The aid, which consists of water, rice, cooking oil, flour, tinned goods and baby formula, will support the people of Gaza.
The Defence Secretary authorised the airdrop following an assessed reduction in threat to the military mission and risk to civilians.
An RAF A400M flew from Amman, Jordan to airdrop this aid along the northern coastline of Gaza, as part of the Jordanian-led international aid mission. UK personnel worked closely with the Royal Jordanian Air Force to plan and conduct this mission.
Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said:
“The UK has already tripled our aid budget to Gaza, but we want to go further in order to reduce human suffering. Today’s airdrop has provided a further way to deliver humanitarian support and I thank the RAF personnel involved in this essential mission, as well as our Jordanian partners for their leadership.
The hell that was unleashed by the October 7th Hamas attack has led to wide-scale innocent loss of life. The UK’s goal is to use every route possible to deliver life-saving aid, whether that is by road, air or new routes via the sea. We also continue to call on Israel to provide port access and open more land crossings in order to increase incoming aid deliveries to Gaza.”
The Ministry of Defence say here that the A400M is a highly capable tactical and strategic airlift platform and today’s airdrop was its first ever mission delivering humanitarian aid by parachute.
“Both RAF and British Army personnel participated in the mission. The drop zones were surveyed before and during the airdrop to ensure aid was delivered directly to civilians.
This airdrop is part of ongoing UK efforts to provide life-saving humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza and follows recent land deliveries of 2,000 tonnes of UK food aid to feed more than 275,000 people and thousands of UK-funded blankets, tents and other relief items, as well as the establishment of a full UK-funded field hospital in Gaza run by British charity UK-Med. The UK remains committed to ensuring aid reaches those who need it most, as Palestinians continue to face a devastating and growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
Hi folks hope all is well.
Great to see the UK demonstrating once more stepping up at the same time main stream media ridicules our military saying how useless it is!
I thought we were also sending aid via RFA Lyme Bay and RFA Argus? Of course they may be in process of replenishment and going back. There is little information on this and is now out of date. The only information today is an RAF air drop.
Cheers
George
I have grave doubts about airdrops in situations like this. Unless you control or know that someone reliable has control on the ground, you can actually make things worse. Either the likes of Hamas or similar will take control of the goods, or outright anarchy (where sometimes more goods are destroyed by those it is intended for than actually ends up where it should). Better to come in by sea or land.
Aid to terrorist…..whatever next, why dont we airdrop them some AK and C4 as well?
I was being serious. Have a look at what happens to UN supply trucks. Quite often they get mobbed & stripped before they get anywhere near where they are trying to get to. If you are not careful, you will actually kill more people than you save. Desperate people do desperate things. People being trampled to death in emergency situations is nothing new. People using brute force to obtain scarce resources is nothing new. If you have to kill a few people to control the mobs, so be it. You will save more in the long run. Without control you have anarchy & anarchy always favours the strong over the weak.
Great to see some positive comments for a change, it’s Not just the mainstream media George, read half the comments on here you think that the UK has the most inept under equipped tiny military force in the world and is on the cusp of being invaded at any second.
Navy Lookout speculated Argus & Lyme Bay were transiting Bab-al-Mandab escorted by HMS Diamond. Marine trackers had them going south through the Suez Canal about two weeks ago.
As an update: Lyme Bay and Argus [LRG(S)] exercised with the India Navy in the Arabian Sea and have now arrived in Kattupalli, India, just north of Chennai, for maintenance.
Hi Jon, thanks for the update. Yes I had seen this yesterday with an explanation that their whereabouts was kept secret for obvious reasons. Apparently protection from HMS Diamond and two US Destroyers en route.
Cheers
George
i wonder if they’ll whine and complain and get mad that the MREs aren’t a 5 star gourmet meal like they did with american ones. helping people in that part of the world always seems to backfire.
Hopefully we airdropped sausages, bacon, pork pie…. I wonder if it was Halal?
All of that aid will be gobbled up by Hamas. A complete and utter waste.
If the left want to be bleeding hearters, I’d rather they apologised for some imperial atrocities a century ago. It’d just be words and wouldn’t affect taxpayers. It would annoy ordinary people, but wouldn’t involve aid being sent to some of the nastiest people on the planet. Some student might even move on, feeling they’d done their bit to atone or whatever.
I am utterly sickened by what I’m seeing here. We know Hamas have mass support, we know what Hamas do to innocent people. We know what happened to that poor woman (a PEACE ACTIVIST for crying out loud!) who was kidnapped, tortured, and mutilated to death, and now we’re being all soft-hearted to the people that did it.
The hypocrisy is staggering here. It is immoral. It is evil. They do not deserve one penny of aid.
DON’T say “It’s just flour and basic foodstuffs”! Hamas fighters on the brink of starving will use it to stay alive, meaning more Israelis are killed. If you think otherwise then you really really need to look at yourself.
