of firing missiles at the Gulf states, particularly those that host American military assets, which would presumably be used in the campaign. What would that mean for the oil price? What would that mean for the global economy? Are those Gulf states ready and prepared to defend themselves as effectively as Israel is? It

What would happen to the hundreds of thousands of British, European, American citizens who live in those places? Would they all have to be evacuated? You know, the potential for escalation is severe. However, on the other hand, it may well be that Iran's capabilities for hitting back are so degraded that those dangers are not as great as you might think. We simply can't know.

But what is running through his head? Well, we're talking about Donald Trump here. And one point to bear in mind is that everything that happens now will be decided by three people, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ayatollah Khamenei, who, and I put the point delicately, are not famed for their cool-headed, wise judgment necessarily, at least not always.

What does Trump want? He wants the limelight. He wants to be the center of attention. At the moment, Benjamin Netanyahu has been at the center of attention and Trump may simply want to wrest the limelight back. But it's a huge decision.

And as you mentioned earlier, direct intervention would go against all his instincts. I would add two things. I mean, I agree with all of that. One, a military one and one political one is that on the military side, I don't think we should read into the fact that America hasn't acted yet, that it won't act. I think it's perfectly obvious that if it is going to act, it'll probably be

a week, maybe even a month away, because it has to plan for all these contingencies. It has to have its assets in place to protect its allies in the Gulf, to protect its own troops, and indeed to make sure the assault it launches, if it does launch an assault, goes smoothly. And it takes a while to do that. I mean, I remember the Iraq war, it took months of buildup. I know we're not talking about a land invasion here, but nevertheless, it took a long, careful buildup by the Pentagon.

I'm in a way not surprised that he hasn't done it yet. And I certainly don't take it as a signal he won't do it. The other thing I think on Trump's mind must be the division within his MAGA movement. You know, people are being pretty vocal on the right of his MAGA movement. You know, people he considers allies and that.

I think probably will have some influence on him. So Paul makes a really good point about the Americans spending some time to make sure that they're going to be ready for what might come if the US military joins in a more direct way. Just today, actually, the US State Department started to collect names. They've asked Americans in Israel, in the West Bank, who would like US government assistance to evacuate.

to fill out a form. So they're collecting and trying to figure out how to move people out of harm's way as things, you know, as it seems that things will escalate. And this is just one of the many different activities that the U.S. has engaged in. They've diverted some military resources, for instance, to the region. And in this process, it's clear that America, obviously, they're in preparation mode. You know, it underscores the fact that they are thinking how to move going forward.

Even in the days before Israel launched its initial strikes early Friday, the U.S. was drawing down non-essential personnel in Iraq.

There's a sense that the American presence in Iraq is the most exposed in terms of U.S. assets in the Middle East, some sense that that might be sort of top of list if anything were to be targeted in response to the Americans getting more involved. And so, again, this is just more to underline how much preparation goes into something like this, that the Americans are thinking somewhat thoroughly about what to do and how to protect their people, both civilians and their troops. I think the Pentagon also is not going to make decisions

what you might call a Ted Cruz mistake. You know, the Pentagon knows, Senator Ted Cruz, the Pentagon knows that Iran is a state of 90 odd million people. The Pentagon knows that it's a massive geographic area with a lot of mountains in it. It is not an easy place to launch an assault on from America.

it's probably not an easy place to launch an assault on effectively, even from the Middle East. So the Pentagon knows all of that and will take time to make sure it gets it right. I wanted to ask about where this leaves America's

allies actually. Britain for example. David you worked in Downing Street in the Foreign Office. The front page of the Daily Telegraph today is about the Attorney General warning that war on Iran may be illegal and essentially warning Keir Starmer not to get involved. David what does this all mean for America's allies starting with Britain? I think it's pretty clear that the British government wants to stay out of this and would prefer America to stay out of it too.

No doubt there are legal qualms. You can raise legal objections to almost any form of military action if you want to. But they do not want to be part of this. I think that's very clear. The irony, as you pointed out, Roland, in a piece you wrote recently, is that the Royal Navy has a carrier strike group within range of Iran at the moment, somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

HMS Prince of Wales is there. And on her flight deck is about 18 F-35 jets, which is about half as many as the Israelis have, which is another way of saying that if Britain did become involved, they could increase the striking power currently arrayed against Iran by about 50%, which would be a big difference. And that's without talking about the nuclear powered submarine that is escorting the carrier, which is armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

So quite by chance, the British are in position to make a significant military contribution. But I stress there's absolutely no sign that the government wants to do that. Quite the reverse. The government wants to stay out of this. But above all, the government doesn't want to be faced with this dilemma where if Trump does decide to intervene, he's going to have to use what is, after all, a British base in Diego Garcia.

