World

Thursday

Sean Rayment

It’s time Israel stopped playing by Hamas’s rules in Gaza

For Israel, the war in Gaza is a zero sum game. Israel must win and Hamas must lose. Nothing but total victory over Hamas after the appalling terrorist attacks which left over 1,400 Israelis dead, hundreds injured and over 200 civilians taken hostage, will suffice. But how is victory going to be defined and what is Israel’s end game? When the dust of war finally settles what does Israel want Gaza to look like? An empty, lifeless, bomb-cratered ruin or a self-governing entity, secure within its own borders and no longer a threat to Israel? Unless Israel has a clear strategic aim, its troops risk becoming trapped inside Gaza, possibly

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The 2024 veep show has already started

Vice presidents are meant to be dependable – and in a funny way Kamala Harris is exactly that. Joe Biden knows that, no matter how bad his poll numbers, hers will be worse: she’s the most unpopular vice president since polling began, according to one recent survey. Biden can afford to be pitifully vague in public partly because she is so painfully annoying. He loses his thread; she loses the plot.  That’s one of the reasons why, for all the alarm in Washington circles about the Commander-in-Chief’s ‘job performance’ and the distinct possibility that he might lose to Donald Trump next year, the Biden-Harris ticket seems locked in place for

Wednesday

Mark Palmer

Migrants should want to go to Rwanda

  Kigali The Supreme Court’s ruling that sending migrants to a former hostel in Kigali is illegal strikes another hammer blow to the government, not least because Rwanda gets to keep the £140 million that set up the proposed deal in the first place. Never mind what happens now – and this story is far from over – if I were a migrant about to take a small boat to Britain, the prospect of ending up here, where it’s easier to start a business than almost anywhere else in the world, would hardly be a deterrent. The facts are these: Rwanda was a broken country after the 1994 genocide. It

Toby Young Toby Young

My futile morning guarding Churchill’s statue

On Armistice Day I made my way to Parliament Square with some vague notion of protecting Churchill’s statue. I’d discussed the need to stop it being defiled by pro-Palestinian protestors a few days earlier with a group I’m involved with called the British Friends of Israel, but in my head this had been a theoretical discussion, not something that involved me personally. Then Allison Pearson, a member of the group, announced in the Telegraph that she intended to stand in front of the statue armed with a rolled-up copy of the paper, and I felt shamed into joining her. Not that I was worried about her being knocked over by

Limor Simhony Philpott

Al-Shifa won’t be the last hospital Israel raids in Gaza

Late on Tuesday night, about a week after the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) encircled Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, Israeli forces entered the complex in what has been described as a ‘targeted operation against Hamas’. IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said that troops are operating specifically within the western area of the hospital, one of the largest medical facilities in Gaza. The IDF’s military operation within the hospital, and other hospitals in Gaza, has been a highly contentious issue in the international community. The US – Israel’s closest ally – declared that Israel operate with extreme care in hospitals, making sure that patients and staff do not get caught in the crossfire. 

Michael Karam

Will Lebanon be dragged into a war with Israel?

Southern Lebanon In the week following the 7/10 attacks by Hamas, a journalist in Beirut put the question all of Lebanon wanted to ask to the Prime Minister, Najib Mikati: do we have to be dragged into the war with Israel? It was more of a cri de coeur than a question, because the whole country knows the answer and knows that Lebanon has no choice. Hezbollah, the Shia Islamist party and militant group, unofficially controls many, if not most, of the levers of power in Lebanon and it does not answer to the people or the government here. Hezbollah’s leader, the reclusive cleric Hassan Nasrallah, holds no public office

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky must be honest about the state of the war

‘Happy New Year! The year of our victory!’ said Volodymyr Zelensky on 1 January. After the liberation of the Kharkiv region and Kherson, Ukrainians entered the ninth year of the war with hope that they could win. Light will always prevail over darkness, Zelensky likes to say. But now the counter-offensive is nearly over, having made crushingly few gains. With western support waning, Kyiv needs to be honest about how the war is going and what it will take to turn the tide. Ukrainians should be told that there is a shortage of soldiers and that mass conscription is urgently needed After Zelensky, the most popular figure in Ukraine is Valery

Douglas Murray

Why don’t celebrities care about the Israeli hostages?

