Notes from 2 fronts: AP journalists in Ukraine, Mideast break down the wars they covered

For the world, 2024 was riven by — and in some ways defined by — conflict on two fronts.

The ripples after the previous year’s Hamas attacks in Israel left Gaza a shambles and tens of thousands dead, and an adjacent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is playing out across the Lebanon landscape as the year ends.

A continent away, the Russia-Ukraine war, which began with Russia’s invasion in early 2022, rages on and evolves, claiming more casualties as it goes.

Associated Press journalists have been covering these conflicts since they began. Now, as 2024 ends and a new year begins, we asked two veteran AP reporters — Josef Federman in Jerusalem and Samya Kullab in Kyiv — to talk about what they saw the past year and what struck them. Here are their accounts:

JOSEF FEDERMAN, news director, Israel/Palestinian territories/Jordan

ON REGIONAL IMPLICATIONS: There’s a shift going on. There are these two blocs in the Middle East. You have Iran and its allies, and then you have the pro-western Arab countries and Israel. The Iranians’ allies include Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, Assad’s government in Syria. Now you see all of this falling apart. Oct. 7 triggered this chain reaction across the region. And what we’ve seen is that the Iran bloc as a whole is collapsing before our eyes. So what Hamas had hoped to do, if you go back and you look at what they said on Oct. 7th, they were expecting the entire Middle East to kind of rise up against Israel with them. And the only one that really did it was Hezbollah in Lebanon. Some of these other Iranian-backed groups kind of joined in. But what you’ve seen over this past year is that Israel has been dismantling Hamas. Hamas still exists at a very low level, but it is nothing close to what it was, and it probably never will be again. So it has dismantled Hamas in Gaza. And it struck a very tough blow to Hezbollah as well.

IMPACT ON HEZBOLLAH: For years, the Israelis built up Hezbollah as like the boogeyman. They said, “Oh, Hamas is a walk in the park compared to what we’re going to deal with Hezbollah.” And people were really dreading that second front opening up. And then it really boiled over into a full-fledged war over the summer. And then Israel moved in and sent ground troops into Lebanon. And it delivered, not as hard hit as what it did to Hamas, but a body blow to Hezbollah as well. Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah. who was this very charismatic figure who led the group for 30 years. It killed nearly all of the group’s top leaders. And the exploding pager incident was more psychological than anything — hundreds of Hezbollah members suddenly are afraid to look at their phones and use their devices after these mysterious explosions. It just shows how far Israel infiltrated this group.

HOW SYRIA FITS IN: There’s a clear connection here. Israel struck a blow to Iran’s allies, and then these rebels in Syria saw weakness. Once Hezbollah caved, within days they were moving across Syria. And within a week or two, Assad had been toppled — after his family was in power for half a century. And the reason Syria was so important was it was the main route for Hezbollah to rearm. The arms would be transferred through Syria across the Lebanese border. That option doesn’t exist anymore. So what was already fragmentation has become even more fragmented. And now Syria is no longer an arms smuggling route to Hezbollah, so Hezbollah is also not going to be the same threat. Israel’s not out of the woods, though, because you don’t know what’s going to emerge in Syria.

WHAT 2025 MIGHT HOLD FOR GAZA: There are signs the war is in its final stages. But even if it ends, I don’t see how anybody would want to invest into rebuilding Gaza again, given the history where every three or four years there is another war where all your work gets destroyed. So for them to get investment this time on that the scale that’s needed, there are going to have to be some big changes in the way people think. They’re not going to just go back to Oct. 6. That’s where diplomacy comes in — who’s going to run it? It has to be somebody that’s trusted by all of the sides. It has to be somebody that’s confident they can do things differently. And you’re going to have that constant threat of Hamas undermining the work if they’re not part of this anymore.

