Gaza

Thursday

William Shawcross

The world is now inexorably divided – and the West must fight to survive

From our UK edition

In The Builder’s Stone, Melanie Phillips reminds us forcefully that we must never forget how 7 October 2023 changed the world. On that day Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded southern Israel and brutally raped women and butchered or burned alive 1,100 Jewish men, women and children. They also dragged 250 Israelis, including three-year-old twins, grandparents and young women whom they had already attacked, into Gaza as hostages. They filmed it all on their body cameras, and perhaps the most terrifying thing they recorded was the glee with which they carried out these atrocities. Phillips, a British writer who lives in Jerusalem and London, has spent many decades fighting Goliaths.

Saturday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Who is responsible for the BBC’s Gaza documentary debacle?

From our UK edition

In 2007, the BBC was engulfed in scandal for an embarrassing – if relatively trivial – misrepresentation of Queen Elizabeth II. A promotional clip for a documentary, A Year with the Queen, was edited to suggest the monarch stormed out of a photoshoot in a huff, when in reality, the sequence had been misleadingly spliced together. The outcry was immediate. Within hours, the BBC issued an apology. By the following day, an internal investigation had been launched. The corporation treated the matter with the utmost urgency, leading to resignations, extensive inquiries, and a near-existential crisis over editorial ethics. Fast-forward to 2025, and the BBC has once again been caught red-handed with a dodgy documentary.

Monday

Daniel McCarthy

How Trump is revolutionizing Washington

Weeks into his second term, it’s clear President Trump intends to be the most transformative force our politics has seen in a century. He seems equally determined to change the course of the world — and perhaps its map, too. Trump’s enemies can blame themselves for making this possible. They showed him that impeachment is nothing to fear: securing conviction in the Senate is nigh impossible and whatever damage impeachment might do to a president’s reputation has already been inflicted on Trump. Two impeachments and a welter of post-presidential criminal prosecutions and even convictions failed to stain Trump in voters’ eyes. On the contrary, they left him more popular than ever and discredited the institutions his opponents employed as weapons of their “lawfare.

Trump

Thursday

Paul Wood

Does Trump deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

From our UK edition

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 Make Gaza Great Again – by removing the Palestinians.  This proposal may have doomed the brittle ceasefire and jeopardised further hostage releases. It has made the prospect of a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel vanishingly small. It might also end up destabilising Jordan and Egypt. But the agent of chaos in the Oval Office is doubling down and no one, least of all Trump, knows how this will end.

Theresa May

Why don’t Yale students want to drink?

From our UK edition

They say it is good to learn new skills as you get older. Well here goes. I am about to arrive in New Haven, Connecticut, to teach as a senior fellow at Yale University. Last time I taught anything to a class it was at Sunday school more than half a century ago. Arriving late at night I see little of the town but then next morning when I draw up the blinds – wow, it’s just like Oxford! In a sense it was meant to be, as Yale’s buildings were to some extent modelled on Oxford and Cambridge. One thing is very different though: there is only one student bar in the university. In my day at Oxford every college had its own bar. Is this a sign of the sobriety of the USA or the sobriety of the young today?

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Andrew Gwynne sacked, Trump saves Prince Harry and a £30m refund over moths

From our UK edition

Home Andrew Gwynne was sacked as a health minister and suspended from the Labour party for making jokes about a constituent’s hoped-for death, and about Diane Abbott and Angela Rayner. Oliver Ryan, a member of the WhatsApp group where the jokes were shared, had the Labour whip removed and 11 councillors were suspended from the party. Asked about 16,913 of 28,564 medics registering to practise medicine in Britain last year having qualified abroad, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said there was ‘no doubt’ that ‘the NHS has become too reliant’ on immigration. The government issued guidance saying that anyone who enters Britain by means of a dangerous journey will normally be refused citizenship. In the week to 10 February, 210 migrants arrived in small boats.

Wednesday

James Heale

Should Starmer stand up to Trump?

From our UK edition

14 min listen

Trump has blown the Overton window wide open. In a press conference yesterday alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, the US president outlined his intention to ‘take over the Gaza Strip’, displacing 1.8 million Palestinians in the process. His plan – if you can call it that – is to build ‘the Riviera of the Middle East’. Many of the countries Trump has earmarked to resettle displaced Gazans have already condemned the takeover. How will the international community respond? Elsewhere, Keir Starmer seems more motivated by a desire to observe the rule of international law than his buddy across the pond. The Chagos deal seems set to be completed in the ‘coming weeks’.

