October 7, 2023, caught Israel off guard. That day, Hamas fighters and other terrorist militias overcame Gaza's fortified border and launched an attack in Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to the small Palestinian territory. The experience of such vulnerability led to a trauma still being felt in Israel today. On October 8, 2023, Israel's government launched an attack on Gaza, and the two years since have been horrific for Palestinians in the enclave.
On Monday afternoon, a few hours before the first ferocious attacks of Israel's ground offensive in Gaza City made buildings tremble as far away as Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Jerusalem for an economics conference. With his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, sitting in the front row, Netanyahu took the stage, looking a little peeved, and berated the event's organizers for muddling his slide show.
Norway is voting on Monday to elect its next parliament in what is expected to be a close race between a centre-left bloc led by the incumbent Labour Party and a centre-right bloc dominated by the populist Progress Party and Conservatives. Among the issues that could decide the vote are inequality and taxation, as well as growing controversy surrounding Norway's sovereign wealth fund, which is facing scrutiny domestically and internationally over its investment in companies tied to Israel, amid the war on Gaza.
For Nick Maynard, a British doctor who has volunteered in Gaza several times, the United Kingdom's silence in action is a form of the government's complicity in Israel's genocide against Palestinians. As a wave of early autumn rain poured over London on Thursday, he painted a harrowing picture of the injuries he witnessed Israel inflict on children, through aerial bombardment or gunfire, or by the deliberate restriction of life-saving infant formula and medicine.