A bonus episode from The Conflict. Jonny Dymond brings together a carefully assembled panel of experts, academics and journalists to talk about the conflict in the region. They assess what has happened in history to lead us to this point. And, look at what history can teach us about what might happen next.
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Welcome to the explanation from the BBC World Service.
I'm Jonny diamond and this is the conflict.
Over the next half hour, we're going to look back at how a specific event from the past in the Middle east has shaped this moment and maybe, just maybe, try to understand what might happen next, past, present and future.
I've worked all across the Middle east for the BBC and I'm chatting with a carefully curated panel of journalists, experts and historians about the conflict in the region in its relentless hunt.
For Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, you hear the half century old echoes of Israel's cheerily named Operation Wrath of God, its response to the atrocity at the 1972 Munich Olympics that was launched after a Palestinian militant group kidnapped and killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Games.
Israel's then Prime Minister Golda Mayor, instructed the Mossad, Israel's external intelligence agency, to find and to kill those responsible.
Munich and Israel's long and vengeful response marked the start of the era of hijackings and kidnappings, gun and bomb attacks across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and farther afield as Palestinian militants, supported by a variety of often revolutionary movements and Arab nations, did battle with Israel to draw attention to their cause.
And Israel responded in bloody kind to deter and to take revenge.
More than five decades later, that fight continues.
Before we take a rutle around the past, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's international editor, can bring us the background.
Well, I think to start with, it's still a very, very vivid moment.
And it's vivid because Israel released that quite extraordinary drone video of his final moments before they killed him.
But I think the way that that video has been perceived, I mean, I think that's actually all important, particularly on the Palestinian side, in the way that they look not just at his death, but at his legacy.
Because in the video, contrary to what had become perhaps popular belief, Yahya Sinwar was not, you know, down a tunnel broken and humiliated.
He was to the eyes of many Palestinians, right to the last fighting back, we saw him fling something at the drone that had spotted him.
It was a turnaround in people's perceptions.