Arieh Kovler is a political analyst and writer based in Jerusalem.
After days of increasing optimism, Qatari prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani summoned the press last night to announce that Israel and Hamas had agreed on a ceasefire and hostage deal. In the hours since, Israel has accused Hamas of backtracking on the agreement and dozens of people have been killed in Israeli strikes on
Early September, days after the gruesome discovery of six murdered Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Gaza, a dramatic scoop appeared in Bild. The German newspaper had obtained a secret internal Hamas document, supposedly obtained from Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s personal computer, that revealed Hamas’s hostage negotiation strategy. The document claimed that Hamas was deliberately exploiting
If the leaks and briefings are to be believed, Israel is getting ready to end its war in Lebanon. With the US pushing hard, and after a successful military campaign, reports say that Israeli leaders are looking to make a deal. Lebanese Hezbollah joined Hama’s war against Israel on 8 October, 2023; around 100,000 Israeli civilians
In Christian countries, it’s typical to put things off until ‘after Christmas’ when the new year begins. In Israel, the equivalent is ‘after the festivals’. The Jewish autumn festivals begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year followed by Yom Kippur and the eight-day festival of Tabernacles, Sukkot. Throughout his career, Netanyahu’s talent has been
Israelis awoke today to the unsurprising news that the IDF had crossed the border into Lebanon. The incursions, which had been expected for days and heavily briefed as imminent yesterday, are supposedly ‘limited’ and ‘targeted’ – aiming to destroy fortified Hezbollah positions overlooking the Galilee and prevent the terror group from using short-range weapons like RPGs
The war that neither side wanted began this week in earnest. After last week’s exploding pagers and walkie-talkies reportedly injured 1,500 members of Hezbollah’s military forces, the Israeli Air Force began a broad campaign of airstrikes against Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, assassinating several senior leaders of the group while targeting long-range missiles hidden in warehouses
At the end of the 2014 film Kingsman: the Secret Service, the plucky spy hero is in trouble deep in an enemy base. Suddenly his tech wizard figures out that he can hack into the microchips inside the enemies’ heads and make them all explode. The bad guys all go boom. Hezbollah fighters must be asking
Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin and Lauren Southern aren’t household names, but they each have enormous, dedicated followings online. Their podcasts and videos all promote similar narratives: liberal values are destroying the West, Ukraine is America’s enemy, Covid vaccines are harmful and pointless and that Donald Trump, though flawed, is the United States’ last
Nearly ten months after Israel’s worst day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made history far away in Washington DC when he became the first world leader to address Congress four times. Even Winston Churchill only managed three. The last time Netanyahu spoke to Congress was in March 2015, as the Obama administration was finalising the Joint
In the middle of a war, Israel’s government is wobbling. Not because of the policy failures that led to the country’s worst disaster ever when Hamas invaded on October 7, 2023; not because of the slow progress of the war, its high human cost or its failure to recover the hostages; not even because of
On 7 April, six months after the October massacres in southern Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the public that the country was just ‘one step away from victory’ in its war against Hamas in Gaza. Nearly two months later, Israel hasn’t taken that step yet. The war continues. No more hostages have been released
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
Today was supposed to be the day we sent our kids back to nursery. For two weeks, my toddler and baby have been home with a nasty stomach bug that turned out to be shigella, a bacterium that causes dysentery and that has been ripping through Israeli troops in Gaza. Then, on Saturday night, Rear Admiral
While preparing to head out to synagogue to join the dancing and celebration for the Simchat Torah festival, the rocket sirens started sounding. As we grabbed the kids and ran to our safe room (all new Israeli houses are built with one), I assumed there must have been some incident overnight, some Israeli escalation to
Here we go again. On Monday, Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Prime Minister, announced that he would bring a bill to dissolve the Knesset and trigger yet another election. After a seemingly endless procession of elections, Bennett’s rainbow coalition was a brief respite from constant campaigning that exhausted the populace and bankrupted the political parties. Comprising factions
Jerusalem In April 2019, Naftali Bennett received an unpleasant surprise. As the votes were counted in Israel’s general election, it became clear that his New Right party had not passed the 3.25 per cent electoral threshold needed to stay in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Bennett had lost his seat, his new party had failed and
So farewell, then, to Israel’s vaccine passport, the green pass. Less than three months after coming into effect, the Covid vaccination certification scheme was scrapped today, along with almost all of the remaining Covid-19 restrictions in public places. Israel was the first country to introduce a vaccine passport back in March. Cafes, bars, restaurants, gyms
A dramatic photo from the Gaza strip taken in the early hours of Friday morning looks like something out of a Marvel film. On the right, rockets fly from Gaza. The gentle trajectory of their parabolic curves shouldn’t fool anyone: these are unguided explosives travelling at hundreds of miles an hour towards an Israeli town. On
I didn’t hear the boom on Monday night. I didn’t hear the siren either, due to some loud renovations. Sitting at my desk in the bomb shelter in my flat that doubles as a home office, I found out we were under rocket attack by reading about it on Twitter. With the blast door and
In 2015, I was nearly beaten by a far-right mob in Jerusalem. Thursday night’s riot in the holy city reminded me a lot of that evening. Thankfully, this time, nobody died, but that same feeling of tension, anger and violence was in the air. My run in with the mob began at a small vigil
