Reunions and rubble: Gaza’s first moments of peace

0:27The Economist But what happens when the equivalent annual salary is the same as that of a previously sought-after graduate job? And if you think hypnosis is either about a code word making someone do something silly, or a dubious route to suppressed memories, think again. We go through the medical evidence that it genuinely helps with pain, anxiety, and more.

1:02But first...

1:09For three-tenths hours yesterday, it seemed that a hard-won ceasefire agreement in Gaza might not go ahead. Hamas had not, as promised, given the names of the Israeli hostages it would release. So Israel kept up its airstrikes. But then the names came, as did, for only the second time in 15 months, something that could be called a truce. Three Israeli hostages were released and reunited with their families.

1:41In the West Bank, 90 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli jails and were met with cheers.

1:51Long-displaced Gaza residents returned home. mostly to ruins where communities once stood. Still, they celebrated.

2:04This is just the first stage of an elaborate agreement, in which more hostages will be released and more Palestinians will return home as the weeks pass. People on both sides nevertheless can hope the vocabulary might change here, from a tentative truce to a binding, lasting ceasefire. perhaps simply to peace. So yesterday, Sunday, was the first day of the truce in Gaza. Anshul Pfeffer is our Israel correspondent. But this is just the first day of a 42-day truce, and it's only the first stage of a longer ceasefire process, and as we saw yesterday, a lot can still go wrong. Let's start with Gaza then.

2:51What's the mood on the ground there? So in Gaza, we've been seeing over the last 24 hours two dynamics. We've been seeing Hamas fighters coming out of their tunnels, putting on their uniforms, waving the Kalashnikovs in the air and carrying out victory parades. And at the same time, we've seen thousands of Palestinians start walking towards the areas where they couldn't go because of the war and what's left of their homes. Less than two weeks ago, I was embedded for a day with an Israeli unit in northern Gaza, in Jabalia. and there really isn't anything left there. The whole area is flattened.

3:25It's a town of over 100 ,000 people and they began returning there yesterday and I don't think that they're going to find very much left of their homes or belongings. It's going to be a pretty grim picture. So in Gaza, both an attempt by Hamas to proclaim victory and the very grim beginnings of what will be a long period of reconstruction. And as for Israel, what's the feeling on the ground there today? There's quite a feeling of dissonance here in Israel that, on the one hand, the Israeli public just waiting to see these hostages come out and the feeling of relief from all the surveys and from the atmosphere in the streets and in the media, it's very clear that this is what most of the Israelis are feeling now.

4:06But at the same time, in the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, there's quite a lot of members there who were against this deal and who don't think the war should have ended without Hamas being totally vanquished. And some of them voted against the deal. The far-right party of Itamar Ben-Gavir resigned from government. So there's the beginnings of a political crisis within the government at the same time as this ceasefire is beginning. And that's one of the main worries that Netanyahu and his team will try and perhaps find a way to stop this in the middle if it's jeopardizing his government.

4:41Well, this has been the story for a long time that Mr. Netanyahu wanted the maximalist win against Hamas and ultimately hasn't got it. Where do you think that leaves him politically? Well, Netanyahu is in a very difficult spot right now. On the one hand, the majority of the Israeli public are in favor of this deal. And even more importantly, from his perspective, he has now Donald Trump, who in a few hours will be officially the president of the United States, very much endorsing the deal and his people who were here in the region pushing Netanyahu, making it very clear that they expect him to go for the deal.

5:15And on the other hand, if we do reach the second stage in six weeks, when Israeli troops finally withdraw from all of Gaza and the rest of the hostages are supposed to be released, I don't think Netanyahu's coalition can survive that. He's already lost one of the parties. He's holding on to a slender majority, another far-right party which voted against the deal is threatening to leave. So I think it very much depends at this point on whether Trump and his administration will keep pressure on Netanyahu for the next six weeks until stage two of the ceasefire begins. And presumably another factor here in the success of this truce and ceasefire will come from what happens with what remains of the Hamas leadership.

