That's one of those patrols going by that I was talking about. And when you see them as they are, they're towing. Towing her water container behind him and other supplies on the truck, you know, then going out in the field. And they're going to they're going to stay in the field for a while. His guys are not going to be going to some bed and breakfast.

It's not for show

No they're going out there for real.

That was from October 9th, 2023. CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson was speaking to me from a car pulled over on the side of the road in Stuart, Israel, just a few miles from the Gaza border. The Israeli military was preparing to retaliate. Remember, this was just days after Hamas had launched its surprise attack on October 7th. It was the deadliest single day assault in the country's history. Israeli authorities say roughly 1200 people were killed, More than 250 others were taken hostage, brought to Gaza. And over the last year, Israel has unleashed firepower into Gaza from the air and ground. The health ministry there says more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed. Whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble. The humanitarian disaster unfolded. Hunger and disease spread quickly. So did international outrage. That military campaign continues to this day. But in the past few weeks, conflict has also spread across the region.

It's hard to overstate the psychological impact of hundreds of blasts across Lebanon now, mostly in Hezbollah areas. Pages exploding at about 330, according to the group.

The densely populated capital of Beirut has just been rocked by several large explosions.

Breaking news Within the past few minutes, Hezbollah confirmed the death of leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike on Friday.

The Israeli military says it's conducting targeted raids in southern Lebanon.

U.S. officials estimate Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles towards Israel. Israel says some of them actually made a direct impact in central and southern Israel.

So after a year of war, with even more death and destruction all but certain. What has the Middle East lost and what would it take to get it back? Today, I check back in with Nic Robertson, who's in Tel Aviv from CNN, this is One Thing. And David Rind.

So, Nick, we're talking now on Thursday afternoon Israel time. It's been just a little more than a day since that huge Iran missile barrage. To say the region is on edge is honestly an understatement. But I first want to go back to the days right before October 7th, before the Hamas attack, before the war in Gaza that followed. If I remember correctly, there was talk of peace in the air. Right. Can you take us back to that moment?

Yeah, I remember August, the middle of August that I got the sense from sources I was speaking with the momentum behind a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia and normalization between the two countries that this was getting closer.

The New York Times is reporting that the Biden administration and Saudi officials are discussing terms of a mutual defense treaty that would resemble what the US has with two of its closest allies, with Japan and with South Korea.

'And it was based on three things. It was based on discussions between the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel, what Saudi Arabia wanted from the United States, which was a defense treaty, a proper document that would say the United States would come to the support of Saudi Arabia and that it wanted F-35 fighter aircraft and it wanted as well, nuclear power stations and facilities. Then this really created a sense that this normalization with Israel was entering a very realistic phase where President Biden would get something out of it, that he would get legacy at the end of his presidency, that he would be able to be the president who secured a lasting Middle East peace, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia would get something out of it because he would reset the relationship with the United States, which was so damaged when he was responsible, according to the CIA, for the killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, that this was going to put him in good standing with the United States again. And in the region.

There have been epercussions for Saudi Arabia. The president declassify the information around the Khashoggi killing. We need to also look at the future of the Middle East and what that needs to look like, not just for the Saudi people, the Israeli people, but for American national security interests.

So President Biden was getting something out of it. The Saudi crown prince was going to get something out of it and Israel would get something out of it.

Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States share a common goal to change history, to make this quantum leap another quantum leap for peace. We had one with the Abraham Accords with the United States, and we now have an opportunity with the United States to change the Middle East forever.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had spoken about this last piece, if you will, of sort of Abraham Accords type deal that he got with the United Arab Emirates, that he could have economic stability, trade and boost the region's stability by this relationship with Saudi Arabia. And it seemed it seemed close.

I'm going to plagiarize. I'll say that every day we get closer.

And how close are you today?

Closer than we were yesterday.

The momentum was building. The numbers of times diplomats were meeting, behind the scenes was becoming more frequent. And that was right up until very early October.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel is at war after a surprise rocket and ground attack from Gaza militants early this morning.

Hamas terrorists launched an unprecedented attack by land, by air and by sea, focusing on Israeli civilians taking the country completely by surprise.

So what about October 7th and the war that followed so scrambled this deal that it seemed like all sides were really interested in.

