Israel

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

As the IDF continues to close in on Hamas in the heart of Gaza, the US announced that Israel will implement daily four-hour ‘humanitarian pauses’ in fighting in the north of the strip. Hours after the announcement yesterday, during a press conference, the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant spoke rather differently about the pauses. He stated that Israel would not stop the fighting against Hamas until all the hostages held by the group had been returned. Only then could proper humanitarian pauses go ahead. The inconsistent messaging from the American and Israeli sides regarding these humanitarian pauses reflects the American administration’s frustration with Israel’s refusal to pause the fighting. The

Away from Gaza, things are getting worse in the West Bank. I’ve received many messages from Palestinian friends raging at what is going on there. To get an idea of the despair of West Bank Palestinians, remember the suicidal attacks on the streets of Jerusalem a decade or so ago. Usually what happened was an ordinary Palestinian would approach a Jew, pull out a knife and stab him, realising they would be instantly killed by the other people nearby. Obviously I condemn these acts, though it’s worth noting that they involved no message, no shouting of ‘Free Palestine!’ There was no large organisation behind them, no big political project, just

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) declared last night that Gaza has been encircled and divided into two separate parts: north and south. The majority of the fighting is in northern Gaza, where Hamas has concentrated its bases and arms. This is a significant new stage in the war, which has so far escalated gradually. The gradual advance of the IDF ground troops had several aims. It allowed Palestinian civilians to move from northern Gaza to the safer south, close to the border with Egypt where limited humanitarian aid has been entering the strip. The majority of civilians have now moved to southern Gaza, but several hundred thousands have remain in

As Israeli forces continue to push into Gaza they face threats from Hamas terrorists who use a network of tunnels under the strip. This is referred to by Israel as a ‘metro’. The tunnel network is extensive and exists under civilian homes and streets. In the brief ten-day war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021, Israel said it had struck 62 miles of these tunnels under Gaza. Today Hamas continues to use them. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant spoke to IDF combat engineers this week and vowed that Israel has ‘unique solutions’ for destroying the tunnels and that Hamas members who remained in them would be eliminated.  Avoiding detection by going

I’ve never been sorry that I left education at 17, armed with nothing but my raw talent and splendid rack. The conformity and unworldliness which you need to have if you want to basically stay at school till you’re 21 are things I despise students for – and haven’t these character traits had a lovely outing during the current ugly outbreak of campus Jew-hatred? Jews have never been popular at universities; the phrase ‘too clever for their own good’ might have been invented for them, with a world population of 0.2 per cent taking a whopping 22 per cent of Nobel prizes. The mediocre spawn of the ruling class once

‘We are the victims… therefore nobody should blame us for the things we do.’ Who do you think said this? Some blue-haired campus activist who’s convinced they’re suffering from structural oppression? A trans campaigner, perhaps, who thinks being misgendered is an act of violence? Maybe some other social justice type who feels victimised by everything from statues of old colonialists to un-PC jokes? Actually it was Ghazi Hamad, a leading figure in Hamas. Yes, Hamas is now the armed wing of the culture of victimhood. The genocidal army of the cloying politics of self-pity. One headline paraphrased his comments as follows: ‘We are victims – everything we do is justified.’ If anyone

It is hard to know what to make of the sheer mindless stupidity of some people who claim to support the cause of Palestinians in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Boxes of live rodents have now been released at a number of McDonald’s restaurants, apparently as part of pro-Palestinian protests. One incident took place on Monday in Birmingham. Video footage widely shared on social media shows a man wearing a Palestinian flag on his head, carrying a box filled with mice from the boot of his car and into the McDonald’s branch in the Star City leisure complex. He tips the mice — painted the colours of the Palestinian flag — on

So now we know what a ‘globalised intifada’ might look like. That’s what people chanted for on the streets of London on Saturday. ‘From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada’, they yelled. And now it’s happening, in Dagestan, where last night there was a violent hounding of Israelis arriving in the country by mobs shouting ‘Free Palestine’. What took place at the airport in Makhachkala was truly chilling. Huge numbers of people, some waving the Palestinian flag and holding anti-Israel placards, stormed the airport after hearing that a flight from Tel Aviv was on its way. They were hunting for Jews. It was a pogrom under the auspices of

In every round of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in the last 20 years, I have always wanted an immediate ceasefire. The way I see it, we Israelis were unwilling to pay the price it would cost to remove the Hamas regime and the dangers of Hamas had seemed manageable. Conflicts such as Operations Cast Lead (2008 to 2009), Pillar of Defence (2009), and Black Belt (2019) to name a few), seem like a futile cycle of blood-letting with immense human costs. This was the mainstream view of Israeli liberals.  But now, like almost the entirety of the Israeli left, I believe that in our current situation an immediate ceasefire

The atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October have been revealed in their terrible savagery. There are accounts of dead babies, their bodies riddled with bullets, entire families burnt alive in their homes, women and girls raped and killed. Bodies tortured and mutilated beyond recognition. Israelis thought that the world would finally recognise Hamas for what it truly is; an Islamist terror organisation seeking to destroy Israel. It did not.  Since the war started, there has been an explosion of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred. Although Western leaders and large proportions of the public were shocked by Hamas’s atrocities and expressed support for Israel, the streets of London, Paris, Toronto and