Matt Frei is Europe Editor and Presenter at Channel 4 News.
This year he has led the Channel 4 News coverage of events in Ukraine from the crash site of Malaysia flight MH17, to the tensions in Crimea and reported live from Independence Square on Kiev’s bloodiest day. He has also secured major interviews with Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Aung San Suu Kyi.
Prior to his appointment as Europe Editor for Channel 4 News, Frei was the Washington Correspondent for two years and has reported on the Americas on everything from business and culture to US foreign policy and its view of the world.
He is also part of the presenting team across Channel 4's news and current affairs portfolio, including the award-winning Dispatches programme.
Matt previously anchored the BBC World News America bulletin and was also Washington Correspondent. He presented a weekly radio show called Americana, and in two decades at the corporation reported from Bonn, Rome, Bosnia, Kosovo, North Africa, Hong Kong and Singapore.
He is the author of two books: Italy: The Unfinished Revolution published in 1996 by Random House and Mandarin books and Only In America published in 2008 by 4th Estate.
The UN is sheltering some 400,000 displaced Gazans in its schools and other facilities. And, as you’ve heard, at least six people have been killed in an air strike on one of those schools. Juliette Touma is Director of Communications for the UN Agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
Mary Beth Long is a former US Assistant Secretary of Defence under President George W Bush. She joins us live from Washington DC.
Hanan Ashrawi is a prominent Palestinian politician and activist, who was a leading member of the PLO.
We spoke to Ruth Wasserman Lande, a former Knesset member with the party of Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz, who joined an emergency unity government after the Hamas attacks.
Earlier we spoke to filmmaker Yousef Hammash, who also works for the Norwegian Refugee Council. He’s been sending us eyewitness reports of the situation in Gaza.
Israel’s military says it has now informed the families of 155 men, women and children that they’re being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.
Joining me live from Tel Aviv is Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman.
With me from the charity Action Aid is Gemma Cosialls Guillen.
We spoke to Masha Michelson, who’s a spokesperson for the Israeli Defence Forces. She’s based in Tel Aviv and just before the interview she had to run and take shelter after sirens sounded in the city. We began by asking her about the IDF’s order for more than one million people living in Northern Gaza…
We spoke to John Kirby, the White House National Security spokesperson.
The US is working with aid agencies on setting up ‘safe areas’ for civilians in Gaza. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is on a seven-country Middle East tour – taking in Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia today alone – as he tries to stop the conflict between Israel and Hamas spiralling into a bigger…
Matt spoke to a doctor who has moved four times this week in an attempt to stay safe, but has remained in Gaza City in the North of the strip. Dr Khamis Elessi is a neuro-rehabilitation and pain medicine consultant. Matt asked him why he hadn’t evacuated to the south.
The grim statistics keep mounting up – since Hamas launched its murderous attack last weekend, the violence in Israel and Gaza has claimed at least 2 thousand 600 lives. And a warning that you may find some of these images distressing.
Earlier we spoke to Dr Kenneth Katzman, a senior analyst at the Middle East Institute. We asked him what he thought were the dangers of a possible invasion of Gaza by Israel?
“We have to defend ourselves – it’s about time the world understands that” – those were the impassioned words of the President of Israel when we spoke to him at a press conference in Jerusalem earlier today.