5:55Well, there's very little left of the senior Hamas leadership in Gaza. There's now a younger generation of commanders trying to take control of Gaza with whatever forces they still have. We saw them trying to put up a show of force yesterday with these military parades. But the reality is that Gaza is almost destroyed now. There's been tens of thousands of deaths. And for Hamas, it's very difficult to show a real picture of victory. And then there's the rivalries within the Palestinian community over who will control not just Gaza, but who will be seen as the main Palestinian parties and leaders in the coming months and years.

6:33Anshul, you're painting a not very hopeful picture for the long term here. We've been talking about what happens over the next six, seven weeks, but what do you see happening in the long term for the governance and the rebuilding of Gaza? It's going to be a massive project which will take years and we'll need tens of billions of dollars to finance. It's not clear yet where that's going to come from. And I think the main question here is who will be in charge on the ground once those funds start to come and the rebuilding begins. Hamas is unlikely to be entrusted by any of the players in the region with that project.

7:06So who comes into Gaza? Will the Palestinian Authority, which is weak and currently based in Ramallah in the West Bank and doesn't really have much power on the ground in Gaza, will they have the capacity to somehow come in? There's been talk of a technocratic government which will be formed in Gaza to oversee the rebuilding process. But really, we're not there yet. We're still in this very early stage of trying just to stabilize the ceasefire. Assuming that happens, I think those who will eventually pay, and it'll probably be the main Arab regimes in the region, they'll also probably dictate who is going to be in charge of Gaza in the long term.

7:44What do the Palestinians want? We've been seeing since October 7 fluctuating surveys of who the Palestinians are in favor. Do they want to be led by Hamas going forward? Hamas is currently very unpopular. But on the other hand, neither is the Palestinian Authority seen as a major alternative here. But that's really what they have right now. There isn't too much clarity on what the Palestinians see going further. And then there's a question of will there be some kind of diplomatic process? The Trump administration is very much in favor of an alliance in which the Saudis and the Israelis will be involved.

8:18For that to happen, the Saudis will demand also that Israel agrees to some kind of a process towards a two-state solution. That's not going to happen with this current Israeli government. So what both the Israelis and the Palestinians want remains to be seen. There may be an early election in Israel. The Palestinians will also have to go through some kind of process of trying to determine what the strategy is going to be going forward. Along the way there, you mentioned the incoming Trump administration. How much do you think it will play a role in what kind of peace emerges from all of this in the really long run?

8:50Well, even before the inauguration, this is a deal which has been at the table since last May. And the Biden administration have been pushing it and failed to bring the two sides to sign this deal. We've seen in just a matter of weeks with representatives of the incoming Trump administration here in the region, how they managed to get it over the line. And it very much depends, I think, in the next few weeks and months how much attention and how much of that pressure will continue now that Trump is in office. If this does remain one of his foreign policy priorities, then I think there's some room for optimism.

9:29Anshul, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Jason.

9:40Thank you.

10:11The BBC has many journalism roles open too But you know what all these opportunities have in common? The listed starting salary is less than£30 ,000 a year which puts it within spitting distance of Britain's minimum wage We will accept the Low Pay Commission recommendation to increase the national living wage by 6.7 % to£12.21 an hour So, Rachel Reeves, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced in November that the Labour government in Britain would be rising the minimum wage to£12.21 an hour, which someone doing 40 hours a week will take home a little bit over£25 ,000 a year. Duncan Robinson is our Britain political editor and Badger columnist.

10:59And so Britain has this increasingly generous minimum wage, which is now two-thirds of the median salary in the UK, and that means it's actually one of the highest on the planet. Both parties have been really keen on this, so the Conservatives started this trend and Labour's sort of finishing it off. But it's had some strange consequences and the oddest of that is something called wage compression. And what's wage compression? So wage compression is when the gap between skilled and unskilled Labour closes. So in Britain, people at the bottom are just being paid more. Their salaries have gone up by a lot and those in the middle have had a pretty tough time of it.

11:33Some people would say that's just equality. That is equality. It's the literal definition of it. But the question that politicians are going to have to wrestle with over the coming years is the sort of difference between equality and fairness. So a good example of this has been junior doctors. Now, they're the people who've been complaining the most about this because they can be really badly paid at the start of their career. And the British Medical Association found this fantastic stat that baristas in Pret-a-Manger, a coffee shop, were earning a penny more per hour than junior doctors at the start of their training.