My mind keeps going back almost ten years, to Nigeria in 2014. As some readers will remember, on the night of 14 April, 276 mainly Christian schoolgirls were abducted by terrorists from the Boko Haram group. It happened at a school in a town called Chibok in Borno State. In some ways it is obvious why there was such international outrage at the incident. After all, this was 276 schoolgirls, kidnapped by an Islamic terrorist group. Even a world that had seen the Beslan school siege in 2004 and was starting to see the workings of Isis still had the capacity to be shocked. The Chibok schoolgirls story caught on,

Jonathan Spyer

Time is running out for Israel to defeat Hamas

Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza is making steady progress. They moved into the strip on 27 October after a sustained air campaign which paved the way for infantry, armoured and engineering units to enter. Despite military analysts predicting that Israel would sustain heavy combat losses, because of decent intelligence gathered in the preceding three weeks, they remain relatively low (46 dead at the time of writing).  The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are now operating inside the Al-Shifa hospital, beneath which Israel believes the main operational headquarters of Hamas is located. According to Israeli media sources, five Hamas fighters were killed in the course of the IDF’s raid into a part of the hospital

Bernard Haykel

Saudi Arabia’s Israel dilemma

The war in Gaza presents a major challenge for Saudi Arabia. The Saudi leadership is trying to placate two different camps: its own population along with the publics of the Arab and Muslim worlds as well as the US administration and influential westerners. The former are horrified by the killings of Palestinians in Gaza whereas the latter want some acknowledgment of Israel’s right to self-defence. This effort to keep everyone happy was on full display over the past weekend at the joint summit of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that was held in Riyadh. At the event, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) gave

Nicholas Farrell

Could Britain learn from Italy’s migrant plan?

Italy has become the first European Union country to bite the bullet and set up a scheme to off-shore migrant asylum seekers to a country outside the bloc. Italy’s right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni says she hopes the scheme, signed off in Rome last week with Albania’s left-wing prime minister, Edi Rama, will become a model copied across the EU.  It is similar to the Tory government’s troubled Rwanda scheme, but more practical and less vulnerable to legal challenge. Italy will process asylum requests in Albania where it plans to send tens of thousands of migrants a year. Britain, meanwhile, plans to hand the task of deciding who gets asylum to Rwanda

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The shallow solidarity of saying ‘we’re all Jews’

Over 100,000 French citizens marched peacefully through their cities on Sunday. They did so to show their support for the country’s 500,000 Jews, a growing number of whom have been harassed physically and verbally since Hamas attacked Israel last month.  In the Mediterranean city of Nice many of the 3,000 demonstrators chanted ‘we’re all Jews’, a facile and frankly offensive refrain. It’s become a habit in recent years to virtue signal one’s solidarity with victims of terrorism or religious persecution: not only do we share your pain but also your identity. One suspects that had those non-Jewish demonstrators in Nice been confronted on their way home by a group of Hamas

Jim Lawley

The Catalan volte face that has disgusted Spain

This weekend saw protests across Spain after the acting prime minister, socialist Pedro Sánchez, agreed to a general amnesty for Catalan separatists in return for parliamentary votes to enable him to stay in power. The amnesty will benefit hundreds of separatists facing fines or imprisonment for their involvement in the illegal referendum on independence for Catalonia in 2017, the subsequent unilateral declaration of independence and the concomitant street violence. There have been nine consecutive nights of often violent protest outside the socialist party’s headquarters in Madrid. But Sunday’s demonstrations, convened by the conservative opposition, held at noon in over 50 Spanish cities and attended by hundreds of thousands, were peaceful. At the

