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Few people know that thousands of Commonwealth war graves lie in the battlegrounds of the Gaza strip.

During the recent campaign, the main Gaza War Cemetery suffered extensive damage as Israeli troops and Hamas militants fought nearby.

Now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is seeking compensation from Israel, the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has learned.

The organisation estimates the cost of repairing or replacing the 363 headstones damaged by recent Israeli shelling at £95,000.

The graveyards date from 1917 when British divisions fought their way into Palestine against intense opposition from defending Ottoman Turkish forces.

After costly setbacks in Gaza, the British eventually gained the upper hand, defeating Turkish troops in the country, so paving the way for the creation of modern Israel.

The role of that campaign in shaping the modern Middle East means that even today, the soldiers' resting places remain powerfully symbolic.

Last April the cross shaped monument at the centre of the Deir al-Balah Commonwealth cemetery was blown up, apparently by Islamic militants.

For me, getting to the Gaza War Cemetery became a personal pilgrimage.

Although I have covered Middle East affairs for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ for nearly 20 years, it was only recently that I learned that my great uncle, Lance Sergeant Walter Holmes, had been killed in Gaza on 19 April 1917 and laid to rest at the Commonwealth War Cemetery there.

L/Sgt Holmes was just 18 years old when he fell in the Second Battle of Gaza.

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In all the casting around for a new strategic direction in Afghanistan, the country's presidential elections, due this August, represent the elephant in the room. Within the Obama administration, the internal debate rages about whether Afghan president Hamid Karzai is worthy of continued American support.

If the US and its Nato allies go with 'Plan A', they run the risk of widespread Taleban disruption of voting, leading to a turn out so poor that the election may be invalidated or a hardening of ethnic divisions within the country. If they delay the elections either for security reasons or because they are looking for a better candidate to back than Mr Karzai, there are obvious risks too.

Some, like Conservative MP Adam Holloway, favour backing an Afghan political process that would delay elections while a national unity government was formed to include Taleban and other hardline opponents of Mr Karzai. Talks between Afghan political factions were held in Dubai in December towards this end. Elections, their argument goes, might then go ahead in 2010 throughout the country, embracing all political forces. Under this process a timetable would also be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops.

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GAZA - We were out filming at the scene of some of the recent fighting today, in a place called Atufah, a neighbourhood east of Gaza City where the town meets the surrounding farmers' fields.

Whereas we are used to struggling to reconcile the different versions given by Israelis and Palestinians, today it was an inconsistency within the local narrative that gave me pause for thought.

People in Atufah had a very hard time during January's Israeli incursion. We met many locals and all told us they had fled when Israeli tanks appeared on Tel el Rais, a hill overlooking their homes.

Adil al Jidba's story was particularly harrowing. He had fled to a relative's home three kilometres away, but after they arrived in that supposed place of sanctuary, he told us three of his children had been killed by Israeli shells.

When people say they fled Atufah, I believe them because it must have been a very dangerous place to be. Many of the building showed the scars of Israeli fire. Some were completely destroyed. I examined fragments of ordnance or rounds that hadn't gone off: tanks shells, 120mm mortar rounds, and heavy machine bullets.

I even saw signs of the now notorious white phosphorous smoke rounds. The Israeli army reportedly told its soldiers not to take any chances with their own security, and that appears to have been their approach in Atufah.

The problem I have with the local narrative is this. When we asked whether Palestinian fighters had been shooting at the Israelis from their neighbourhood they all said no. But how could they know that, if they hadn't been there? They had fled.

Some people, like Mr al-Jidba and a few others we spoke to, also asserted the right of "mujahdeen" to confront the Israelis in order to prevent them taking any more Palestinian land. Many overseas, I suspect, would sympathise with the right of the Palestinians to resist that invasion. It's just that from everything we heard today, nobody was resisting from Atufah.

The Israelis maintain of course that they were taking fire from the area we filmed in. How else do you explain the amount of shooting they did at Atufah? The Palestinian answer would be that the shooting was unprovoked, malicious, and illustrates the inhumanity of the Israelis.

My own instinct is that while the Israelis may have used what their ministers readily term disproportionate fire aganst Palestinian fighters, the bullets were not all travelling in one direction.

JERUSALEM - You hear the word 'hazak' here an awful lot at the moment. It means strong in Hebrew. It features in Benjamin Netanyahu's slogans, in roadside placards and one of the smaller parties contesting these elections has even called itself "Strong Israel".

Conventional wisdom has it that this word plays well after the Gaza offensive because it taps into a national mood: that Israel's bombardment of the Palestinian territory showed the value of strength in dealings with the Arabs. We put up with Hamas rockets for eight years, runs the Israeli popular narrative, and now at last we've done something that's got the Palestinians' attention.

I wonder though how far people who use the word 'strong' so much are not actually those who at some level sense their own weakness. The notion, repeated by many in the centre ground here too that the Gaza operation restored Israel's "deterrent capability", after it was damaged by the 2006 Lebanon War is, to my mind, more an expression of hope than fact.

In the first place, few Israelis - of right or left - think that Hamas has fired its last rocket from Gaza or become any more reconciled to the presence of a Jewish state here. Any advantage gained by January's killing, then, is temporary. In the second it is clear to anyone who knows this part of the world that battering Hamas in the confines of the Gaza strip should not give Israelis any particular confidence that they would do any better against Hezbollah if the 2006 Lebanon campaign was re-run now. The Shiite militant movement is a far more competent, better armed adversary and its position in Lebanon allows it a strategic depth, as well as freedom to import weapons that no Palestinian group could match.

Looking beyond Israel's immediate borders, the strategic situation seems no better now than it was before the Gaza operation. Indeed it can be argued that is has worsened. Barack Obama's White House cannot be relied upon to look the other way quite as often as George Bush's one did. Iran meanwhile is closer to possessing the nuclear weapon.

The possibility of Iran getting the bomb touches Israeli insecurities so deeply that one would be foolish to rule out the possibility of a military strike against those nuclear facilities. My own analysis is that Israel acting on its own lacks the capability to do serious, lasting, damage to the Iranian program. But in a situation where people feel the need to demonstrate their strength so often, it is quite possible that an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities could be one consequence of this election.