What Hamas appeared to recognize was that if this normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel was agreed, then the Palestinian issue, their issue, their cause would go on a deep back burner and nobody would pay attention to it, that the economic forces in the region would take over from the aspirations of the Palestinians in Israel. It was the moment where they thought, if we don't strike now, then we're going to lose our voice. And if you look at everything that Sinwar has achieved and sought to achieve since October the 7th, it has been to put the Palestinian voice back on the global stage, whether it's demonstrations by young students at American universities, European universities, similar, has been able to galvanize much greater support for the Palestinian cause than previous Palestinian leaders. And all of that was at stake on October the 7th. And his project to get the Palestinian issue on the world stage has in that way achieved something. But he knew that if he didn't move, then the opportunity to do that was going to be snatched from him by this normalization between Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Well, you know, now kind of fast forward to what we've seen these last couple of weeks in in Lebanon and the strikes on Israel from Iran. Should we think of this as a separate thing from what has happened in Gaza over the past years, or are they linked in some way?

They're absolutely linked. Hamas owes its influence. It owes its military strength. It owes all the tunnels it has. It owes all the missiles that it has built inside of Gaza to support from Iran, support with technology, support with money, support with influence. So Hamas in Gaza is very much an extension, a proxy of Iran. And the other escalations we've seen have been Iran's other proxies stepping into the arena, the Houthis in Yemen blockading the Red Sea, taking down ships. Hezbollah in Lebanon are striking across the border, they say, tying Israel down on the northern border, doing their part to to support Hamas. All of that goes back to their main sponsor, Iran. It provides them with the weaponry. It provides them with the military training, provides them with with the money in many cases. So, yes, this all ties back to Iran.

The Iran backed Houthis are behind recent rocket and missile attacks on Israel, including in the last 24 hours, as well as on U.S. warships and commercial ships in the region.

So as things have really escalated in the past few weeks, the Houthis have not only continued striking the ships, the international commercial ships in the Red Sea, they've launched ballistic missiles, these long range missiles that have a heavy hundreds and hundreds of kilograms of explosives.

Here in the center of Israel. The fires are burning through the farmland here. The bomb squad is on site...

They've launched three of those in the past couple of weeks...

'But one of the big questions right now is how did a missile get all the way from Yemen and penetrate so deep into the center of Israel? And on Saturday, they said they were targeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben-Gurion Airport, the main international airport in Israel. Wow. As he sat on the tarmac, just having arrived back from the Unga and the following morning, the IDF called me up, Israel Defense Force called me up. The spokesman said, We have something we want you to see. I can't tell you what it is. Get in your car now and start driving to this location. And that's what I did. Not knowing where I was going, what I was going to see when I got there. It was an airbase. I wasn't allowed to take my phone in and use it as a camera. I wasn't allowed to take a camera. And and as I boarded and boarded the aircraft, I was being taken on. I could see that it was an air to air refueling aircraft. And as we flew south out of Israel, high above the desert, then out across the Red Sea, you can see Saudi Arabia, one side, Egypt on the other. F-35 fighter jets start coming up to the rear of the fuel tanker and high pressure fuel flows into the F-35 from the tanker. That takes about 3 or 4 minutes that that plane, the F-35, peels away. Then another one comes in. And I would say for an hour and a half, that process is repeated all the way to Yemen. And when the crew show me the flight plan, that's when I could see where we were going. And I could see that the target was Hudaydah. And as the last F-35 topped up its gas tank, it peeled off and flew towards Hodeidah for its strike against what I was told was a U.S. fuel dump at a Houthi power generating station. And what I was told was this is the port that the Iranians supply most of their weapon systems into the Houthis. And this is why the Israelis were targeting it, But they were targeting it for another reason to to send a message to Iran that they could fly these long range missions. This mission was about 1500 kilometers outside of Israeli airspace. And they wanted to show to Iran that they can reach deep into Iran as well. And that was just two days before Iran struck in Israel with that 180 or more ballistic missile in two barrages.

Yeah. And you wonder if the rules with Iran just in general have been scrambled after we've seen how aggressive Iran has been in sending these these ballistic missiles straight into Israel.

Absolutely. The rule book has been ripped up. We're in a new phase, an absolutely new chapter. And Israel's response is going to determine how the pages flow from here. This is a very, very delicate situation.

is this Mahmoud?

Hello, Mr. David.

Hello. It's so good to hear your voice.

I've spoken to people directly impacted by what has happened since October 7th over the past year. I know you have to. I'm thinking especially about Mahmoud Jerusha in Gaza.

We just kind of lost hope. And the next day, the war made it. And like it seems, it's not going to and, you know.

He's just 19. But he told me that dreams he had to one day become a professional soccer player or even to own a house are basically not worth having as long as he's in Gaza. Or Ilay David, whose brother Evyatar was kidnaped by Hamas from the Nova Music Festival. I think his first.

Passion is music. He loves music. He loves dancing festivals.

He told me he and the other hostage families would need several miracles to be reunited with their loved ones and that they might be wasting their energy by protesting on the streets like we've seen.