12:04And so some people felt this was a little bit snobby, but others thought, well, a doctor has trained for years to have this job, they should probably be paid more than someone making coffee. And you're probably going to see that again and again in different sectors when they realise that there's actually quite a small gap between skilled labour and unskilled labour. And is there evidence that this actually changes the choices that people make? Not as far as I know, because in general, people haven't really clocked it. You've come into this end of very benign economic circumstances in the UK where basically since the financial crisis, you had low wage growth, but you also had low interest rates and low inflation.

12:38And that's come to the end. And so the only people who are sort of getting pay rises in that period were people on the minimum wage because the Conservative government kept on cranking it up whenever they could. And so that gap closed without people's quite realising. So I just scooted around on job advert websites looking for sort of jobs that are relatively skilled, quite demanding. They want people with good degrees. And you often find people still assume that a salary that begins with a two is fair enough, when actually anything below£24 ,000,£25 ,000 is probably going to be illegal, depending on how many hours you're working.

13:08So one of the strangest effects is going to be on the tax system, because a lot of these people with these low-paid but middle-class jobs are graduates. And in the UK, the graduate repayments basically work as an extra tax. But that means that somebody on close to the minimum wage, if they've got a degree, is going to be paying a marginal rate of 37%. And someone without a degree will be paying about 28%. And somebody above retirement age, who will still be working, will pay 20%. And that's a very odd, uneven tax system that you certainly wouldn't design on purpose, but we've ended up there by accident.

13:39And what happens when people clock it? In general, people get a bit annoyed. So the junior doctors were quite upset about it, and the government did eventually crack, and they gave junior doctors a huge pay rise. But if you listen into a phone-in show on, say, Radio 5, which is a talk radio channel in the UK, when they're discussing the minimum wage, you will have people like lorry drivers ringing up and complaining. They have to have these special licenses, they have to have these health and safety qualifications, and they do it for a couple of quid more than they can earn in a supermarket. And working in a supermarket is a little bit easier and a little bit less skilled than driving a very heavy lorry.

14:13And they're annoyed about that. And annoyed people do act in peculiar ways. And so there's a interesting paper by a researcher called Ben Ansell, Oxford University, and he made the point that graduates on the whole are more liberal than the rest of the population. But when the graduates end up in non-graduate jobs, they're more likely to vote for extremist parties. Now, it's a relatively small effect, but if you have more and more people falling into that trap, then it could play out in just pretty aggressive politics. And what's the solution then? I think The Economist has been in favour of raising the minimum wage and in favour of raising it quite substantially as it has been.

14:51So what's the answer? Well, the minimum wage has basically been a free lunch for quite a long time. The downsides haven't really happened. People expected it to increase unemployment and it hasn't. But you do have a problem where it can't go up forever unless there's actual productivity improvements. And so you might just end up with a bit of a sort of zero-sum game between different types of workers. So junior doctors were relatively pliant for a very long time until they got fed up with being completely stiffed. And they just were a lot more active in terms of trade unionism than they used to be.

15:22So that could be something that happens. And Duncan, how has this played out in other countries? The archetypal example of wage compression is basically Sweden. So in Sweden, there's a pretty small gap between highly skilled professionals and the people on the quote unquote bottom rungs. And the advantage of that was that Sweden was a relatively competitive economy. But it's also just a very social democratic country. It's not the typical example you think of when you compare it to the UK. So it could be the situation where we all just become a little bit more Swedish in Britain. But that doesn't seem that likely.

15:52So I do think you're going to have this slightly more conflictual future between workers. Duncan, thanks so much for talking to me. Thank you.

16:09The attendant ills of wage compression aren't the only rumbles of trouble in Britain's economy. Far from it. For 17 years, it's been battered by a series of crises, some global and some homemade. On a recent episode of Money Talks, our subscriber-only sister show on business, finance, and economics, my astute colleagues pick apart what ails Britain and the government's spending plans that should address it. If by some chance you're not yet a subscriber, search Economist Podcasts Plus and fling open the gates of audio enlightenment.

