The Bondi Beach attack was a sickening antisemitic attack, but worse has been the opportunism displayed by pro-Israel voices over it. Right, so the incident at Bondi Beach. A community is shattered at a Hanukkah celebration, sixteen people gone, dozens injured, a Syrian man shot twice saving families he’d never met, and still the loudest voices in public life somehow decided the real story here was whatever pro Israel grievance they were already carrying around. You watch the facts crawl out slowly while the commentary sprints off at full speed, dragging Gaza into it, dragging protests into it, dragging Iran into it, dragging anyone who doesn’t toe the approved line into it, and you realise half these pundits didn’t want to understand this attack at all, they wanted to own it. Bondi is grieving, and the politics and the main media mouthpieces are already rifling through its pockets. Right, so you look at what’s happened in Bondi and the first thing that hits you, before you even get to the politics or the noise or the opportunists sharpening their talking points, is the sheer weight of the thing itself. A Jewish community gathered for a Hanukkah celebration, one of those evenings that exists to remind people that life and light continue, and then two men arrive with guns and turn it into carnage. Sixteen people gone, dozens more injured, families running for cover in a place that should never have been a battleground. You sit with that because the tragedy has to be the first thing you hold, otherwise the whole conversation tilts into something grotesque. The point is you start from the reality, not from the politics layered on top by people who couldn’t wait even an hour before using the bodies in Bondi to reinforce whatever story they were already trying to sell. The police have named the shooters. Sajid Akram, fifty years old, killed at the scene. His son, Naveed, twenty-four, wounded and under guard. Improvised explosive devices found and neutralised.

Israel has an all new 'Iran will have nukes in fifteen minutes' excuse, but it hasn't taken much to utterly shred it. Right, so Israel has rolled out another warning about Iran, delivered with that familiar mix of urgency and certainty that always seems to arrive before anyone checks whether the facts can actually stand up. And if you’ve been paying attention over the years, or even just this year given what happened back in June, you’ll recognise the rhythm before you even get to the detail, because every time Israel hits a political wall or the old talking points lose their force, a fresh threat from Tehran is suddenly pushed into the spotlight. Iran runs its drills, Israel amplifies them, Western outlets repeat the framing, and the whole thing lands as if we’re meant to forget how many times the script has already been rewritten. So rather than take the latest alarm at face value, it’s worth looking at how Israel is shaping the danger, what it’s leaving out, and why their Iran story keeps getting bigger every time the evidence actually gets thinner. Right, so Israel is pushing a new panic story about Iran and pretending it’s intelligence rather than messaging, and you can see the shape of it the moment you look at the numbers they’ve chosen. They’re saying Iran plans to fire two thousand missiles at once the next time the two countries clash, a figure delivered with the same straight face they used when they insisted Iran would have a nuclear bomb within weeks, and when you strip out all of their theatrics here, it’s the same pattern all over again. Israel reaches for the most frightening headline it can manufacture because it is relying on the public not stopping to ask the basic questions: what capability are you talking about, who confirmed it, and why are you saying it now? It lands as a story written for people who won’t check, because anyone who does check quickly discovers it’s not just exaggerated but structurally impossible on the facts we have. Here’s what we actually know. It has reported that Israeli officials are now telling journalists that Iran intends to build the capacity for a two-thousand-missile barrage in the next conflict, and they are presenting this as a military assessment rather than a political narrative. But when you cross-reference this with the technical analysis from the people who actually study these missile programmes, you hit a wall immediately, because Iran does not have the infrastructure for a salvo on that scale.

The debate over the exact role Israel played on October 7th has blown apart again as the guy charged with finding the hostages speaks out. Right, so they told you it was the most moral army in history. They told you they were doing everything, everything, to bring the hostages home. They hung the yellow ribbons and they made the solemn vows. And then the man Netanyahu’s regime put in charge of actually finding those hostages, a retired major general named Nitzan Alon, sat down and explained how it really works. He said most of the Israelis killed in Jabalia were killed by Israeli fire. He said they started with “hostages first” and then chose a different path. He said the rescued were more afraid of their rescuers’ bombs than their captors. So let’s be clear about the story they’re selling. It’s not a rescue mission that went wrong. It’s a military doctrine that worked exactly as designed, and the design was always to sacrifice the saved to prove you can’t be beaten. The lie isn’t in the error. the contradiction is in the objective. Right, so the story of what happened in Gaza after October 7th is not a story of Hamas outsmarting Israel. It’s not a story of intelligence failure alone, claims for or against on that depending on whether you take Israel’s word for that or the likes of Egypt who said they supplied said intelligence. It’s a story of a state’s doctrine allegedly sacrificing its own people, the hostages Hamas took. It’s a story we’ve heard before, but now with another voice speaking up on this, seemingly now confirmed by the man they put in charge of finding them. Nitzan Alon, the retired major general they appointed as the hostage and missing persons coordinator, has sat down and said the quiet part out loud. He’s confirmed that most of the Israeli captives killed in the Jabalia refugee camp were killed by Israeli fire. Not by Hamas. By the Israeli military. By the bombs and the shells sent in to destroy Hamas, which ended up destroying the people they were supposedly there to save. He says they started with a “hostages first” policy. That was the public promise, the thing they told the families, the banner they hung over the whole operation. Bring them home. But Alon says they chose a different path. They pivoted. The priority became dismantling Hamas, and the hostages became, functionally, expendable within that calculation.