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s inner real-estate developer targets Gaza

As he settles into the Oval Office for a second time, Donald Trump is thinking big or, if you prefer, bigly, at least when it comes to geopolitics. The Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada were already in his sights. Now add the Gaza Strip. It seems that Trump may be on the verge of granting it statehood as well as Canada. Who gets to be #51 and #52?  On Tuesday evening, Trump doubled down on his smash-and-grab foreign policy, announcing that the United States “will take over the Gaza Strip.” He didn’t stop there. “We’ll own it and be responsible,” Trump said, vowing to “create an economic development that will supply an unlimited number of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job.”  Gee willikers!

gaza

Thursday

Eleanor Harmsworth

What’s the matter with Columbia?

It was the first day of the spring semester when masked individuals burst into the classroom, shouting and throwing posters at students. As they yelled, the professor asked the protestors calmly, and in Arabic, to leave. The class was on the History of Modern Israel, the campus was Columbia University, and the protestors were part of the highly engaged and increasingly extreme “Palestine liberation” movement. It transpired that the masked students did not speak Arabic, that they did not intend to engage in a dialogue, and their primary concern was causing disruption and documenting that disruption for social media.

Palestine

Saturday

Laurence Dauti

Oxford has had enough of its Gaza protests

From our UK edition

The ceasefire in Gaza may be holding, but student activists aren’t happy. Yesterday, ten students from the Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) protest group stormed the Radcliffe Camera, the eighteenth century library, ‘occupied’ it and founded the ‘Khalida Jarrar Library’ named after a Palestinian activist and one of the 90 freed as part of the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel. The rationale, one member told me, was that the building was the centre and ‘heart’ of the city, would ‘make it Palestinian’ and would ‘attract the most attention’.

Students from the Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) protest group occupying the Radcliffe Camera on Friday.

Friday

Cockburn

What’s going on between Brett Cooper and Candace Owens?

Brett Cooper, former host of The Comment Section on the Daily Wire, has sparked rumors after liking a controversial Instagram post by former colleague Candace Owens. Speculation follows a clip from Piers Morgan Uncensored last month in which Owens accused Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being a war criminal with “genocidal ambitions.” Owens told Morgan, “I want to use my platform to say that I believe they are intentionally executing a holocaust.” Cooper liking Owens’s post raised questions: does Cooper agree with Owens’s take on the war in Gaza? Could this be tied to her departure from the Daily Wire? And does she plan to collaborate with Owens moving forward?

brett cooper

Monday

David Christopher Kaufman

What does Gaza have to do with the Los Angeles fires?

The insanity displayed by the pro-Hamas crowd never ceases to amaze. But the latest salvo feels extreme even by the extremist standards that have come to define the global political climate post-October 7. According to some of the most vocal online anti-Zionists, the raging inferno now overwhelming much of Los Angeles is not the result of government neglect or poor urban planning or even climate change. No, the thousands of homes and tens of thousands of acres now destroyed across Southern California are the handiwork of Jews and Zionists and Israel.  There are many streams leading to this nonsensical conclusion — all rooted in time-worn tropes of nefarious Jewish alliances and global domination.

Friday

Cockburn

Jose Andrés’s mixed emotions

In one of the grubby little hypocrisies that have come to characterize Joe Biden’s single term, the president awarded Jose Andrés the Presidential Medal of Freedom last weekend — at around the same time as signing off on another $8 billion weapons sale to Israel. A previous lot to head off to our top Middle East ally may well have played a part in the air strike that killed seven people working for Andrés’s World Central Kitchen in Gaza. Such complex contradictions may explain Andrés’s muted reaction to receiving the honor: one of Cockburn’s sources saw the chef dining with his family and friends at Nobu after the ceremony. When the spy approached Andrés at the bar the chef was ebullient — yet upon being congratulated he turned solemn.

jose andrés

Tuesday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Iran’s axis is dying

From our UK edition

From the hilltop viewpoint at Misgav Am, Israel’s northernmost kibbutz in the Upper Galilee, the view into southern Lebanon is a panorama of uncertainty. Less than a full day after Assad was finally defeated in Syria, I stand at and look down at the rubble of the Lebanese buildings destroyed in the recent fighting, as close to the Syrian border as the IDF will allow. Beside my feet, spent bullet casings remind me that less than two weeks ago this peaceful spot was a frontline position. The shell of a bombed-out nearby community viewpoint serves as a silent witness to the RPG attacks Hezbollah regularly launched on civilian homes and buildings since it started its war on Israel in October 2023.

