Paul Wood was a BBC foreign correspondent for 25 years, in Belgrade, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Kabul and Washington DC. He has won numerous awards, including two US Emmys for his coverage of the Syrian civil war
No one covers up their war crimes any more. They film them, celebrate them, post them on X. So we have videos from Syria this week showing Islamist fighters making terrified Alawite men get on their hands and knees and howl like dogs. In one video, the victims crawl along a street spattered with blood
Steady rain during the day stopped just before Monday’s evening prayers for Pope Francis in Saint Peter’s Square. A line of cardinals sat on a platform, an ageing politburo in black and scarlet. A couple of thousand of the faithful and the curious stood below. Vatican gendarmes, wearing kepis and carrying sidearms, directed people to
It’s never a good thing when your cardiologist sounds alarmed on the phone. Come in tomorrow, he said: we’ll get you on the table. He wasn’t talking about cracking my chest, thank Christ, but threading a wire in through a vein to get a look at the heart, blow up a tiny balloon to stretch
Donald Trump told reporters this week that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to free some of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. But, he went on, ‘they’ll never give it to me’. Trump’s chances of putting on white tie and tails in Oslo have receded to a distant speck with his plan to
The former US president Jimmy Carterdied, at the age of 100, just before news of an imminent deal to free the last of Israel’s hostages in Gaza. Carter’s presidency was crippled by his own hostage crisis, American diplomats held captive in Tehran. Freeing them became his administration’s highest priority, and he worked on it for
Isis are back. In fact, to borrow Gerry Adams’s remark about the IRA, they never went away. Now, they are regaining some of their previous strength in Syria and Iraq, and moving into fresh territory in Africa. Of most importance to the West, the Afghan branch of Isis – Isis Khorasan – is said to
The SAS are worried. Britain’s most elite military unit have come face to face with the IRA, the Taliban and Isis. But the enemy that really concerns them doesn’t carry a gun or wear a suicide belt. It’s the phalanx of lawyers they think are coming for them, armed with a deadly weapon: the European
Peace is closer than ever in Lebanon – which is why we’ve seen more bloodshed this week. As this is published, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is expected to announce his government has accepted a ceasefire with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, on terms negotiated by US officials. That explains the surge in violence over
One of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign ads was aimed at Jewish voters. Three stereotypical New York bubbes are kvetching about the state of the world. ‘Israel’s under attack. Anti-Semitism like I never thought I would see.’ One says: ‘Oy vey… You know Trump I never cared for, but at least he will keep us safe.’
Iran has fallen into the trap set by Israel. It has taken the bait after months of failing to respond to a series of devastating – and humiliating – attacks, which decapitated its Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, and killed the leader of Hamas in Tehran. But the regime may have self-immolated by firing missiles at Israel
The American general David Petraeus famously asked of the invasion of Iraq: ‘Tell me how this ends.’ That’s the question as Israeli bombs and missiles fall on Lebanon and the few missiles Hezbollah has sent in response are intercepted. Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ seems paralysed with indecision. Does Benjamin Netanyahu take this as a win,
Israel’s security cabinet met in a bunker in the ministry of defence in Tel Aviv on Monday night. The main item on the agenda was Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia whose missiles and rockets have forced tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes in the north. The meeting lasted into the early hours of Tuesday.
Any journalist who has covered a war will recognise Ryan Routh’s type immediately – the war zone nutter. Routh is currently all over America’s front pages, accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump. The photograph used by most news outlets shows a grizzled-looking character with a flak vest, a stars-and-stripes neckerchief, and a troubled stare. Back
The fact that the Middle East stands on the brink of a catastrophic war can be explained by a scene from The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s preposterous but entertaining series on Netflix about aristocrats and sarf London drug-dealers. The dim eldest son of a duke is in trouble with a vicious gangster, who makes him dress
The first time I heard the name ‘Michael Cohen’ was in 2015, from a Republican political operative who told me: ‘It’s his job to clean up Trump’s messes with women.’ He went on to explain how Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, would pay a large amount in cash to whichever actress-model-stripper-pornstar was claiming to
As Jordanian fighter jets shot down Iranian drones heading for Israel on Saturday night, there were joyful cries of Allahu Akbar on the ground as some people lent out of their windows to cheer the drones they thought were getting through. King Abdullah II was depicted on social media wearing an Israeli military uniform complete
The village we moved to in central Italy is lovely – old stone houses and olive trees on a hillside – but it is eerily deserted most of the time. A neighbour in his forties says that when he grew up here, it was full of children playing in the cobbled streets. There were about 350 people
The US and Britain really didn’t think they had a choice about bombing Yemen in retaliation for Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea – one of the world’s busiest waterways, carrying almost a sixth of global shipping. But the airstrikes overnight are unlikely to stop the attacks and in the short term will
Israel has made the first, rather tentative, moves of its ground operation against Hamas – but there’s nothing tentative about its aerial bombing. Here’s a report of one incident: at 4.30 p.m. on 10 October, an explosion collapsed a six-storey building in Sheikh Radwan, a district of Gaza City, killing, it was said, at least 40
The last message that Shaked Haran saw from her father was just after 7.30 a.m. on the Saturday of the Hamas attacks in Israel. Her parents were in the safe room of their house in Kibbutz Be’eri, just outside the Gaza Strip. The message said that ‘masked terrorists’ were ‘swarming’ everywhere. ‘We don’t think we’ll