Israel thought an opportunistic assault on UNRWA over unpaid taxes would put them in their place. It's not worked out well for them. Right, so Israel’s latest stunt - storming the UNRWA offices in East Jerusalem, cutting communications, and raising its own flag - isn’t about overdue bills or taxes. That’s the official line, but we’re not here for Israel’s script. This was a test of a much bigger lie: that Israel operates within the rules, that UN protections matter, and that international law is anything more than a nice idea for when it’s convenient. So let’s cut to the chase here. Israel doesn’t just want to control land. It wants to erase the people who’ve been living in limbo for decades, whose refugee status won’t quietly disappear, no matter how many flags you replace or how many schools you close. This isn’t about aid. This is about closing a legal file without ever having to face the music for what’s been taken. And as usual, the world watches, but it doesn't move. Welcome to the new normal. Right, so Israel has entered the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in East Jerusalem, cut communications, seized equipment, removed the UN flag, raised its own, and told the world this was a routine matter of municipal enforcement. That is the sequence of events as they occurred. A state has acted directly against a UN agency operating on occupied territory and has done so by asserting domestic authority over international protection. The insistence that nothing extraordinary has happened is the first warning sign, because power only works this hard to normalise an act when it knows it has crossed a boundary it would rather not name. This was not a clerical dispute that can be tidied away later, and it was not a misunderstanding between bureaucracies. It was a deliberate intervention, carried out openly, designed to test whether UN protection still has any force when it collides with a state determined to escape obligation. UNRWA is not a peripheral organisation that has wandered into controversy by accident. It exists at the core of the unresolved Palestinian refugee question, and it does so not through slogans or speeches but through administration. UNRWA registers refugees, maintains records, and sustains the legal fact that displacement has not been resolved simply because decades have passed. That function matters far more than any individual service it delivers. It anchors obligations that do not depend on Israel’s goodwill, donor sentiment, or the political fashions of the moment. As long as UNRWA exists, the refugee question remains legally unfinished, and that unfinished status is precisely what Israel has spent decades trying to eliminate without conceding return, restitution, or accountability.

Labour Migration MInister Mike Tapp has announced the need to investigate links between race and grooming gangs - but there aren't any, so why do this? Right, so there’s a particular move politicians make when they know the evidence isn’t on their side but they fancy sounding tough anyway. They don’t make a claim outright, that would be risky. Instead, they “ask the question”. They talk about “links”. They gesture vaguely at ethnicity, culture, religion, and then act offended when anyone points out what they’ve just done. That is exactly what happened here. Migration Minister Mike Tapp spoke to GB News, floated the idea of racial links to grooming gangs before any inquiry had even started, and Labour by inference, must stand behind it. Not because the evidence supports it — it doesn’t — but because the framing does useful work. It shifts attention away from institutional failure and onto identity. And when Green Party Deputy Leader Mothin Ali said, plainly, that there is no racial link, he didn’t start a culture war. He exposed one. And what followed wasn’t debate. It was proof. Right, so there is no evidenced racial causation here, and Labour should know that from the inquiry record, because the British state has spent more than a decade commissioning inquiries, reviews, inspections and national investigations into organised child sexual exploitation, and every single one of them has reached the same core conclusion. Abuse persists because institutions fail. Police fail. Councils fail. Prosecutors fail. Safeguarding systems fail. Ethnicity does not cause those failures, and ethnicity is not supported as a causal explanation for the crime by the inquiry record. That is the record. That is the baseline. And everything that has happened since Mike Tapp chose to speak to GB News and talk about “identifying links” between ethnicity, religion, culture and child rape is a departure from that baseline, not an extension of it. This did not begin as a research question. It began as a framing choice. Mike Tapp is not an anonymous commentator or a freelance pundit. He is the Migration Minister, speaking in his official capacity, invoking the authority of the Home Office. That matters, because when ministers speak, they do not merely describe reality. They shape it. They signal what is legitimate to suspect, what is acceptable to say, and what will be defended when the consequences arrive. In this case, the consequences arrived quickly, in exactly the way the inquiry record warns happens when you racialise the frame.