And I am very afraid that it's going to be much longer than we imagined.

And like what I take away from those conversations, Nick, is just like this deep sense of hopelessness that nothing can really be done to make any of this better for the people living in this region. You've covered the region for years and years, so I guess I'm wondering, regardless of what side people may be on, how widespread is that feeling of hopelessness as we go forward with whatever might come next?

Yeah, I think that's a very widespread and widely felt feeling of hopelessness, particularly for the families of hostages, particularly for the people living in Gaza, particularly for the people of Beirut right now, and for the families that have had to flee their homes in the south of Lebanon.

They're getting scarier because it feels like by the day things are escalating and we don't really know what area is safe anymore. I feel like in Gaza, it's started the same way and then it escalated. Yeah. So you always worry about keep on going, whether you change the world, the West speak out, or are we just another country in the Middle East?

There is so much uncertainty right now that this is what leads people to have a feeling of despair about what comes next. It's a basic psychological condition for humans and people are living through that in this region. It's been a year and it's open ended at the moment.

We are now literally paralyzed. We cannot do anything. We have to stay at home and everything is deteriorating. Our futures are not there. We have a blank idea about our futures. We don't know what will happen next.

There's no sense of what the next day looks like in Gaza or the next day it looks like in Lebanon or the next day and the relationship with Iran looks like. So it does seem, despite the best diplomatic efforts of a cease fires and a normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, the future at the moment is uncertain. And that anxiety and despair that people feel is real, it's palpable. And the longer this goes on, the deeper those feelings will become.

Is there any leader or, you know, figure in the region that is talking about something different, talking about hope in any way? Or is that feeling kind of ingrained at all levels of the people making the decisions about where this goes?

I think there's a strong sense in the region that as long as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is in place, leading a very right wing coalition nationalist coalition in Israel, there is little chance of changing the narrative and moving things forward. The request and the demand, if you will, right now of the many in the international community, and particularly for countries in the Gulf and the Middle East, is if you don't have a two state solution or you're not on track to an irreversible track, to a two state solution, a state for the Palestinians, then there's there's no opportunity for the region to move forward. And the feeling is that that can't be achieved under this current leadership. There are plenty of people with plenty of ideas. And, you know, Prime Minister Netanyahu talked about it at the U.N. General Assembly. He talked about you can have curses or blessings and blessings. His narrative of blessings was, you know, a region here that's economically tied up Israel all the way through with Saudi Arabia, through the Gulf, all the way to Asia with trade, development, internet development, communications development, economic development, all of that. I am hearing the same thing being spelt out to me even before the Prime Minister spoke. From leading Palestinian figures. There are plenty of people who see that as a vision, but it's being held back politically because the decisions the politicians are taking a military decisions, not diplomatic decisions. And as long as the military situation continues and continues to escalate, as it is, the chance of getting to that horizon of a better place diminishes.

But I guess for Israel, all the military action they've done over the past year, whether it be in Gaza or over the border with Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah, taking out Hassan Nasrallah, these groups still exist in whatever state they may be, but they're still there and they still have weapons. So, like, how much more military might would it take to actually change the picture?

I think what. From my experience of covering conflicts, they generally and either with an overwhelming and crushing victory for the most powerful side in that conflict, although and in some kind of diplomatic or peace agreement. And if you have a diplomatic peace agreement, which is what which is what Israel realistically is most likely to get in the future because it has so many enemies in the region and they are generative, they will regenerate if you use the same military tactics against them. You do not get to a cease fire and diplomatic agreement with an enemy by forcing them to surrender. You get to it because you make an agreement that the enemy doesn't consider you such a hostile enemy anymore. And you both agree that you're not going to use weapons against each other. This is what happened in the Northern Ireland peace process. The IRA didn't throw their weapons on a bonfire or hand them over to British troops. They agreed that they would go away by themselves and with inspection. Bury them all, never to use them again. They decided not to fight. They decided their intent was political and not to fight. And that's the way you get a long term solution. If you cannot have the might to smash the other side. Israel does not have the might to smash its opponents. And this is not a realization that I feel that we're close to. It's certainly a realization that you hear from a lot of others in the region. You know, they would say Israel can't win by military means. You have to have a diplomatic solution. And a diplomatic solution is one where your enemy doesn't want to doesn't want to attack you, not because they've thrown away their weapons.

And like you said, we were seemed like we were getting closer to some kind of diplomatic solution with the Saudi Arabia situation. And October 7th happened. And since then, it's all kind of been downhill from there. Well, Nick, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

David, thank you very much.

One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haylee Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Caroline Patterson, Sarah Boxer, Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Wednesday. I'll talk to you then.