The war in the Middle East has barely begun

The few enquiring minds still left occasionally ask me what the most underreported stories of the current Israel-Hamas conflict are. I tend to reply that there are two.

The first is the issue of Israeli refugees. They are not called that inside Israel, where the authorities prefer to refer to them as ‘internally displaced people’. But while the world rightly concerns itself with the internally displaced people inside Gaza, the lack of notice paid to this other story is strange.

For the past five months, tens of thousands of Israeli families have had to abandon their homes. After 7 October, people in villages, towns and cities near the Gaza border were immediately moved out by the Israeli government – mainly to hotels around the Dead Sea and Eilat. At the same time, tens of thousands of families from the north of the country were forced to leave their homes because of the threat of bombardment and invasion by Hezbollah on the border Israel shares with Lebanon.

I have lived among these people for many months, and their misery seems to have bypassed most of the international media. Let me give an example. The 22,000 residents of Kiryat Shmona in the north were evacuated to Tel Aviv from their homes on 7 October. Most have not been back. Their city’s proximity to the Lebanon border means that not only is it at risk of ground attack, it is also in exceptionally close rocket range to Hezbollah. I have been there a number of times in recent months. It is deserted, of course, although there is one quite good kebab shop open which serves the few people who go that way.