Itamar Ben Gvir might have been acting like the cat who got the execution cream, but no amount of noose lapel pins can save his bill it seems... Right, so he turns up in the Knesset with a gold noose pinned to his chest, grinning like he’s reinvented justice, and for a moment you’d think the only thing standing between Itamar ben Gvir and a functioning execution chamber is the will to hurry up and build one. But scratch it, just slightly, and the whole performance falls apart. Because while he’s waving props and promising a Palestinians-only death penalty delivered by lethal injection, the people he actually needs to make that threat real - Israel’s doctors - have already shut the door on him. They’ve said no. They’ve said it publicly, professionally, unequivocally, because their ethics – yes, there is such a thing as medical ethics in Israel - ban them from taking part in executions and they’re not about to throw away their licences for him. So here he is, selling a punishment the state can’t physically carry out, he’s claiming he’s got 100 doctors who will, but conspicuously hasn’t proven it, so you can see the cracks running through this whole charade before he even opens his whacking great mouth. Right, so it says everything about the state of Israeli politics that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir walked into the Knesset wearing a gold noose on his suit like he was launching a brand. He called it a symbol of justice, a symbol of deterrence, a symbol of what he thinks Palestinians should expect once his new death-penalty bill becomes law. And even before he opened his mouth, even before he started rehearsing the lines about terror and revenge and “no more releases,” his plan was already collapsing in real time. Because it wasn’t long before anyone who actually understands how a death-penalty system works could see the hole running straight through the centre of his plan, and the people who sit at the heart of it - the Israeli Medical Association, represented publicly by its chair Professor Zion Hagay - who wasted no time pointing it out. A state can pass a death-penalty bill. But it cannot kill without doctors. And Israel’s doctors have said no. The law Ben-Gvir is pushing is not a general reinstatement of capital punishment. It is a targeted law aimed specifically at Palestinians convicted of killing Israeli Jews in attacks labelled as terrorism.

Israel has been caught spying on US troops stationed near Gaza as part of Trump's joke a peace plan but it's not exactly the first time... Right, so here’s the strange thing about this latest “shock” out of Israel: people are acting like the surveillance of US troops at a base in Kiryat Gat is some wild new departure, when the truth is it fits so neatly into Israel’s long habit of spying on the very countries keeping it afloat that you almost wonder why anyone’s surprised. A US general has had to pull an Israeli counterpart aside and tell him the recording has to stop, staff are warning each other to keep their voices down, and Israel is waving it all off as absurd, which is exactly how they always respond when the evidence gets too close for comfort. So I’ll tell you what this really is. It isn’t a scandal because it happened. It’s a scandal because it’s happened before, and everybody in Washington still pretends it won’t happen again. Right, so Israel has been accused of spying on US troops operating out of a base in Kiryat Gat, and the first thing to understand is that the shock is performative because none of this behaviour is new, none of it is surprising, and none of it stands apart from a long, well-documented pattern of Israeli intelligence targeting the very states that keep it armed, funded, and politically protected. What’s different this time is the location, the timing, the mission those US troops are on, and the fact that the leak has come from inside the American command rather than from a political briefing in Washington. A US-run Civil-Military Coordination Centre, or CMCC, has been set up inside Israel, close to the Gaza border, to monitor the ceasefire, coordinate humanitarian access, and begin the slow, bureaucratic work of shaping what Gaza’s administration will look like under the framework inherited from the Trump plan. Inside that base, according to staff, Israel is reported to have been recording meetings, openly and covertly. That includes discussions between American officers and humanitarian agencies, which is already politically dangerous because this is the one area of the conflict where Israel wants as little outside scrutiny as possible, and when those recordings became obvious enough that staff started raising the alarm, the American commander, Lieutenant General Patrick Frank, summoned his Israeli counterpart and told him the recording had to stop.

