This is a seismic moment. Civilisation is being tested by a culture of death. Israel is meeting the challenge and will survive. Britain is going down, firing at Israel as it does so
July 23, 2025 14:58
The echoes of October 7 were unmistakeable and horrifying. For several days last week, the Druze of Suweida in southern Syria were subjected to a barbaric onslaught by government troops controlled by the new Syrian president, Abu Mohammed al Jolani, as well as attacks by Bedouins and other jihadists. An estimated 1,000 Druze as well as Christians were slaughtered. Men were beheaded, women raped, children shot in front of their parents. An elderly Druze man was burned alive in his wheelchair.
From all those who over the past 21 months have posed as driven by conscience to support the “oppressed” Arabs of Gaza, there was now only silence. There was no condemnation from the likes of Amnesty or – until several days after the massacres – Human Rights Watch that constantly flay Israel over fabricated crimes against humanity. There was muted protest from church bodies, even though a Christian pastor and his entire family of 20 were slaughtered.
Instead, there was outrage over the accidental damage done by the IDF to a Catholic church in Gaza, when shrapnel from a strike on a nearby terrorist target hit part of the church and tragically killed three people.
The new Pope shamefully misrepresented this as an “attack by the Israeli army on the Catholic Parish of the Holy Family in Gaza City, which as you know killed three Christians and gravely wounded others”. Yet on the deliberate slaughter of his Syrian co-religionists he is, so far, silent.
On the BBC and other media the Syrian atrocities were barely reported, with the attacks falsely characterised as “sectarian” battles between Bedouin and Druze. Israel, the only country to come to the defence of the Druze by attacking Syrian military targets, was portrayed as bombing them for no particular reason other than yet more Israeli aggression. The Syrian pogrom wasn’t allowed to interrupt the steady stream of anti-Israel libels about aid supplies to Gaza.
Almost every day, Hamas has claimed Israel is deliberately killing Gazans queuing for food. It is, in fact, mainly Hamas that’s been killing hundreds of them to prevent them from receiving the aid that threatens to bring about the terrorist group’s final defeat.
Where some Gazans have been killed by IDF fire, these were the few inadvertent casualties of warning shots fired to stop the Hamas-infiltrated Gazan crowds from attacking the Israeli troops guarding the aid sites. But the Hamas claims have been reported uncritically by the BBC and its ilk as true. Last week, the BBC’s Today programme trumpeted an interview with a British surgeon, Nick Maynard, who has been working in al Shifa and other hospitals in Gaza.
Maynard claimed that IDF soldiers were not only deliberately shooting Gazan children queuing for food but were choosing to target different body parts depending on the day of the week “almost as if a game was being played”. On Saturday, four boys had been admitted who had been shot in the testicles. This, he said, was clear evidence of Israeli targeting. This was the kind of macabre and ludicrous claim, presenting the Jews as simply demonic, that normally issues from the psychotic mouths of Hamas. How did Maynard know the injuries he was treating were caused by the IDF and not Hamas? He said he trusted the Gazans who had told him.
In January last year, Maynard told the Telegraph that he had never seen any evidence of Hamas activity in al Shifa hospital. Yet last year the IDF arrested more than 500 people at al Shifa who belonged to Hamas or other terror groups. One of these, the Islamic Jihad spokesman Tariq Salami Otha Abu Shlouf, told his interrogators that he had used the hospital compound and medical equipment for terrorist purposes.
On Monday, Today ran in its key 08.10am slot another item about Gaza which, having assembled yet more distortions about the IDF killing Gazans queuing for flour, declared that the only way to stop the suffering of the Gazans was to recognise a Palestine state. Thus the BBC is the puppet dancing at the end of the Hamas string.
The documentary October 8 refers to a meeting in 1993 in a Philadelphia hotel monitored by the FBI in which 25 senior Hamas operatives met to discuss how to strengthen “activism for Palestine” in America by infiltrating American media outlets, universities and research centres. To make Hamas palatable to Americans, they would frame it in terms of “apartheid and oppression” and address Americans “from a position of rights and justice”.
This strategy was adopted throughout the West. Instead of fighting such mind-bending indoctrination, the political class has embraced it.
On Monday, the British government, along with 27 other Western countries, published a preposterous denunciation of Israel for the “inhumane killing” of Gazans seeking aid and denying “essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population”. This despite Israel facilitating the delivery of thousands of tonnes of aid and millions of meals to Gazans rather than allowing Hamas to steal it. And, of course, they threw in the contested claim of “settler violence”.
This is a seismic moment. Civilisation is being tested by a culture of death. Israel is meeting the challenge and will survive. Britain is going down, firing at Israel as it does so.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times
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