Israel

There is, as Ecclesiastes reminded us, a time for war and a time for peace. In its 76-year history, Israel has rarely selected the time for war, almost always reinforcing its position and responding in self-defence to Arab attacks. The invasion of Rafah will be another such tragic chapter in the tragic history of the Jewish state. Hamas has made it a time for war. The tanks went in after volleys of rockets were fired by Hamas Has it started already? Last night, Israeli tanks entered the southern town after a last-ditch ceasefire proposal from Hamas was rejected as inadequate. But the operation has so far fallen short of a

A day after it seemed that a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel was all but dead, the terror group has issued a surprise statement announcing that it has accepted the deal offered by Egypt and Qatar. Optimism, though, would be premature at this point. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under considerable public pressure to reach a deal that will secure the release of Israeli hostages, has said the proposal for a new Gaza ceasefire is ‘far from Israel’s basic requirements’. Meanwhile, late on Monday, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) said it was conducting targeted strikes against Hamas targets in eastern Rafah. Despite this military action and Netanyahu’s

When Israel responded to Iran’s unprecedented missile and drone attack in a measured military fashion on 19 April, some believed that Israeli prime minister BenjaminNetanyahu had agreed to show restraint in return for Joe Biden’s support for a military operation in Rafah. These rumours were dispelled this weekend when the US president reiterated his objection to a major military operation in the city during a call with Netanyahu. This leaves Netanyahu between a rock and the hard place. Rafah, located in the southern end of the Gaza strip, is near the border with Egypt and close to Israel itself. It is the last and most significant of Hamas’s strongholds and

The Biden administration is planning to announce sanctions against a part of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). On the one hand, this would be the latest in a series of US and European sanctions targeting Israeli settler organisations linked to violence against Palestinians. On the other, it’s an unprecedented legal action by the United States against the Israeli military itself.  One of the long-running divisions in Israel society is between Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews and the rest of the public. Originally a tiny minority, Haredi Jews now form nearly 14 per cent of Israel’s population. The biggest tension is over the issue of military service: while most Jewish men are drafted

The reported Israeli strike on an Iranian air installation near the city of Isfahan in central Iran appears to have been the most significant of a series of attacks carried out by Israel in the course of last night. While the full picture is still emerging, there are indications that an additional strike of some kind took place south of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. A third strike took place on a position of the Syrian army in Sweida, a majority Druze province close to the Syria-Israel border, according to a number of Syrian opposition sources. The strike on Sweida is business as usual in terms of Israel’s ongoing campaign against

The Iranian drone and missile attacks of 13 April brought less drama for many in Jerusalem than one might have imagined. War brings with it the disappearance of expectations of daily continuity, or of a reasonable and logical sequence of events.  It has been wartime for six months now here in Jerusalem; in another way it has been wartime for the last 75 years. If one insists on drawing out the camera range still further, it has been war, or a state of emergency for Jewish people for as long as history can remember. Next week, after all, Jews worldwide will gather to read and recite a nearly 2,000 year old text

On Sunday morning, Israelis – those who hadn’t already spent part of the night in bomb shelters or safe rooms, unable to sleep – woke up to the good news that nearly all of the approximately 300 missiles and drones fired from Iran hours earlier had been destroyed before crossing into Israeli airspace. One Israeli was injured in the attack, but no one was killed. As has been the case since the 7 October disaster that marked the start of the war in Gaza, Israel’s military and technological prowess had performed successfully and efficiently. No less impressive than the military feat of keeping these weapons from hitting their targets in

On Wednesday, three sons of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh were killed by an Israeli airstrike. The three were killed when their car was bombed in Gaza’s Al-Shati camp. According to reports, at least three of Haniyeh’s grandchildren were also killed in the strike. Upon hearing of their death, Haniyeh, who resides in Qatar, said ‘I thank God for this honour that he bestow upon us the martyrdom of my three sons and some grandchildren.’ The targeted killing of high-level Hamas operatives is an extremely complex operation, and a tactic that Israeli forces specialise in. It requires accurate intelligence and quick action using precision weapons – often fired from drones

There are many misunderstandings about Israel in the international media, but one of the most bewildering is the suggestion that if it weren’t for the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu the war would end. It is one of those mistakes that at best mixes up hope with analysis, and at worst displays a dumbfounding ignorance. Let me give you an example. In recent months I think I’ve interviewed everybody in Israeli politics who might some day replace Netanyahu. It doesn’t matter if they’re from the right or the left of the political spectrum, not one would be doing anything different from what he is doing now. No one, left or right,

Britain in the nineteenth century pioneered the idea of the professional, impartial civil service independent of politics. In the twenty-first, that same civil service is unfortunately pioneering the notion of a body increasingly independent of the state that employs it, and apt at times to follow its own remarkably political agenda without much control from anyone. Following your conscience is a good deal less impressive when you are doing it on someone else’s dime British companies export a good deal of military equipment to Israel. To do so, they require export licences from the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). Yesterday, it emerged that a group of civil servants in

The 2024 Eurovision Song Contest – the final of which will be held in Malmö on 11 May – is the latest peculiar target of pompous virtue signallers. The hosts of the UK’s largest Eurovision screening have announced their decision to scrap the event. The reason? Israel, of course. ‘We have collectively decided not to screen the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest this year while Israel remains in the competition,’ the independent Rio cinema in Dalston, east London, said in a statement. Reminder: they are talking here, not about the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the Good Friday Agreement, but The Eurovision Song Contest – which generates