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin isn’t afraid of Cameron

Considering the obsession Russia has with Britain as the source of all its woes, it is perhaps surprising how David Cameron’s return to politics is being taken. Or rather, how little Moscow thinks it matters. After all, there is a flatteringly pervasive sense that while the United States is the main threat to Russia, Britain is more than just its sidekick. Instead, if Washington has the resources, London has the low cunning. Time and again, the Kremlin claims to see MI6 or the Foreign Office or some other arm of Perfidious Albion behind its reversals. Even the recent allegations that a Ukrainian officer masterminded the bombing of its Nord Stream

Sasha Lensky

Why Putin doesn’t want to negotiate

Discussion of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia has until recently, among most Western governments, been considered something of a no-go area and a sign of wilting faith. Yet with hopes vanishing that any counter offensive will bring a decisive change in the war, and another, headline-monopolising conflict breaking out in Gaza, this taboo in the West looks set to be broken. During a recent prank call to which she fell victim, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni probably spoke for many when she said there was ‘a lot of fatigue’ over Ukraine and that she herself had some ideas for finding ‘a way out’. Perhaps less remarkably, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Battling the official narrative — China’s ‘underground historians’

35 min listen

Controlling history is key to the Chinese Communist Party’s control of the country. Whether it’s playing up the ‘century of humiliation’, or whitewashing past mistakes like the Great Leap Forward or the Tiananmen Protests, the Party expends huge effort and resources on controlling the narrative. That’s why it’s so important and interesting to look at those Chinese people who are documenting the bits of history that the Party doesn’t want you to know about. They interview survivors from Communist labour camps, or keep their own memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, and try to keep the memory of past horrors alive through film, magazines and paintings. A new book called Sparks documents their

Sunday

Edward Howell

How North Korea is supporting Hamas

First, it was Russia’s war with Ukraine. Then, it was Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel. Both of these events, in gross violation of international law, have certainly not escaped the watchful eyes of that infamous state sponsor of terrorism, North Korea. Earlier this week, a Hamas official said North Korea is ‘part of [Hamas’s] alliance’, and he intimidated Israel and the United States with the words that: ‘the day may come when North Korea intervenes’ by unleashing a direct strike against the United States. Recent events have clearly demonstrated that Hamas does not just want to destroy the lives of Israeli civilians, but the very existence of the Israeli state.

Sean Rayment

For Israel, the real battle is only just beginning

Israel must steel itself over the coming weeks for more national trauma as the fighting against Hamas in Gaza intensifies and troops losses begin to mount. The country’s armed forces have already paid a high price, with 348 deaths since October 7th. To give some context, this is almost twice as high as the number of British soldiers killed in eight years of fighting in Iraq. In a country with just a tenth of the population of the UK, the losses will be even more difficult to bear. The break-in battle was always going to be the easiest part for the Israeli Defence Forces. The aerial bombardment, like a first

Jawad Iqbal

Democrats are tearing themselves apart over Israel

A month is a long time in American politics – or so it would seem judging by the growing split among US Democrats over the Israel-Hamas war. In the days immediately after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing 1,400 people and taking more than 240 hostages, Democrats across the board in America offered unequivocal support for Israel and its right to self-defence. That was then. Now, support for Israel’s actions has plunged the party into an increasingly vitriolic internal battle that is pitting former political allies against each other. The festering divisions in the American left running along ideological, generational and racial lines are set to deepen as the

Saturday

Limor Simhony Philpott

After Hamas, who will control Gaza?

Who will rule Gaza once the war is over? Israel, so far, hasn’t provided an answer. The country’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been clear that his aim is to wipe out Hamas. He said this week that Israel will claim responsibility for security in Gaza for an ‘indefinite period’, in order to stop Hamas from rearming and establish long-term security. But Israel is unlikely to have the stomach to stay in Gaza as casualties mount. So who will step into this vacuum? One possible solution is for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to take over as the ruling body in Gaza. The PA governed over the Palestinian territories following the