And to do that, he's going to require Britain's permission. Which means if we say yes, Keir Starmer says yes, then he's

morally and politically and legally complicit in what his attorney general is calling potentially a legal war. If he says no, he's probably the first British prime minister to say no to an American president on a matter of, you know, what they think is urgent national security. I don't know, since 1945? No, no, that's not true. No, that's not true. No, no. I mean, if you think back to Syria...

Ed Miliband, an opposition politician, effectively

got that turned over in parliament. So we couldn't go with Obama and attack Assad for using chemical weapons. And the Americans didn't go without allied support. You can go back further to Vietnam, where Britain didn't get involved. I think there's a difference, Paul, which is in 2013, with Syria, the British government said yes. The prime minister at the time said, yes, we want to be we are part of this. And if you want to use Diego Garcia, that's fine with us.

And then they were vetoed by Parliament, which is a bit different. So I think Rowland's point stands. You know, no British prime minister in this comparable circumstance has ever rejected an American request to use Diego Garcia. It is a fundamental question. And it's clear that, you know, our government really does not want to be asked that question.

Because whichever answer they give, as Roland spelled out earlier, you know, it's not good for them either way. So they would prefer America just not to get involved and for the issue not to arise. Would Trump feel better with allies alongside him? I think that's an important question. And I think even Trump, if he's going to go to war, something he doesn't want to do, or as Long said, he doesn't want to do, is a lack of allies going to make a difference? And I suspect it might.

After the break, can the Iranian regime survive and the agonizing decision facing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? If you're a lineman in charge of keeping the lights on, Grainger understands that you go to great lengths and sometimes heights to ensure the power is always flowing, which is why you can count on Grainger for professional-grade products and next-day delivery so you have everything you need to get the job done.

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It's a bit strange this moment, isn't it? It's got that kind of Cuban Missile Crisis feeling to it, doesn't it? This kind of moment, day by day, the world on the brink. Well, it's a week that will live in history. And for years to come, people are going to be looking back at these events and studying them very closely. So those of us who are living through them and witnessing them, particularly Sophia and Paul, who are actually out there in the region, you know, it's a great privilege. You know, of all the times that Iran could be under attack,

all facing this kind of pressure, facing it at a moment when the Supreme Leader is 86 years old and has already been in power for 36 years and is not well. You know, he received it was publicly acknowledged that he received treatment for cancer not so long ago.

This is not a time when you want to have a leadership like that, when you're facing a challenge on this scale. There was an interesting piece along those lines I read last night. I can't remember when, but in one of the American papers, they said that his predecessor, who he was very close to, which was Khomeini, I think, at about the same sort of age and about close to his death, he had to surrender to Iraq. Ah, that was a piece I wrote, Paul.

He drank the cup of poison. He drank the cup of poison, that's right. And now he's... It was a very good piece. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm very glad that you attributed it to an American journalist because, of course, it was such a good piece. It must obviously have been written by an American and couldn't possibly have been in the Daily Telegraph. No, it had New York Times all over it.

Yeah, no, I wrote about this irony of history that Khomeini back in 1988 had to, as he put it, drink the cup of poison and do what he had sworn he would never do and agree a ceasefire with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And he never spoke in public again and he was dead 11 months later. And now the man he was very close to at the time and his linear successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has to decide whether to drink his own cup of poison.

and seek some deal which would undoubtedly involve sacrificing the whole of his uranium enrichment program in order to save Iran from American attack and save his regime. And there must be a chance that he might do that. I mean, not a big chance, but he might. I think the kind of tragic comparison with the cup of poison is also that the Iran-Iraq war didn't have to go on as long as it did.

that what he got was status quo antebellum. And they'd really achieved that within a couple of years. They pushed the Iraqis back. It wasn't really a surrender. It was a kind of acknowledgement of let's stop the war. More of a, it was a draw. But he was bitterly opposed and he spent, he sacrificed huge numbers of Iranian lives in prolonging that stalemate for so long. Yeah, the deal that he got in 1988, he could have had in 1982.

