Middle East

Keir Starmer is losing grip on his party’s position on Israel. So far, over 25 Labour councillors have quit over Starmer’s comments on the conflict following the attack by Hamas on 7 October. The Labour leader angered his party when he suggested in an interview with LBC that Israel ‘has the right’ to withhold power and water from Gaza. Starmer has since tried to clarify his comments by meeting with Muslim Labour MPs and calling for a ‘humanitarian pause’ in Gaza to get aid in. However, many in his party want him to go further and call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Nearly a quarter of Labour MPs have publicly

The Secretary General of the United Nations is conventionally thought of as the world’s most high-profile diplomat, charged with the responsibility of bringing calm and astute leadership to bear at times of war and international crisis. This is a core purpose and mission that appears to have escaped the attention of Antonio Guterres, the UN’s current chief. Addressing a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday, Guterres said the situation in the Middle East was growing more dire by the hour and urged all parties to respect and protect civilians. Fair enough and exactly the kind of thing that UN leaders are expected to say. It

If the Israeli public had expected Benjamin Netanyahu to take responsibility for failing to foresee Hamas’s attack on 7 October, for years of neglecting the safety and security of the towns near the border with Gaza and for allowing Hamas to build a substantial armed force – they would’ve been disappointed by his speech on Wednesday night. Netanyahu, in a typical manner, did not accept responsibility. Unlike the IDF’s Chief of the General Staff, Herzi Halvi, and the head of Israel’s general security service Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, both of whom have publicly admitted to failures for predict the attack, Netanyahu declared that an investigation into the events will take

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

Inevitably, some have tried to suggest the terrorist invasion of Israel was in some ways orchestrated by Moscow. ‘Russia is interested in igniting a war in the Middle East so that a new source of pain and suffering will weaken world unity,’ said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the aftermath of the attack. But if Russia was involved, why has its response been so weak and uncertain? In fact, the Kremlin seems near-paralysed by the unfolding conflict. Of course, Moscow hopes that this crisis will distract the West from Ukraine and undermine its ability to continue to fuel its war effort. It is also trying to spin useful narratives, such as

On Monday, while IDF troops were clearing the last Hamas terrorists from Israeli communities near the Gaza border, Benjamin Netanyahu promised that ‘we are going to change the Middle East’. Only two Israeli prime ministers have spoken like that before. One was Menachem Begin when he waged war on the PLO in Lebanon in 1982. The other was Yitzhak Rabin when he made peace with the PLO in 1993. Neither fully succeeded, but both reshaped the regional balance.  What Netanyahu understands is that the regional balance is shifting once again. It has moved away from the West vs East bipolar order of the Cold War and on from the brief

When I arrived at the all-night rave near the border with Gaza the party was in full swing. It was 5am and thousands of revellers had gathered in the desert. A few hours later, hundreds would be dead or injured, women raped, dozens of people missing – some snatched across the border. The first sign of trouble came at 6am. We heard the gunshots before we saw the terrorists. We ran to our car to escape. Bullets flew past our heads. Already there were many wounded and dead. But our road out of hell was blocked: hundreds of cars were all trying to leave, and off-road desert paths were impossible

Israelis are livid. Their fury is directed not only at Hamas for massacring over 700 people, wounding thousands and abducting at least 130 including women and children, but also at the Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) for failing to prevent this terrorist invasion. How did Israeli security forces – among the most sophisticated in the world – not foresee Hamas’s attack? A postmortem is already underway, but what is clear is that Netanyahu’s government was caught napping, distracted by its attempts to force through unpopular judicial reforms. This stole attention away from the worsening security situation in Gaza, the West Bank and the