Gaza

‘What happened to Piers Morgan?’ asked a Spectator writer last weekend. The answer, according to slavishly pro-Israel commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti, is that I’m now ‘darker’, ‘degraded’, ‘dismal’ and ‘debase(d)’ – because I’ve become more critical of how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza. For a long time on my YouTube show Uncensored, I defended the country’s right to defend itself after 7 October attacks. But I now believe Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has crossed the ‘proportionality’ line with its recent food and aid blockade and relentless bombardment of civilians. Self-evidently, Israel is failing in its mission to eliminate Hamas and get the remaining hostages released. Its forces have been killing

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, entertained 29 other national leaders online to seek a way of guaranteeing the future security of Ukraine. He then invited European defence leaders to meet in London. He spoke by phone to President Volodymyr Zelensky after the inconclusive conversation between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin. John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, thought to be the last Battle of Britain pilot, died aged 105. The government faced resentment in its own party against welfare cuts outlined by Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary: the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments would be tightened; incapacity benefits under universal credit would be frozen for existing claimants

In 2007, the BBC was engulfed in scandal for an embarrassing – if relatively trivial – misrepresentation of Queen Elizabeth II. A promotional clip for a documentary, A Year with the Queen, was edited to suggest the monarch stormed out of a photoshoot in a huff, when in reality, the sequence had been misleadingly spliced together. The outcry was immediate. Within hours, the BBC issued an apology. By the following day, an internal investigation had been launched. The corporation treated the matter with the utmost urgency, leading to resignations, extensive inquiries, and a near-existential crisis over editorial ethics. Fast-forward to 2025, and the BBC has once again been caught red-handed with

The ceasefire in Gaza may be holding, but student activists aren’t happy. Yesterday, ten students from the Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) protest group stormed the Radcliffe Camera, the eighteenth century library, ‘occupied’ it and founded the ‘Khalida Jarrar Library’ named after a Palestinian activist and one of the 90 freed as part of the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel. The rationale, one member told me, was that the building was the centre and ‘heart’ of the city, would ‘make it Palestinian’ and would ‘attract the most attention’. The university, having tried to talk with the group, had by lunchtime told them that it was over to the police Just as the

Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of 7 October, went to meet his maker last week. Having spent a year being pursued through the underground tunnels of Gaza that he had built, he finally put his head up above the surface in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah. The world that had told the IDF not to go into Rafah was once again proved wrong. Sinwar was killed in an exchange of fire by a 19-year-old Israeli soldier who was not even in uniform on 7 October. People inside the ICC were annoyed by the way Khan made himself a sort of ‘world policeman’ A couple of days after Sinwar’s demise, I

Home Riots subsided after 7 August, a night when many were expected but only empty streets or demonstrations against riots eventuated. By 12 August there had been 975 arrests and 546 charges in 36 of the 43 police force areas in England and Wales. Rioters could be released from jail after serving 40 per cent of their sentence, as part of the early release scheme to ease prison overcrowding, Downing Street said. Ricky Jones, a councillor for Dartford, now suspended from the Labour party, was remanded in custody after being charged with encouraging violent disorder in Walthamstow. The judge told him: ‘It is alleged that using a microphone you addressed