So they fought for an extra six years and they got nothing out of it. But the situation now in some ways is even more agonizing for his successor because unlike in 1988, the regime's survival now is at stake. Sophia, you're in Beirut right now. You're based in Turkey.

What about the other neighboring governments in the region? We've talked about Israel is still at war in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, all over the place, really. But there's other governments here and neighbors, Iraq, for example, Kuwait, the

the Saudis, the Qataris, the Emiratis, there's countries all around Iran that must be feeling fairly nervous. What can you tell us about the attitude of governments in the region to all this? Well, I've been trying to get a handle of what the feeling is like in Iraq amongst the general public. There's a big debate going

There always has been, but it's moments like this where it really rises to the surface. But a discussion on whether it helps or hurts to have a U.S. presence within the country. Some people think that it is useful because then there could be greater protection. Others think that it's a terrible idea because it then makes their own country a target for

when big conflicts like this between Israel and Iran start to play out. And so for many people, and especially in Iraq, which has had a very complicated history with the US and regime change, definitely not enough for us to describe in an hour-long podcast. But for them, they don't want to see war. I mean, the general sentiment I have from people I've talked to all across the Middle East, and I'm speaking about the general public and, of course,

their viewpoints differ quite a bit. But the one thing I've heard from everyone is that nobody wants to see this. Of course, nobody wants to see death and destruction. And this is something that is so much out of their control. Many people have said to me, you know, that this is a

a battle between two great powers and it's something that they wish could stay isolated between those two. But unfortunately, because of the geography of where, for instance, Iraq is or even Turkey and Lebanon, I mean, they in a way have no choice but to get pulled in whether or not they want to and whether or not they've agreed to it per se. In Turkey,

Since this all began, there's been a lot of disinformation, actually. There was a lot of different rumors about whether Turkey, whether its military helped Israel. I mean, it's really interesting to

how much information is swirling around on all of this in terms of what people are putting out and how much is rumor and how much is fact. I mean, it's really, really difficult to parse through it sometimes. And it's really riled people up generally, I would say, across the region. One interesting thing that happened with Turkey is that, of course, Turkey and Iran share a land border. And now the airspace across Iran has been closed.

For people who want to evacuate, especially following the orders from the Israeli military for people in Tehran, for instance, to leave, presuming that more major strikes will occur, one way that Iranians can get out of the country is to enter Turkey through a land border crossing. And so some people have started to come into Turkey, but there's also a debate in the public about whether or not that's a good idea. Turkey took a lot of Syrians when the civil war broke out, and it was really complicated for them

to handle this refugee population. But one line that really stuck out to me was that there was a discussion about whether or not Iranians could be trusted because there's a sense, we know now that there was some very intense, deep operations by Israeli intelligence in Iran, which helped the success of the initial operation last Friday. So there's a sense that maybe not all Iranians can be trusted. So should they be allowed into Turkey? I mean, the discussion on this is so wide that

And so varied. And there's so many different lines that are coming across the region in all these countries that, again, like I said before, have no choice but to be a part of this whether or not they would like to. To clarify that, you're saying there's anxiety in Turkey that a lot of these Iranians may be Israeli spies? Yeah, because, yeah, it's one line of discussion and it's really an important one. I mean, this is something...

I think what it reflects is that people in a way don't really know what to believe and who to trust in this very fraught moment. And you have to remember that Turkey is in the middle of, well, a lot of conflicts and they share a border with these countries. It's a complicated position to be in.

Yeah, I mean, belief, truth, what do we believe, another layer of the Hall of Mirrors and everything. Maybe we should finish by coming back to Iran. On Wednesday, we had a special edition which was only Iranian voices, Iranian-born, Iranian exiles, Iranians there talking about their country. And I would refer listeners to that to get a sense of what Iranians are saying. But nonetheless, I think the big question here is what happens to Iran because the other unanswerable question is,

after will America join the war is what happens to Iran? Does the regime survive? Would anyone like to take a stab at looking into a crystal ball? I think there are a couple of scenarios. People worry immensely that if the regime is toppled, that the strongest armed group will take charge, and that could be more radical still, the extremists in the Revolutionary Guard.

The other option is that it divides among ethnic lines, as it did in Iraq, and you get a civil war breaking out and chaos across the country. It's quite hard to see if they did topple the current regime that they could easily put in a stable one. David? Yes, I agree. I mean, the prospects have...

