Paul Wood

In 2004, the BBC sent me to the Iraqi city of Karbala to report on the gathering of Shia pilgrims for the religious holiday of Ashura. American troops knew to stay well away. They were already fighting a Sunni insurgency and didn’t want trouble with Iraq’s Shiites as well. The insurgency’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the butcher of Iraq — had just threatened to attack “the sects of apostasy,” as he called the Shia, and as we entered Karbala, militiamen searched us for weapons. The air hummed with tension. But at breakfast in the hotel, we ran into a gaggle of backpackers: Brits and Americans. Seeing the look on my face, a blonde woman in the group told me not to worry. “Things are much calmer now in Iraq, aren’t they?

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 civilians. One man, Mahmoud Ashour, had to dig through the rubble with his bare hands to find his family. Buried there were his daughter and her four children, a girl aged eight and three boys of six, two, and six months. They had fled there thinking it would be safer than other parts of Gaza. But, he said: ‘I couldn’t protect them. I have no trace left of my daughter.’ Israel’s aim should be ‘the defeat of Hamas and nothing more’.

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 make it out alive.’ Then nothing. When Israeli soldiers finally arrived, the house was a smoking ruin. But there was no sign of her parents, nor of her sister, her sister’s husband, their daughter aged three and son aged eight, nor of an aunt and her 12-year-old daughter, nor of another aunt and an uncle. Ten members of the family were gone. Hours later, one of her father’s friends got through to his mobile.

What do you get for the man who has everything? Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, is said to have a $500 million yacht, a $450 million Leonardo painting and a $300 million French château. Now he’s acquired a new bauble: American golf. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has negotiated a controlling interest in the main US golf tournament, the PGA Tour, merging it with a rival league the fund already owns, LIV Golf. There was an appalled reaction from Hatice Cengiz, fiancée of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly killed on MBS’s orders. She called it ‘the worst face of sportswashing’, telling journalists: ‘It shows there are no limits to what money can buy.

Beirut, Lebanon The secret police tail was impossible to miss but easy to lose. Two men in Saudi national dress – white thobe and chequered shemagh – drove a large black American saloon slowly behind me as I walked on the baking hot road. I turned into a shopping mall and they parked outside, not bothering to follow on foot as there was only one entrance. I went into a shop, all the way to the back, and then out through a door for staff to get to the mall’s loading bay, where a local activist picked me up in his car. We felt immensely pleased with ourselves when we got to the house of the Shia dissident we had come to see. He laughed and pointed out a nearly identical black car down the road, one man with binoculars, another on his phone. The dissident was being watched 24/7.