The war in the Middle East has barely begun

The few enquiring minds still left occasionally ask me what the most underreported stories of the current Israel-Hamas conflict are. I tend to reply that there are two.

The first is the issue of Israeli refugees. They are not called that inside Israel, where the authorities prefer to refer to them as ‘internally displaced people’. But while the world rightly concerns itself with the internally displaced people inside Gaza, the lack of notice paid to this other story is strange.

For the past five months, tens of thousands of Israeli families have had to abandon their homes. After 7 October, people in villages, towns and cities near the Gaza border were immediately moved out by the Israeli government – mainly to hotels around the Dead Sea and Eilat. At the same time, tens of thousands of families from the north of the country were forced to leave their homes because of the threat of bombardment and invasion by Hezbollah on the border Israel shares with Lebanon.