17:01On the internet these days, wellness in all its forms is very much a thing. Cold plunging, ionic foot baths, all kinds of dubious stuff. And in a trend that's been on trend to one degree or another since the 19th century, hypnosis. I don't want to single out any one influencer who's making money hand over fist, convincing you in calm tones to declutter your mind, but in short, There's lots. But look past the YouTube economy. In real clinical situations, hypnosis is bringing real benefits. Hypnosis for a long time was considered placebo. Dolly Seton is a data journalist at The Economist. But right now there's a growing number of doctors and researchers who think that it's a method that can be used effectively for some medical applications.

17:57I have to say, I don't know much about hypnosis as a therapy, but I'm imagining the television version of it, swinging pocket watch and you're getting very sleepy. Yeah, that refers to the first part of a typical hypnosis session, which is called induction. The hypnotist will try to get the person into a relaxed state of absorption, kind of like watching a movie where you have no sense of time and you're just completely involved. And they'll do that in different ways. Maybe have you focus on an object like a pocket watch or think of a happy memory or go to the beach in your mind. The second part is the suggestion.

18:36And that's when the hypnotist will tell the person that a sharp pain actually feels like warmth or that broccoli really tastes like chocolate. It's clear that the medical establishment on some level does believe it works. But how does it work? What's the mechanism here? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think it's really known. Hypnosis is defined in lots of different ways, and there's lots of different research. But researchers are trying to figure that out by doing brain scans and EEG recordings of people under hypnosis. And they have found some suggestive things, such as more activity in networks of brain circuits that are involved in attention and focus when patients are going through the induction process, or more links or activity between networks that deal with threats or fears.

19:24They point to hypnosis being able to reprocess the way that the brain puts together or interprets pain. You can begin by taking a few slow, deep, and even breaths. I went to observe a clinical psychologist, Guy Montgomery, at Mount Sinai in New York. He didn't do the hypnosis on me, but he did it on a colleague. as you begin to let yourself drift, you can always speak to me if you need to. You can always readjust yourself. Guy Montgomery did a study back in 2007 that looked at breast biopsies and lumpectomies, and the cancerous tissue was removed. And he showed that for patients who did hypnosis before the surgery, the operations took less time, there were fewer side effects afterwards, and there was actually less need for sedatives and painkillers.

20:22We combined CBT plus hypnosis for women undergoing radiotherapy for breast cancer. And so we were able to essentially reduce or stop the increase in fatigue. So breast cancer patients over like a six-week course of radiotherapy typically have a linear increase in fatigue over time. And so patients in the control group went up, right, as you would expect. patients in our hypnosis plus CBT group kind of were pretty flat. So has it changed things? I mean, this was 2007. Although it's not used frequently in America, it has been adopted more in France. All 30 of France's university hospitals actually use hypnosis to manage pain and also preoperative anxiety.

21:06It's used for dental anxiety in Germany. It's used for burn patients in Hungary. So it's used in many countries, but not to a great extent. So why is it not more broadly used if the trial data suggests that it can be so helpful? One big problem is the stigma associated with hypnosis. And also it's unregulated. So anyone can claim that they're a hypnotist. They can have no medical experience. You have a lot of charlatans out there. Somebody years ago got their cat to be certified as a hypnotist because that's how low the standards are for so-called certification. So they're really contending with that kind of an image.

21:43But then there is the contingent that understands the gains to be made. I mean, what about the idea of making it more formalized, more regulated in some of these jurisdictions, making it less charlatan rich? Sure, I think that's what advocates would love to happen. But what they have faced is that because hypnosis is not a drug where pharmaceutical companies could benefit with a clear profit, And because it's really just a savings rather than money in the pocket, there isn't a lot of motivation to improve standards and to get hypnosis into hospitals or into offices. And so what's your view then?

22:24This will continue on its current path where a small number of practitioners understand the benefits to be had, but pretty much everybody else just steers clear? I think that that is likely to be the case, that it won't be widely adopted. However, more doctors are putting together apps where people can be hypnotized at home, where they can go to a doctor and do a tape that they can then use at home. And so that offers some options outside of being accepted more widely. But as far as using it to manage pain in operations, which would help people who might suffer from the side effects of general anesthesia, that really doesn't seem like it's likely to be adopted anytime soon.

23:11Dolly, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

23:28That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.