How Britain can save Israel – and Gaza – from bloodshed

The world changed on Saturday morning with Hamas’s attack on army bases and civilian communities in Israel. What began as a Palestinian military triumph became, within minutes, the greatest single atrocity of the entire conflict to date, by either party. 

Every assumption of the status quo ante has been swept aside, including much of the international etiquette around calls for restraint: Israel appears to be hours away from launching the most overwhelming assault on a modern city since Vladimir Putin’s attack on Grozny, with unreserved Western blessing. This will likely unleash every rocket in Hamas’s arsenal onto Israeli cities, and might well drag other parties into the fray, from external actors like Hezbollah to Palestinian organisations in the West Bank and even hand-to-hand sectarian violence among Israelis and Palestinians sharing the same towns in Israel proper. But even if the war remains confined to the Gaza Strip – which seems unlikely – the number of casualties in the coming weeks is expected to dwarf what Israelis now refer to as the Black Sabbath.