The Debate

An invasion of Gaza, and then what? In the buildup to a ground operation, Israel’s leadership has vowed to crush Hamas. But beyond public pronouncements, as residents on both sides of the border hold their breath, what is the actual plan? From destroying smugglers' tunnels to reoccupying the territory that Israel left in 2005, the spectrum runs wide.

It's payback time. After the unspeakable horrors perpetrated by Hamas, Israel is now in battle formation. What does revenge look like? Amid the mobilisation, the air raids, with the Gaza Strip blockaded and out of water and electricity, where do civilians go?

There is the horror, the reaction to the horror, and the reaction to the reaction to the horror. As more and more tales emerge of the savagery inflicted on civilians last Saturday by Hamas militants, as loved ones wonder if the missing are captured or dead, the grief and rage mount.

What is just retribution? As Israel reels from the massacre of hundreds of civilians, the capture of hostages and the shattering of its aura of invincibility, there is the immediate reaction. We have seen the call-up of an unprecedented 300,000 reservists and the shutdown of food and fuel to Gaza.

How to make sense of the deadliest day in Israel's history? Saturday's shock cross-border attack has left over 800 dead in Israel, most of them civilians. We ask about the element of surprise and the retaliation that’s so far left more than 560 Palestinians dead and what’s next on Day Three of what may be a very long war.

Europe has issues at its doorstep and Ukraine is only one of them. Azerbaijan overran Nagorno-Karabakh after promising not to invade during the European Union's embryonic mediation effort. Not only was that promise broken, but the winner is refusing a meeting with the loser.

How effective is chaos as a political strategy? As the United States awakened to its first-ever destitution of a speaker of the House of Representatives, attention is turning to the eight members of the lower house who triggered Kevin McCarthy's downfall. We ask why the leader of the Republican majority in Congress seemed on borrowed time ever he was elected on the 15th ballot back in January. Will those pro-Trump loyalists be rewarded or punished for their hardline stance?

French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna is in Armenia to examine the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan which until two weeks ago had a sizeable ethnic Armenian population. But now the enclave is almost empty, as more than 100,000 of its former residents have crossed the border and fled to Armenia.

As if nightly Russian missile strikes were not enough, Kyiv started the week with more in its Monday morning in-tray. First with neighbouring Slovakia, where the pro-Russian candidate Robert Fico finished tops in a weekend general election, leaving people to wonder: what kind of a coalition will the anti-West left-wing populist form?

As France, Italy and others wonder if the working-class voters who now vote far right will ever return to the left, the sight of a US president walking a picket line in support of striking auto workers certainly grabbed headlines here. We ask about Joe Biden's embrace of his blue-collar roots and his open support for trade unions, often seen as an endangered species on both sides of the Atlantic.