If we’re supposed to say that the efforts taken by the British to quell the India mutiny were of their time and should not be critcised, then the same applies here. An uprising by a murderous movement that has targetted innocent women and children. End of. I don’t care how much “times have changed”. At the end of the day, if someone tries to act like a stone-age savage, then we’re back in the stone ages and should behave as such to defend ourselves. If you think otherwise, then I invite you to look at that woman’s body. Then look at it again. KEEP looking until it enters your thick narcissistic skull that these “freedom fighters” are some of the nastiest people on the planet.
Heck, there were Indian mutineers that were BETTER than this. Read up on the Gwalior contingent. Read up on mutineers that escorted families away from Meerut. Back then we slaughtered them all regardless of their behaviour. Now? We send aid. I find it difficult to express how upsetting it is to see us directly supporting these evil men whilst calling for Israel to stop trying to defend themselves.
Difference is after the Indian Mutiny the British government actually listened to peoples justified complaints leading to the nationalisation of the east India company and the gradual move towards Indian independence.
Netanyahu is offering no such future. He said the two state solution is dead and refuses to offer Palestinians Israeli citizenship .
So where do people go?
It’s Netanyahu who will go. The two state solution is the only game in town, even if neither side accepts it at the moment.
Yes I agree
The two-state solution idea was killed off years ago by both the PLO and then by Hamas. They simply are not willing to share a homeland with people of Jewish faith and want them all gone.
In short, this conflict is all about religious/cultural supremacy,
Yes, but what solution can there be beyond two state?
Before a two-state solution can happen the people in the West bank and Gaza, need to accept that Israel exists and is not going to go away. Then Hamas must surrender its arms . at that point discussions can begin.
Without those conditions you can expect continuous conflict.
Bringer of facts wrote:
“”Before a two-state solution can happen the people in the West bank and Gaza, need to accept that Israel exists and is not going to go away.””
And there stands the cornerstone of the quagmire that is the Israel question. and that if we look back in time using factual history and not revisionist history we find that actually Israel has gone above and beyond in which to seek peace. Yes , some will sneer and mock what I have just written, but ask yourself which one of you has actually got off your arse and done your own homework in looking into the : ”What, Why and When”
For example part of the remit of the Balfore agreement was for the Palestinians to get their own homeland and they did, its called ‘Jordan’ (I’ve been, nice country, might visit again in which to visit their tank museum) it constitutes 8/10th of the contested area and it was born in 1921 as the Palestinian homeland, its constitution was written in 1928 and enshrined in law that no Jews could live or own property in the country (Whilst since repealed no Jews live in the country)
In 1948 on the birth of Israel, it was invaded by 7 Arab nations , who informed the Palestinians in the path of their advancing armies to leave the area, go and live with family until they had finished pushing the Jew into the sea. Where do you think the adage “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be free” cones from? Problem was, the Arabs lost. Except in Gaza (occupied by Egypt) West Bank (occupied by Jordan, which as its constitution forbade Jews from living there went out of its way to remove all Jews from the West bank and East Jerusalem , they even removed Jewish graveyards using gravestones as urinals)
The Arabs tried setting up round 2 in 1967, problem was Israel got in the first punch, which is why that war lasted 6 days. But it gets better, Israel offered to hand back all the territory it had captured in return for recognition and peace, the Arab league replied with the infamous Khartoum Resolution of The Three Noes: No peace with Israel, No negotiation with Israel, No recognition of Israel.
In 1973 they tried again with round 3, based on the premise, that they recapture the Sinai and the Golan heights , sue for a UN ceasefire, consolidate their positions and a few years down the line start over again, but this time a lot closer to Israel, but they got greedy and overstretched their advances and were punished by Israel which ended up taking more land than they did in 1973. In turn that war led to a peace deal with Egypt, which saw Sadat assassinated in Oct 1981 by Islamists not happy with that peace deal.
Terror attacks from Lebanon resulted in the invasion of Lebanon, attacks inside Israel with the first and second intifada saw Israel build a huge wall separating Jewish and Palestinian areas. In 2005 Israel did a deal with the PLA in which to end the Second Intifada , hand back Gaza and the West Bank in exchange for peace. Israel carried out the first part by forcibly removing 10000 Jews living in Gaza and handing it back to the Palestinians, which saw Hamas attack Israel in 2006 which saw the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and the end of any chance of the west bank getting handed back (The main reason here was Ariel Sharon the main driver of the peace deal suffered a stroke in Dec 2005, followed by a bigger one in Jan 06 and his replacement Ehud Olmert simply wasn’t up to the task of continuing that project.)
So in a nutshell Hamas scuppered any chance of a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians because politically it would have seen the support they had gained (winning the last elections) fall in favour of the party (Fatah) which had won them actual independence freedom and statehood.
