“Oct 7 2023”

It’s eerie. Gaza 2025 and Berlin 1945 are so uncannily alike.

It’s not just the ruins everywhere. What grabs and shakes your attention are the executions.

In April 1945, the end of Nazi Germany was inescapable. The Red Army was smashing and raping its way westward towards Berlin. The Brits, the Americans, and the Canadians controlled the air, their armies had crossed the Rhine and broken through the Siegfried Line, and Patton was surging through Bavaria and nearing Czechoslovakia. The Nazi empire of death was being exposed to the world as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald fell into Allied hands. The end of the Third Reich could come any day.

On October 13, 2025, at Israel’s Knesset (Parliament) in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the company of US President Donald J. Trump, declared the war in Gaza over.

Oh, really? Sadly, the probability of an enduring peace with Hamas or allied Islamists appears close to zero. After all, in Netanyahu’s words, Israel is dealing with “monsters.”

Britain’s National Health Service has become a hotbed of anti-Semitism. It seems nearly every week brings a new case of an NHS doctor expressing foul views about Jews. Worse, these views seem to be expressed with impunity. The problem is now so serious that the health secretary, Wes Streeting, has vowed to overhaul the UK’s medical regulator to ‘root out the evil of racism’ from the NHS.

A report in The Times cites the case of Rahmeh Aladwan, a trainee doctor from Manchester. In September, she faced the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal Service (MPTS) for describing the Royal Free Hospital in north London as a ‘Jewish supremacy cesspit’. She also said that the Holocaust was a ‘fabricated victim narrative’ and described the terrorists who carried out the 7 October 2023 pogrom as ‘martyrs’ who were repelling ‘foreign Jews’. According to The Times, she was even filmed making a ‘throat-slit gesture’ towards a group of Jews.

US President Donald Trump’s plan for ending the Hamas-Israel war states that “Gaza will be a de-radicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.” His plan also stipulates that “Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough” and that “once all [Israeli] hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty.”

Although Hamas has released the 20 living hostages and, since the announcement of Trump’s plan in early October, has handed over the bodies of some of the fallen, the Gaza Strip remains anything but a “de-radicalized terror-free zone.”

President Donald Trump set himself a grueling pace last weekend to ensure his fragile peace plan’s opening performance went off without a hitch. His mini-tour began with a twelve-hour flight to Israel, where he met with the hostage families and delivered a major address to the Knesset. This was followed by an air hop to another major address at a world leaders’ meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh. Factor in the usual schmoozing and glad-handing between formalities; it had to be a tiring day. Yet Trump looked as peppy at the end of his Middle East excursion as at the beginning.

The ban on away-fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv football club coming to Birmingham next month to watch their team play Aston Villa has nothing to do with football. It’s about the UK government and police surrendering the safety of Britain’s Jewish community to a mob that believes it now has Israel and the Jews inexorably in its sights.

It also demonstrates something to which I have been drawing attention for years — and was indeed the first person to do so — that the British state is losing a battle against Islamic domination that it has been refusing even to acknowledge it is facing and that it must fight.

Maccabi fans are being excluded from the match in response to a petition by the independent MPs Ayoub Khan and the disgraced former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn

Not long before he was shot dead by one of the gangs of Gaza, Saleh al-Jafarawi had identified the Hamas internal security forces whose tentacles were spreading out across the territory.

Wearing black baseball caps embroidered with gold and carrying assault rifles as they were stationed from Gaza City in the north to Khan Yunis in the south, the patrols were a sign that Hamas was ready to crush any existential and internal threat.

Three days after posting images of the security forces, Jafarawi, a journalist, was killed by an armed militia, caught in the crossfire as Hamas wrought revenge on gangs that dared to challenge it. A few days after that came the first public executions of men that Hamas claimed were plotting to overthrow the militant group that has ruled by fear since 2007.

October 13, 2025, marks a milestone in the Middle East.

Following President Trump’s facilitation of a peace deal and ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, hostages held by Hamas have been released and returned to their families after two years of captivity in exchange for Palestinian terrorist prisoners. The cessation of hostilities between Israel and Gaza has brought relief to millions affected by the conflict.

One might expect such a development to unite people across the political spectrum in celebration. But the response has been mixed.

Hamas offered starving hostages more food if they converted to Islam — and they refused, according to statements by families of some of the 20 living hostages who were returned to Israel earlier this week.