Israel

The last surviving American hostage held by Hamas in Gaza is set to be released as early as today, coinciding with the arrival tomorrow of President Trump in the Middle East. The timing could not be more significant. Previous attempts to negotiate the release of Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old Israeli-American soldier from an elite army unit, failed despite high-level talks in Qatar. However, Hamas – not a terror organisation known for its nuanced approach to diplomacy – clearly realised that with Trump in the region, their ‘gesture of good will’ might pay additional dividends. Alexander was serving on the border with Gaza on 7 October 2023 when Hamas gunmen arrived

Israel’s cabinet has given a green light an audacious plan to retake Gaza, signalling a serious shift in its approach to the war on the Hamas-controlled enclave. Approved on 5 May, the operation aims to seize the entire Strip, hold key territories, and maintain a long-term military presence – a stark departure from the hit-and-retreat tactics of the past.  With a timeline pegged to begin after Donald Trump’s regional visit from 13-16 May, the IDF are mobilising tens of thousands of reservists for what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls an ‘intensive’ campaign. But this high-stakes strategy, driven by the twin goals of crushing Hamas and freeing hostages, is fraught with

On Monday this week, Ronen Bar, head of Israel’s security service Shin Bet, challenged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to fire him in the country’s Supreme Court, blocking it – at least temporarily. He was supported in his claim by a number of civic groups and former military generals, including the former senior air commander Nimrod Sheffer, stating that Netanyahu wanted to get rid of him after suspecting that Bar was not loyal to him. The Shin Bet chief provided the court with classified documents showing that Netanyahu wished to turn the agency into his private secret police, like those in some dictatorial regimes. Bar also wrote in his

On Monday evening, The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove and Spectator columnist and associate editor Douglas Murray sat down for a live event at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster.  In front of a packed auditorium with 1,500 guests, they discussed the October 7th massacre; Douglas’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West; and the best and the worst aspects of the MAGA movement. This is a video exclusively for Spectator subscribers.

In 2008, under the UK’s Labour government, Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin – a Likud central committee member – was denied entry into Britain. Then home secretary Jacqui Smith cited public safety concerns, quoting Feiglin’s provocative articles and speeches as justification. There was no court appeal available to him, no diplomatic immunity by virtue of his office; he was simply barred, his presence deemed not ‘conducive to the public good’. Few, if any, in the British political establishment rushed to his defence. Fast forward to today, and the diplomatic chaos caused over the weekend by two Labour MPs, Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed, being denied entry into Israel. The reason: Israeli

Jerusalem’s Shalem College should have been brimming with life when we visited last month. But this leafy campus was oddly empty. The reason, of course, is that a large contingent of its students are currently serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as part of the war effort against Hamas. Away from campus, the young Israelis that we met on our trip were of similar age and appearance to the undergraduates I taught in Cambridge as a doctoral student. But the similarities stopped there. For these young people were about as different to their contemporaries in the West as it is possible to be. We met a girl in her

Are we being lied to, or at the very least misled, about what’s going on in Gaza? It increasingly seems so. Israel is carrying out a genocide, cries the activist class. Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have no basis in truth. What Israel’s voluble haters call ‘mass murder’ is in fact a pretty normal war. Too many have made themselves the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas Strikingly, Hamas appears to have quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its casualty figures. Its fatalities list for March 2025 dispensed with 3,400 names that were contained

London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan published a video online earlier this week to mark the Muslim festival of Eid. Released under the guise of seasonal goodwill, this glib social media greeting is not merely problematic – it is an outright disgrace. Cloaked in the warm language of unity and peace, the Mayor of London delivered a politicised monologue that whitewashes terrorism, stokes division, and fundamentally misrepresents the moral landscape of the Israel–Palestinian conflict. This is not the conduct of a responsible leader. It is the conduct of a man either wilfully blind to barbarity or all too willing to exploit a religious holiday for ideological gain. ‘More than 50,000 Palestinians

Awoken by sirens wailing over large parts of central Israel last weekend, I pulled on whatever clothes I could find beside my bed and shuffled down to the bomb shelter in the basement. The missiles, launched from Yemen by the Iranian-backed Houthis, didn’t distinguish between ideologies or identities. More or less every Israeli in the strike zone – left-wing or right-wing, religious or secular, Jew, Arab, Christian, Muslim, or other – did the same. Those without safe-rooms of their own rely on communal shelters, often meeting their neighbours dressed in pyjamas or wrapped in bath towels. Those who get caught away from home rush into the nearest building to be ushered

The war in Gaza has resumed with a new intensity, but it would be a mistake to see this as a straightforward continuation of what we have witnessed over recent months. This phase of the conflict suggests a shift in strategy – one shaped by Israeli military recalculations, a more accommodating US administration, and the failure of ceasefire negotiations to yield further meaningful results. Washington and Jerusalem are now aligned in their broader strategic objectives For some weeks, Israel has found itself in a strategic deadlock. The lull in fighting had given Hamas time to reorganise, rearm, and reinforce itself, while the humanitarian aid flowing into Gaza ended up helping

Imagine if, following an Allied raid on Nazi positions, the newspapers the next day told us about nothing but the civilian casualties. No mention of the fascists who were killed. No utterance of their names, no information about their ranks. Instead, just pained commentary on the suffering of the innocents who tragically found themselves swept up in this act of war. This is one of the most blistering assaults on Hamas’s terror army since 7 October We would think that strange, right? We would consider it a reneging on the journalist’s duty to tell the truth about war. Well, that’s how I feel perusing the coverage of Israel’s resumption of

‘Amnesty International and Harvard,’ says Alan Dershowitz of the 7 October 2023 massacre, ‘blamed it on Israel even before the first shot was fired in Gaza.’ It was true; the Israel Defence Force (IDF) did not enter Gaza until 27 October, but already there were ‘River to Sea’ anti-Israel demonstrations, anti-Semitic posts on TikTok, the first stirrings of the Tentifada movement on campuses, a deafening silence in the United Nations (especially from its women’s committee which was to take six months to denounce the mass rapine) and a worldwide attempt to blame 7 October on its victims rather than its perpetrators. On Saturday 15 May 2024 there were two consecutive articles in the Times, a full eighteen

Another week, another peace plan for a seemingly intractable conflict. This time it’s Gaza’s turn, with the launch of a new peace and reconstruction plan for the rubble-strewn Strip. The proposal, created by Egypt and endorsed by the Arab League (a 22-strong group of Arab states) at a summit in Cairo, provides an alternative to President Trump’s ‘Gaza Riviera’ model. Trump’s idea to place Gaza under US control, depopulate it to redevelop the enclave, and decant its residents to nearby Egypt and Jordan was rejected out of hand by the Arab states. The US has signalled that it is open to hearing what an Arab plan for Gaza’s post-war reconstruction