Friday

Daniel DePetris

Trump is already the diplomat-in-chief

The United States only has one president at a time. Until January 20, that’s Joe Biden. But President-elect Donald Trump and his skeleton foreign policy team are waiting in the wings, plotting policy behind the scenes on issues — Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Middle East peace — that have stymied the Biden administration for the last year. In fact, Trump is already influencing the respective calculations of allies, partners and adversaries before he even steps foot in the Oval Office. And Biden’s advisors seem perfectly fine with it. Trump fancies himself as a master negotiator, somebody who’s inherently skilled at poking, pressuring and sweet-talking the opposite side of the table until he gets what he wants.

diplomat

Friday

Oscar Edmondson

Is Keir Starmer really going to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu?

From our UK edition

11 min listen

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defence minister Yoav Gallant as well as – separately – for Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif. They are all wanted for alleged war crimes, but specifically regarding Netanyahu and Gallant the ICC say that, 'each bear criminal responsibility for ... the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.' So why have these warrants been issued now? And what are the implications for Labour's relationship with Israel?   Oscar Edmondson speaks to James Heale and Tom Gross, commentator on the Middle East.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The ICC’s rogue prosecutor

From our UK edition

Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of 7 October, went to meet his maker last week. Having spent a year being pursued through the underground tunnels of Gaza that he had built, he finally put his head up above the surface in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah. The world that had told the IDF not to go into Rafah was once again proved wrong. Sinwar was killed in an exchange of fire by a 19-year-old Israeli soldier who was not even in uniform on 7 October. People inside the ICC were annoyed by the way Khan made himself a sort of ‘world policeman’ A couple of days after Sinwar’s demise, I went into Rafah to see the house where he spent his final minutes.

Monday

Fin de Pencier

Inside the ‘next Gaza’

West Bank It’s hard to take someone seriously when they tell you: be extremely careful, that part of the West Bank is just like Gaza now. Hyperbole, surely, but duly noted. It was late August and I was heading to the Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps, two adjacent Palestinian communities in the northern occupied West Bank which are now the site of almost daily fighting between the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups. The nearby city of Jenin has seen even worse violence. On the approach to Nur Shams, the landscape suddenly turned from an impoverished yet benign Arab countryside into a full-blown urban war zone. Dust filled the air, Hamas propaganda was plastered all around, an Israeli drone circled above us.

Gaza
Biden
Daniel DePetris

The endgame: Biden’s quest for a foreign policy legacy

President Joe Biden only has a few more months before he steps out of the White House, hands over the keys to his successor and spends his remaining days soaking in the Delaware sun. But before he enjoys retirement, the lifelong public servant has a big piece of unfinished business: scoring a major foreign policy win that will secure his place in the history books. Unfortunately, dreaming about being a statesman is one thing; being one is quite another. The two conflicts that would give the president that coveted status — the wars in Gaza and Ukraine — aren’t presently amenable to diplomatic resolution. And while Biden and his advisors may be committed to doing the impossible, all the commitment in the world won’t do much if the combatants are intent on slugging it out.

Thursday

Charles Lipson

What follows Sinwar’s death in Israel’s war in Gaza and beyond 

Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and strategist responsible for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, is dead, killed by the Israeli Defense Forces in a tunnel beneath his hometown of Rafah in Gaza.   Although the Biden administration (rightfully) congratulated Israel, both President Biden and Vice President Harris had previously demanded Israel not stage a major military operation in Rafah, where Sinwar and other Hamas leaders were killed. That advice matched the administration’s strategic wisdom throughout the conflict.   With Sinwar gone, the key questions now are: what is the endgame in Gaza? And how does Israel’s success in Gaza affect the current battle against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the future battle against the Islamic Republic of Iran?

yahya sinwar