ON TRAUMA: When this is over one thing that seems safe to say is there’s not going to be a happy ending here. Nobody’s going to come out of this war smiling. Many of the hostages aren’t coming back alive. Even if Israel succeeds in dismantling Hamas, if all of these hostages that are alive get out, who knows what sort of trauma they are facing and future they’re going to have? There are the Oct. 7 victims, and hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed since then. Their friends and families are all grieving. And the future of Gaza, it has been bombed really into oblivion. I mean, the amount of damage that we can see from satellite photos and from our people on the ground, it will probably take decades to rebuild. No one knows who’s going to govern Gaza. Nobody knows who’s going to pay for this reconstruction. And then just think about all the trauma, what everybody’s been through. Tens of thousands of people killed — lots of militants but also lots of civilians. We have 90% of the territory that has been displaced. Many, if not most, are living in tents in squalid conditions. About half of Gaza’s population is below the age of 18. It’s a young society. You have an entire generation of children who have missed two full years of school. Who knows what type of education they will get? How do you make up that time? And what future do they have?

SAMYA KULLAB, correspondent, Ukraine

ON THE STATUS OF THE WAR: Ukraine is not winnable in the way maybe Ukrainians had hoped back in 2022, when there were real victories the the failure of the battle for Kyiv the winning back territory and the counter-offensive. The jubilation and the joy from those initial moments has kind of turned into this incredible feeling of gloom and coming to terms with what we’ve always known — that Ukraine is at a terrible disadvantage. I would describe it as being bled out slowly.

ON OUTSIDE BACKING: A lot hangs on what kind of support Ukraine will get from allies. And that’s also been wanting. One of the reasons Ukrainian military leaders can’t execute battle plans is because the military support they expected coming from Western allies did not arrive. It did not come on time. But at the same time, those decisions, those battle plans, we have to also look at them and question whether they are, in fact, effective on the battlefield.

ON MORALE: The men are just holding onto these defensive lines with everything they have. A year ago, even, I would never hear soldiers say anything negative on record about their leaders. Now people are not only saying it to me on record, they are going online on their social media, with their names, their rank, their units, and telling everyone they know about what is not working. And that, I think, says a lot about where we are. And Ukraine can’t afford to fire anyone. They need as much manpower as possible. There have been tens of thousands of cases of desertion — 100,000 since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. And more than half of that figure is from just the last year. Many of them go back and then leave again, but Ukraine doesn’t have the ability to prosecute 100,000 men. So they much prefer to try to convince them to come back.

ON LIFE FOR NONCOMBATANTS: The war is all-encompassing, so you can’t escape that it’s happening. You walk down the street, you look at some lovely little things on sale, and you see a little sign that says, “Please buy these handmade things. I’m trying to raise money for my husband’s military unit.” There are donation boxes everywhere. The number of amputees I see walking on the street — I see them every single day. And now it’s being more normalized. There is a version of “The Bachelor” here in Ukraine where the main guy is a double amputee, so it’s becoming more normalized in that way. For people who are not fighting, Kiev feels a bit like a bubble in the sense that there are cafes, there are lovely restaurants, there are bars, people are out. But there’s curfew so by midnight everything is closed and there’s air raid alerts all the time all the time. Today we had almost 200 drones, 90 missiles and one of the largest attacks in at least in a few weeks. So this is all happening around you.

ON THE NEAR FUTURE: Two years ago, Zelenskyy would never have said anything about a ceasefire or any kind of agreement that would not include the return of the occupied territories, and now Zelenskyy has said, “Well, we may not be able to get them back military by military force alone it might be a mix of military and diplomacy. That was a signal to all of us that things have changed. My sense from talking to people in Kyiv is everyone is waiting for Donald Trump and what he will decide. And then the other kind of elephant in the room is, does Russia even want to engage in any kind of negotiation? Why would they? They have the advantage. Another question is, how long can they go?

A MEMORABLE MOMENT IN 2024: We found this one woman, and she told us that she had to leave with her children because her daughter was injured. She needed a proper doctor. She couldn’t leave with her husband because her husband had served with Ukraine and the Russians knew that. And so he was basically under house arrest and he had been tortured. So she left and we asked her, were you there during the floods? And she said, yeah, I dragged bodies and I buried them with my own hands. And she described this experience she had of picking up bodies in boats, taking them to the shore and then burying them in the cemetery. And one thing I’ll never forget of what she said was, “The dead don’t scare me. The living frighten me far more.” We don’t communicate with her anymore, and I still think about where she is, what she’s what she’s going through and the bravery it takes to leave your home and then the bravery it takes to go back to a place that’s not safe.