内容摘要：Live radio commentary from 19:00 BST on BBC 5 Sports Extra, plus live text commentaries on the BBC Sport website and app

Live radio commentary from 19:00 BST on BBC 5 Sports Extra, plus live text commentaries on the BBC Sport website and app

Inside Israel, the sharpest criticism of the planned offensive has come from the families of the hostages who fear they have been abandoned by the government that claims to be rescuing them. Hamas still has 24 living hostages in the Gaza Strip, according to Israel, and is holding the bodies of another 35 of the 251 taken on 7 October. The Netanyahu government has claimed repeatedly that only as much military pressure as possible will get the survivors home and return the bodies of the dead to their families.In reality, the biggest releases of hostages have come during ceasefires. The last ceasefire deal, which Trump insisted Israel sign in the final days of the Biden administration, included a planned second phase which was supposed to lead to the release of all the hostages and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Netanyahu's extremist allies told him they would bring down his government if he agreed to a second phase of the ceasefire. First, Israel blocked humanitarian aid to put pressure, it said, on Hamas to agree to a renegotiated deal that would give Israel the option of going back to war even after the hostages were released. When Hamas refused, Israel went on the offensive again with a massive air attack on the night of 18 March.Since then, Israel has put unrelenting pressure on Palestinians in Gaza. A new offensive will kill many more Palestinian civilians, deepen the misery of the survivors and bereaved inside Gaza and widen the toxic rifts within Israel. On its own, without a ceasefire deal, it is unlikely on past form to force Hamas to free the remaining hostages.The carnage inflicted by Israel inside Gaza has been a recruiting sergeant for Hamas and other armed groups, according to President Joe Biden's administration just before it left office in January of this year. It is worth repeating the words used by Biden's secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in a speech in Washington on 14 January.

"We assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost," Blinken said. "That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war."When he spoke, Israel was claiming that it had killed around 18,000 Palestinian fighters inside Gaza. More have been killed since then, and many more civilians.

Israel's massive onslaught broke the back of Hamas as a structured military organisation more than a year ago. Now Israel faces an insurgency, which history shows can go for as long as recruits are prepared to fight and die to beat their enemy.

How do you measure misery? For journalists the usual way is to see it, to feel it, to smell it.Will the French (who sources are referring to when they talk diplomatically about "coastal states") relent on

in return for giving the UK the kind of favours it wants? "The French have been trying to link fish to lots of things," a source close to the talks says – it might be five years since we left the EU, but maybe the more things change, the more things stay the same.Indeed, just like on so many occasions during the Brexit wrangles, as we go on air this weekend, EU ambassadors will be gathering at their COREPER (Comité des représentants permanents) meeting to go through the agreement. Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. And even then, agreements in principle will leave many details to be hammered out in the weeks and months to come.

For the UK government, agreement of any sort means "we'll have scored the hat trick", says one minister. No one in government would dream that Monday will mean an end to their domestic woes, but a, an