Inevitably, Anderson's release in 1991, along with other Western hostages such as Terry Waite and John McCarthy, emotionally informs the bulk of the new material, which also considers the Gulf War, Islamic resurgence, the collapse of the Oslo peace agreement and the bloody 1996 Qana massacre in a UN refugee compound by Israeli forces, to which Fisk bears terrible witness. He sees Yasser Arafat make the transmission from "terrorist to superstatesman to superterrorist", but by the end of this exhaustive testimony, virtually the last Western journalist left in West Beirut, he admits, "I still fear the monsters". And then Ariel Sharon is elected prime minister of Israel in February 2001.