Starmer pushed a terror story he thought would hold, but now the Filton trial is putting real pressure on the line he built. Right, so you know something’s gone very wrong in British politics when a single trial in Woolwich ends up carrying more political weight than half the speeches coming out of Westminster, yet here we are, watching a government that’s spent the year rebranding protest as extremism suddenly pretending it has nothing to do with the noise now swirling around the Filton case. Six people are on trial, the evidence belongs to the jury, and that’s where the line should sit, but the state keeps dragging the whole thing into its national-security fairytale because it needs the public thinking this is bigger than a break-in. And when ministers talk louder than the facts, you can see the real story forming: not what’s happening in court, but what the government wants the country to believe is happening. And that’s where the trouble starts. Right, so you look at this Filton trial and the first thing you have to do, before you get pulled into the noise around it, is remind yourself what is actually happening here, because it’s very easy to get swept up in the government’s storyline and forget that this is a live criminal case with a jury sitting in judgement and that means the rest of us have to keep a strict line between what’s happening in court and the politics being built around it. Six defendants are on trial over the break-in at the Elbit Systems factory in Filton on the sixth of August last year, and one of them is facing an additional charge of grievous bodily harm, and all of that belongs entirely to the court. The evidence belongs to the court. The verdict belongs to the court. And anything that even sniffs of speculation about guilt or innocence is off-limits, and rightly so. What the rest of us can talk about, though, and what has become impossible to ignore, is the political weather this trial is sitting inside, because it tells you more about the direction of the British state right now than any single event has in a long time, and you can see it when you step back and look at how ministers have been talking about this case long before a jury ever heard a word of evidence. Because the government has already decided what this trial means for them politically. They decided it the moment they proscribed Palestine Action earlier this year and the Filton break-in became one of the examples they kept pointing to whenever they wanted to make the case that Britain is under threat from a new kind of domestic extremism. Protest wasn’t enough for them. Direct action wasn’t enough.

For all of Friedrich Merz's fawning towards Israel, he can promise as much loyalty & arms as he likes, but if nobody will deliver it for him... Right, so Germany’s government is still busy polishing its halo over Israel, parroting the same line about “unwavering support,” as if repetition might somehow justify it, but the country’s own national airline has just stepped in and quietly blown a hole straight through that performance. Lufthansa Cargo has suspended all military and security-related shipments to and from Israel, citing export-control law and sanctions that make the route “impossible independent of routing,” and they dropped that little bombshell at the exact moment the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrived in Tel Aviv to promise more loyalty. When the politics says yes and the logistics say absolutely not, it’s the logistics that win, and the German government is left looking like inexcusable excuse makers yet again. Right, so we’re watching a German government fall over itself to prove unwavering loyalty to Israel, and at the exact same moment, we’re watching one of the country’s most recognisable institutions quietly step back and refuse to enable that loyalty in any practical sense. That’s the story here, and it doesn’t need dramatic framing because the facts already do the heavy lifting. A national airline has suspended all transport of military and security-related cargo to and from Israel, and the move wasn’t announced from a moral podium or a political stage. It was delivered as a compliance notice, grounded in export-control law, citing the UK export system as the trigger, and presented as a logistical inevitability rather than a choice. The first thing to grasp, is that Lufthansa’s decision isn’t just a corporate decision. It lands like a judgement on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s administration too. You cannot stand on a podium promising unconditional support for Israel when your own freight carrier has effectively stopped the supply line. It doesn’t matter how many speeches get written or how many flag-waving pictures get taken, or how low you bow and scrape to a state that has spent two years committing genocide in Gaza. Support is measured in capability, not sentiment. If you can’t move the equipment, you can’t maintain the policy. And right now, Germany can’t. The airline has made it clear that all military and security-related goods are blocked, independent of routing.

While Ben Gvir poses with a noose shaped lapel pin, record numbers of prison fatalities on his watch is hitting Israel hard. Right, so Itamar Ben Gvir turning up to the Knesset in a bright yellow noose pin is one of those moments where the performance finally catches up with the policy isn’t it? Because you do not need to be a legal scholar to see what a man is telling you when he walks into a parliamentary committee dressed like the executioner while more than a hundred Palestinian detainees have died on his watch in detention. You do not need insider briefings to understand what it means when he praises soldiers who shoot surrendered men in Jenin and then tries to promote the officer responsible. And you certainly do not need a UN mandate to work out why states are starting to bar him from entering their borders. You just have to look at the noose and look at the bodies and ask why anyone is still pretending the two things are not connected. He might want to put a noose around the neck of Palestinians, but his antics, going consistently without meaningful censure are placing it around the neck of Israel itself instead. Right, so Ben Gvir walking into the Knesset wearing a bright yellow noose pin is not a one-off stunt, it is the straightest expression yet of what he is doing with the carceral system he controls, and of what the Israeli state is now prepared to put in plain sight. He and his Otzma Yehudit colleagues sit on the National Security Committee with little nooses on their lapels while they debate a bill that would formalise the death penalty – but only for Palestinians - on so-called “nationalistic” grounds, and he sits there cheerfully explaining that hanging is one of several options, along with the electric chair and lethal injection.