Iranian regime falling. I mean, I think the only thing we can say with a fair degree of certainty is that out of the mayhem that would follow, you would not get a nice pro-Western liberal government that we could easily do business with. It's far more likely, as Paul says, to be the most heavily armed group that would seize power. And that's most likely to be some form of military dictatorship. My personal view is that

defanging the regime, making sure that it doesn't have a nuclear enrichment program is much better than bringing it down. Why? Because the alternative is, first of all, you risk state collapse and general mayhem, as Paul mentioned. And secondly, a successor regime would almost certainly be no better from a Western interests point of view.

I think that must be right. I mean, where we need to be is, you know, on top of an Iran where there's a proper negotiated deal over the nuclear facilities and where it can be properly monitored. I know that that's an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. It didn't work with North Korea, for example. To some extent, it didn't work with Israel when Israel was developing its own nuclear bomb. Diplomacy in the end...

and stability seem to be the better cards. Sophia, just before we go, I want to second with Sophia and Paul about how you will be reporting this going forward over the next kind of week. What will you be looking at in your respective kind of regions? Sophia, do you want to go first? I'm really looking at what Iran's got in its arsenal, both physically in terms of

their missile capabilities, for instance, going forward. A lot of the Western defenses that they had in that part of the country were hit by the Israelis. So it seems that they've had to move more inland, which means that they've now brought out

much longer range missiles. They just used this past day their longest range missile, up to 2,000 kilometers. And so that perhaps reflects the fact that they've had to move more inland. So there's that. And then the fact that there are still groups all around the region that have been backed by Iran that could still be leveraged. And Iranian officials have made that clear. These groups too have made that clear as well. They are saying kind of the same thing, that they're

They're ready to act if called upon by Iran. There's one, a couple of groups based in Iraq have been a little bit more forceful, making it very clear that if the Americans get involved, they will 100% be attacking the US presence in Iraq. And so this, I think, cannot be discounted. For Hezbollah, they are not as strong as they used to be, that's for sure. But I think that you cannot...

You cannot discount the spirit of these groups because they have suffered from Israeli bombardment themselves for so long. And so the feeling here is the opposite of what Paul's been experiencing in Israel. There's a lot of support for what Iran is doing to Israel. A lot of people have said to me, well,

finally they can have a taste of their own medicine. Now their hospitals are being hit and their children are dying. They took my home. Actually, this is exactly what a man said to me last night. He lost his home only just two weeks ago in Lebanon from an Israeli airstrike, and again happening despite a ceasefire agreed a couple of months ago. And he said, at first I was so mad that they took my home.

But now I see that the Iranians have taken theirs, that they're going for them too. And he said that it made him feel better. I didn't get the sense that it comes from a place of wishing harm on people, but more a sense of justice. Because for a lot of these people who've lived around the fringe of Israel, they feel that they have been at risk for so long. And Israelis say the same thing. So it really underscores how tense this region is.

All of these people have suffered so much destruction, so much death, so much trauma. And it's really, really hard to see how you kind of pull back from this. It's a tough time. Thank you, Sophia. Paul, what are you going to be watching in Israel over the coming days? Well, I mean, there's obvious reporting to be done. There's missile strikes occurring every night. So we'll be following that very closely to try and understand what

whether the Iranian capability has really been eroded or whether, as seemed evident this morning, they've still got the capability to inflict real damage. So that's very unclear, just how much capability has been lost, how much is being held back. Maybe they're about to collapse. It's very, very unclear. So that will be one thing. And the other thing, I think, like Zafir, I

I'm very interested in the mood within Israel. I think Safiya is absolutely right around the mood outside of Israel. It's worryingly celebratory in part, stupidly so, I think, but nevertheless, it's there. I will be keeping an eye on those things and popping down to the bomb shelter every few hours. Keep your head down. David Blair, would you like the very last words? What are you going to be watching for and writing about?

in the coming week or so? No, it all depends on America. Do they intervene? And if so, what effect does that have? Thank you very much. David Blair, Sophia Yan, Paul Newkey, thank you for joining us on Battle Lines. That is all for this week. We'll be back on Monday. Presumably we'll be talking about this again unless something else very surprising happens. Until then, that was Battle Lines. Goodbye.

Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph, created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Roland Oliphant and Venetia Rainey. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battle Lines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review, as it helps others to find the show. To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest.

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