Middle East

Woken by sirens outside my window in Israel at 3 a.m. I made my way to the bomb shelter in the basement, reaching for my phone on the way. An unusual and urgent message appeared on the screen which had been sent to the entire nation: Home Front Command had updated its guidelines with immediate effect. Israelis are instructed to know where their nearest protected space is, to avoid unnecessary movement, and to prepare for possible extended periods in shelters. Public institutions are not to open. The meaning was clear: the long-anticipated Israeli operation against Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes had begun. Saudi Arabia publicly condemned the Israeli strikes

While much of the Western debate remains trapped in tired slogans and false moral narratives, events on the ground in the Middle East have taken a decisive turn. In the past 24 hours, U.S. embassies have begun evacuating non-essential staff. Military dependents are being authorised to leave key bases. Multiple reports say U.S. officials have been told Israel is fully ready to launch an operation against Iran if required, and Washington expects possible Iranian retaliation on American sites in Iraq. The U.S. anticipates that Iranian retaliation against U.S. assets in Iraq could follow any Israeli strike The trigger is Iran’s growing stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium, its preparations for potential retaliation

As Israel continues to wage a defensive war against the terrorists who invaded and slaughtered hundreds of Jews on October 7, the Jewish State is under attack as never before in the West. I found this out for myself when I was invited on to Piers Morgan Uncensored to discuss the situation in Gaza. Piers Morgan asks for the truth but refuses to hear it. pic.twitter.com/2LtEgoMJ5h — Natasha Hausdorff (@HausdorffMedia) June 3, 2025 What my appearance and censorship on the ironically named “Uncensored” show demonstrated was a refusal, perhaps even a fear, to hear the reality, the facts and the law when it comes to the war against Hamas. This is in

Since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, the Jewish State’s most vociferous critics have been busy. Their most egregious claim is that Israel is committing a genocide. As is so often the case with Israel, the crimes it is accused of are rooted in an inversion of the truth. Israel’s critics must stop politicising and weaponising international law to spread blood libels Genocide has been committed during this conflict: by Hamas terrorists who rampaged through southern Israel and massacred over 1,000 innocents, targeting Jews. They executed their barbaric atrocities in the hope this would inspire simultaneous attacks on Israel’s other borders. On that day, Yahya Sinwar’s terror

If the war in Gaza has taught the world anything, it is this: truth in war is rarely immediate. In the fog of conflict, facts take time, evidence can be manipulated and early narratives are often weaponised. Yet time and again, much of the international media – and too many public officials – refuse to learn this lesson. Faced with shocking claims, particularly when they implicate Israel, they rush to publish, to condemn, to headline. Rarely do they wait for verification. Even more rarely do they correct with the same urgency when the facts unravel. In the fog of conflict, facts take time, evidence can be manipulated and early narratives are often

I have kept my silence on the Middle East for ten years. I left Israel in 2015, after five years as British ambassador, as the first Jew in the role. Since then, I have turned down every request to be a talking head. Neither the world nor my successors needed another ex-ambassador pundit. But I now feel obliged to break my silence, just once, to say that the Israeli government’s treatment of the Gazan population is both wrong and self-defeating. And that it is not anti-Israel or pro-Hamas to say that withholding humanitarian aid is not the answer. The situation is the opposite of straightforward. It is not just that

Keir Starmer’s government has suspended trade talks with Israel and summoned the Israeli ambassador over the ‘intolerable’ offensive in Gaza. To be honest, I’m surprised it’s taken ten months for any doubt to be cleared up. But now it is entirely clear where the government stands vis-à-vis our supposed great ally in the Middle East, Israel, and the Islamist death cult which seeks to wipe Jews – yes, Jews, not Israel – off the face of the earth: it stands with Hamas. Don’t rely on my take, but on the words of Hamas Don’t rely on my take, but on the words of Hamas, who last night issued a statement in response to the

Jerusalem’s Shalem College should have been brimming with life when we visited last month. But this leafy campus was oddly empty. The reason, of course, is that a large contingent of its students are currently serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as part of the war effort against Hamas. Away from campus, the young Israelis that we met on our trip were of similar age and appearance to the undergraduates I taught in Cambridge as a doctoral student. But the similarities stopped there. For these young people were about as different to their contemporaries in the West as it is possible to be. We met a girl in her

Are we being lied to, or at the very least misled, about what’s going on in Gaza? It increasingly seems so. Israel is carrying out a genocide, cries the activist class. Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have no basis in truth. What Israel’s voluble haters call ‘mass murder’ is in fact a pretty normal war. Too many have made themselves the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas Strikingly, Hamas appears to have quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its casualty figures. Its fatalities list for March 2025 dispensed with 3,400 names that were contained