[W]ith both Turkey and Qatar, two countries that support Hamas's hardline Islamist agenda, seeking to play a more prominent role in Gaza's future development, the prospect of persuading Hamas to disarm and relinquish control appears even more remote.

King Abdullah II of Jordan tried to warn Trump, also at the end of October: "[W]e hope that it is peacekeeping, because if it's peace enforcing, nobody will want to touch that.... If we're running around Gaza on patrol with weapons, that's not a situation that any country would like to get involved in."

Trump's radical plan to transform Gaza's political landscape -- especially his focus on disarming Hamas -- could come unstuck, though, if pro-Hamas states such as Turkey and Qatar have any involvement in the territory's future administration.

Turkey's desire for Hamas to be reconciled with the PA completely contradicts a key requirement of Trump's peace plan, which demands that the terror group not only disarms, but ends its political involvement in Gaza. If implemented, any Turkish involvement in Trump's efforts to end the Gaza conflict would simply offer Hamas a lifeline, one that would enable it to maintain its terrorist agenda.

The Trump administration may be tempted to believe that Turkey's involvement in the issue is crucial if a settlement in Gaza is to be reached. The administration must also understand, however, that any Turkish involvement will completely undermine Trump's stated objective of forcing the terrorist organisation to disarm if there is to be any hope of a lasting peace in the Middle East.

For a number of reasons, the BBC's standards have experienced a slow but steady deterioration for decades.

It was initially created in 1972 when the Sunday Times exposed the damage that use of thalidomide tablets did to unborn babies, with facts fed to the paper by rivals of a pharmaceutical giant.

Two years later came the trans-Atlantic version, when two "investigative" reporters helped topple a US president. There, too, there was no investigation but a leaking of information by President Richard Nixon's political foes.

Journalists started talking of writing a "story" rather than reporting "news".

Transformed into celebrities, some journalists became shallower, and the shallower they got, the more full of themselves they became.

The next step was to gift-wrap arrogance as "challenging" or "adversarial" interviews that put the emphasis on the rudeness of the interviewer rather than the frankness of the interviewee.

Today the BBC has hit a new low in terms of standards it advocated for decades.