Israel

The killing of Lebanese Hezbollah military chief Haytham Ali Tababtabai by Israel this week reflects how much the balance of power between Jerusalem and the Iran-backed Shia Islamist group has shifted since the year-long war between the two in 2023 and 2024. Yet, paradoxically, Tabatabai’s killing also shows that nothing has been finally settled between the two enemies. While Hezbollah has now been shown to be much weaker than Israel, it nevertheless remains stronger than any internal faction in Lebanon, including the official Lebanese government. The practical consequence of this is escalation: Hezbollah is seeking to repair and rebuild its capacities, no force in Lebanon is willing or able to stop

The Israeli hostages recently freed from Gaza have begun to speak, and among the new revelations is that some were subjected to sexual assault and degradation, including male hostages. They describe being stripped, groped, violated, and threatened at gunpoint. The scale and cruelty of what they endured should have triggered sustained, front-page attention in the UK, not least on the BBC. But it has not. The testimonies began surfacing in recent weeks. Rom Braslavsky, seized by Palestinian Islamic Jihad while recovering the bodies of murdered women at the Nova music festival, described being stripped naked and left that way for days. ‘They took all my clothes. Underwear too. Everything. They

In 1929, René Magritte painted a picture that has since become iconic in both art and philosophy. The Treachery of Images depicts a finely detailed tobacco pipe with a caption beneath: Ceci n’est pas une pipe – ‘This is not a pipe’. Magritte’s point is subtle and enduring. It is indeed not a pipe, but an image of one. You cannot fill it with tobacco, light it, or smoke it. It is a representation, not the object itself. Israel manoeuvres within it, cautiously. Hamas exploits it, selectively. Saudi Arabia nods along, calculating Magritte was exploring the gap between signifier and reality, between the name and the thing named. His visual paradox

As the Gaza ceasefire struggles into its second month, a significant difference between the position of Israel and that of its chief ally, the United States, on the way forward is emerging. This difference reflects broader gaps in perception in Jerusalem and Washington regarding the nature and motivations of the current forces engaged in the Middle East. The subject of that difference is Turkey.   The Turks have expressed a desire to play a role in the ‘international stabilisation force’ (ISF), which, according to President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, is supposed to take over ground security control of Gaza from the IDF (and Hamas) in the framework of the plan’s implementation.

It’s been almost a year since Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that arguably held more power in Lebanon than the government itself, signed a ceasefire to end a ferocious two-month long war. The deal couldn’t have come at a better time; thousands of Israeli air and artillery strikes had pulverised southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s traditional base of operations, leading to a displacement crisis and killing close to 4,000 Lebanese. Whole swaths of northern Israel had been vacated due to Hezbollah missile attacks, forcing the Israeli government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to spend money on tens of thousands of civilians bunking in hotel rooms. But the agreement is wearing thin. The

Remember that weird little Covid ritual of 2020, when every Thursday at 8pm people stepped out onto their doorsteps and applauded? Banging saucepans, clapping their hands, they lit up the miserable skies with cheers for the National Health Service. It was mawkish, and orchestrated to the point of theatre. But its aim was to express a kind of collective gratitude for those who had become the most visibly important figures in the national story. Nurses and doctors were held in the highest esteem. They were ‘society’s best’. That’s why all those people applauded. Crowds of Palestinian Arabs whooped and whistled, and filmed on their smartphones. They called out ‘Allahu Akbar’

In the wake of yet another rupture in the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the region finds itself suspended in an unstable equilibrium – tense, volatile, but for now, deliberately held back from tipping into open war. On Tuesday, Hamas terrorists launched a coordinated double attack against Israeli troops operating inside the designated ‘yellow zone’ in Rafah – territory under clear IDF operational control. First came sniper fire, killing Master Sergeant (Res.) Yona Efraim Feldbaum. Minutes later, anti-tank missiles struck an engineering vehicle. The attack, both fatal and brazen, represented a clear violation of the ceasefire, exposing not only the presence of armed Hamas cells within IDF-controlled space but

The grotesque return of a body part falsely presented as one of Israel’s remaining hostages marks a new low in Hamas’s campaign of calculated cruelty. Israeli authorities confirmed today that the casket transferred by Hamas did not contain the remains of any of the 13 captives whose remains are still known to be in Gaza. The part belonged instead to Ofir Tzarfati, a 27-year-old abducted from the Nova music festival and buried in Israel last December. Ofir’s body had already been recovered and laid to rest in Kiryat Ata. His headstone, chosen by his grieving family, bore a line that now seems almost unbearably tragic: ‘You were a world and

The war in Gaza has not ended; it has changed its shape. What began as a brutal confrontation has now hardened into a political and geographic experiment, one whose contours may define the region’s next decade. Beneath the surface of ceasefires and reconstruction plans lies a deeper transformation: the reappearance of the Palestinian question, after years of deliberate absence, as a central axis in the regional and global conversation. For nearly two decades, Israel and much of the Arab world succeeded in marginalising that question. Strategic normalisation, economic incentives, and the pursuit of calm made it possible to sustain the illusion that the conflict could be frozen indefinitely. That illusion

Imagine, for a moment, the world we narrowly escaped. A world in which Joe Biden, frail and fading, remained in the 2024 presidential race and, with the exhausted assent of a compliant media and a protective establishment, was returned to the White House. A world in which his decisive televised collapse never quite happened or was quickly obscured. In this alternate reality, Biden staggered through the campaign and secured just enough ground to claim victory. If the career diplomats sneered at the ‘real estate men’ entering geopolitics, they may now see: sometimes, it takes builders to rebuild the world Had that happened, the consequences would have been severe, not just

In confirming the Israel-Hamas peace deal on Truth Social last night, Donald Trump referenced the seventh Beatitude from the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.’ Trump has been called a lot of things, many of them words you won’t find in the Bible, but could his next monicker be Nobel laureate? Even some of Trump’s critics, among whom I count myself, see a case for awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize The Gaza war did not begin on his watch and it was not the backdrop to his second term that he wished for. Trump II has been much more

I would like to ask readers for help. My Italian wife and our six children, aged 10 to 22, believe that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza and that Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is complicit in this genocide. I do not. What should I tell them? Once again, I am forced to remember how precious truth is – yet how difficult it is to demonstrate. Also, how easy it is to convince people that an untruth is the truth. And yet, at the same time, how easy it is to doubt the truth when all around you are telling you it is an untruth – especially if