Middle East

Sitting in a room at the Israel Defence Forces’ Hakirya base in Tel Aviv, I listened – along with a room full of delegates, mostly European MPs and members of the House of Lords – to a briefing from an IDF spokesman. He was a British-born reservist recruited back to the front lines of Israel’s communications war, and he did not inspire. He repeated basics about what happened on 7 October, and the horror of those events – something that everyone in that room, all there as pretty major fans of Israel, desirous to see it triumph in its hour of adversity, already appreciated. We wanted new information: dispassionately and

I have visited Israel three times in the past year. The first trip was in the spring, just as the anti-government protests – triggered by Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to control the Supreme Court – were beginning. The day before we travelled, protestors forced Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport to close, and a general strike was announced. Every Saturday night, out went the protestors – mostly liberal and secular, but not entirely, so widespread is frustration with the government. ‘You could not be seen sitting and drinking wine on a Saturday night’, Moran Alon, the owner of the Nilus bar in Tel Aviv told me. ‘People would wonder: why aren’t you at

The language in the government and parliament over Israel has changed a lot this week. Ministers are no longer mounting the full throttle defence of Israel or offering regular reminders to the Commons of what happened on 7 October. Lord Cameron’s evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday was just one example of that: the Foreign Secretary said that ‘of course’ he was ‘worried that Israel has taken action that might be in breach of international law’. He also repeated the line that ‘too many civilians have died’, and reminded Israel that it needed to do more to avert a famine in Gaza. Similarly, when Rishi Sunak was asked about

Hamas leaders based in Qatar have been holding talks with Palestinian officials from Fatah, the political organisation that dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA) which governs the West Bank. The once rival organisations are in discussions about forming an alliance for governing Gaza after the war with Israel. For the Palestinian Authority, this is an opportunity to return to Gaza nearly 18 years after the organisation lost the legislative elections to Hamas in 2006. The PA has been deeply unpopular among Palestinians for some time. A poll conducted in Gaza and the West Bank at the end of November found that support for Hamas tripled since the start of the war,

President Isaac ‘Bougie’ Herzog is Israeli aristocracy. His father, Chaim Herzog, was the sixth president, serving between 1983 and 1993; his grandfather Yitzhak Herzog was chief rabbi; his maternal uncle was Abba Eban, the most famous of the country’s foreign ministers. After leading the Israeli Labor party and the parliamentary opposition in the Knesset between 2013 and 2017, Isaac became Israel’s 11th president in July 2021. He is the first to be born in Israel since the Declaration of Independence 75 years ago. My first question rather asks itself: how is the war going? ‘Depends on what you mean by war,’ Herzog quickly replies, before turning the discussion away from

Israel knows that airstrikes alone cannot help it to win its war against Hamas. To handicap its enemy, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) must kill or capture the group’s leaders, both in Gaza – where they are hiding out in intricate tunnel complexes – and elsewhere, in other countries in the Middle East, including Qatar. But the cost of such dangerous operations will be high – and could easily backfire. For now, the priority for Israel is targeting Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip. On the hitlist is Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza; Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades; and Deif’s second-in-command,

The conflict in Gaza is about to enter a crucial phase as Israel continues its military campaign to destroy Hamas. After a seven-day pause in hostilities saw Hamas release 110 hostages in return for 240 Palestinians, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are now locked into a more complex and politically tricky battle as they venture into southern Gaza. If the IDF adopts the same tactics in the south as they did in the north of the Gaza Strip, then thousands more Palestinian civilians will die. There are signs, however, that Israel is changing tactics after bowing to pressure from allies. Over 15,000 civilians have been killed, according to the Hamas-controlled