Israel

Israel’s fight against Hamas has been compared to the war against Isis between 2015 and 2019. That war was largely waged in Iraq and Syria, and one of the most important battles was the struggle to retake Mosul from the Islamists in 2017. The city and its outlying areas were home to two million people when Isis conquered it in the summer of 2014, and Isis had embedded itself within the local population. Around two million people live in Gaza today. It’s hard to distinguish Hamas from civilians. When the Iraqi offensive against Isis in Mosul began in October 2016, there were warnings about the threat to the civilians in the city. I covered

Last night, after a suspected Islamist fanatic gunned down two Swedish football fans in Brussels to ‘avenge Muslims’, the BBC ran a headline calling it a ‘terror’ attack. This should seem entirely unremarkable. After all, it was a terror attack, so the language had the benefit of being accurate. The problem, of course, is that the corporation has a policy of refusing to describe the butchers of Hamas in the same terms.  It is true that the BBC amended the headline pretty quickly after realising its error. The broadcaster has insisted in its guidelines that its journalists should use descriptive terms like ‘bomber’, ‘attacker’, ‘gunman’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘insurgent’ and ‘militant’ by default. As John

Over the weekend, the IDF confirmed that it killed the Hamas terrorist who commanded the attack on Israel a week earlier. It was later disclosed that the terrorist was arrested by Israel in 2005 for abducting and killing Israelis. He was released in 2011 by Netanyahu’s government in return for a captive Israeli soldier abducted in 2006 as part of a prisoner exchange deal. Netanyahu knew that Hamas received money, weapons and training from Iran The deal included the release of over 1,000 prisoners, many of them dangerous terrorists who returned to Gaza and rose through the ranks of Hamas. This controversial agreement exemplifies Netanyahu’s failed policy of containment and

This week’s political shows were dominated by the Israel-Palestine conflict, as Israel prepares for a land, sea and air assault on Gaza. Israel has said it will not supply water, fuel or electricity to the region unless Hamas releases its hostages and has instructed the people of Gaza to head south to avoid the imminent attack. A humanitarian disaster looms in an already densely populated area, and Victoria Derbyshire asked Israeli government adviser Mark Regev to respond to allegations that the actions of Israel could be breaking international humanitarian law and even amount to war crimes. Regev denied the allegations but he implied that Israel would target civilian zones because

On a patch of scrubland outside the Zikim kibbutz earlier this week, I came across a platoon of Merkava 4 tanks positioned among the trees. One of the tank commanders recognised my colleague and we exchanged a few words. ‘This is our Yom Kippur,’ he told us. ‘We haven’t even begun to grasp the implications of this.’ Yom Kippur, in this context, isn’t a reference to the annual Jewish day of atonement. Rather, it recalls October 1973, when Israel was surprised by an attack on two fronts from the forces of Egypt and Syria. The Hamas assault on Israeli Jewish communities around the Gaza Strip came exactly 50 years and a day after what Israelis

The world changed on Saturday morning with Hamas’s attack on army bases and civilian communities in Israel. What began as a Palestinian military triumph became, within minutes, the greatest single atrocity of the entire conflict to date, by either party.  Every assumption of the status quo ante has been swept aside, including much of the international etiquette around calls for restraint: Israel appears to be hours away from launching the most overwhelming assault on a modern city since Vladimir Putin’s attack on Grozny, with unreserved Western blessing. This will likely unleash every rocket in Hamas’s arsenal onto Israeli cities, and might well drag other parties into the fray, from external actors like

In retaliation to over a thousand Israeli dead, the country’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has vowed to besiege Gaza. In a statement earlier this week, he said: ‘We are putting a complete siege on Gaza… No electricity, no food, no water, no gas – it’s all closed.’ Israel has been as good as its word, even stopping medicine from entering the Palestinian enclave.   Israel is obliged under international law to minimise injury to Palestinian civilians Shutting off supplies to an area of 2.3 million people, nearly all of them civilians, raises grave questions about the legality of Israel’s action under international law. While international law generally accepts the blockade of enemy

A little more than a week before Hamas carried out its Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said: ‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.’ Sullivan was expressing a consensus view, one apparently shared by the Israeli government. Then came the attacks of last weekend and, as the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, said, ‘Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed in one day.’ The surprise attacks have been called Israel’s 9/11, its Pearl Harbor, and so the question Israelis are asking is: how could this happen? And of more consequence, perhaps: who was really behind it?