So to last Oct, Israel was on the cusp of signing a peace deal with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and as we saw, Hamas couldn’t allow that, as at a stroke they would lose a lot of support.
So in a nutshell, Hamas uses the Islamic hatred of Judaism in which to further its own political needs and for some very strange reason the vast majority of the world refuses to see that.
A one state solution called Israel.
Correct
I say to the “bleeding heart” protestors who are regularly marching through our cities:
Do something practical with your energy, go to Gaza and deliver some aid by hand …. and I bet you won’t be thanked or welcomed especially if you are not Muslim.
I completely agree, frankly these people are evil and if there was a box to check between sending my tax to biscuits for animals or bombs for the IDF to drop on them – the the IDF would have every penny, and more.
The sickening thing is that if this were ANY other democracy, fighting dictatorships, mass murderers, religious zealots, frankly stone age animals – we would be arming and supporting them to the utmost of our ability, and more.
We can send arms to Ukraine (let’s be honest, we want them to beat Russia, , although they sadly won’t),but we were prepared to arm some of the biggest gangsters in the world because it suited us, but we won’t support a democracy (called Israel) with its hands tied behind its back fighting the war that we SHOULD be fighting as a sister democracy to the utmost of our ability and more.
It does not matter whether you are normal, gay, lesbian, autistic, disabled, identify as a squirrel, Israel is on your side – the people they are fighting would march you up to the top of the nearest high rise and throw you off the top.
The hypocrisy is sickening and coupled with the national humiliation of watching that scum, and I mean scum, occupy London each week, is frankly, the low point of our country in my life time.(I was born after Suez but well remember the Falklands being invaded).
For the record,I am not Jewish,I have no Jewish family, in fact I have a grandfather who was very close to the King David Hotel bomb, it does not matter, these people are our people, they are the west, they are democracy, due process, the rule of law, equality, human dignity, we should not even write their names on the same piece of paper as the animals they are fighting. Go Israel.
I’m glad that sleepy Joe is finally waking up at the UN and maybe coming to the conclusion that Israel is neither a US ally or its friend.
Israel has been adept at crafting the US political narrative since 1948 however Netanyahu appears increasingly politically tone deaf in US politics and Israel has lost the support now of the other four members of the UNSC.
Perhaps Old Joe can ask American other great ally the Republic of Ireland to do some supply drops next into Gaza.
Hopefully Hamas can be got rid of and Gaza can move forward with a properly elected democratic government that can actually deliver a two state solution.
“Israel is neither a US ally or its friend”
Well, who is then?
Israel the US and Europe have more in common culturally than any other countries in that region. So of course they are going to be allies
BTW They do not want democracy, because that is seen as Western culture, they want Sharia, or a combination of that and traditional “Councils of elders”.
Compare the number of soldiers that Estonia has sent and lost in US operations with the number Israel has?
That’s probably the best metric of who is an is not an ally.
Who is “they”, 2 million people living in Gaza under an authoritarian unelected regime yet somehow you managed to collect strong data on what the people of Gaza want i presume.
How did you manage that? Do tell?
I could not even tell you what Americans want and they have 50 polls a day. Your methods are obviously superior to the rest of us please share your source.
You only have to study the regions history.
Our cultures are not the same our values are not the same.
It is not difficult to figure this out
What we call democracy is a Western concept, it is not compatible with many middle-eastern traditions, which are based on patriarchy and Islamic jurisprudence.
Except Israel, which is a democracy.
Well, I was hoping that anyone who read my last 2 comments would realise I was excluding Israel and talking about the Arab majority in the region.
So…the biggest democracy in the world is where? Actually, “Brown people” part of my family is “Brown” understand one man / one woman one vote, as do people in Malaya, Pakistan, Singapore, Bali , . It is not the location that is the problem.
JIM wrote:
“”Who is “they”, 2 million people living in Gaza under an authoritarian unelected regime yet somehow you managed to collect strong data on what the people of Gaza want i presume.
How did you manage that? Do tell?””
The problem the Western liberal world refuses to accept is that the issue with Gaza is simply part of a much larger (and growing) multi-facetted one. Where the diktats of faith is been enforced on others who not only have no say, but who are silenced if they object and the irony here is, its got nothing to do with religion, rather it’s about control by bigots who use religion in which to bully and intimidate the faithful to back their cause and in which to allow them to play the victim card at non-Muslims.
We see that in play here in the UK, why only yesterday the Khan report was released (ive downloaded it, but at 146 pages its something of a read) regards the intimidation used by Muslims against the Batley Grammar School teacher. (My older brother was actually the first non-white person to attend Batley Grammar, hence my interest)
We saw it on video where a Muslim shop keeper in Bradford was physically attacked by the faithful last month for selling coke cola in his kebab stop.
We saw it this morning when the Palestinian crowd decided to blockade Instro Precision in Sandwich Kent which supplies Optics for military use.
Back to West Yorkshire and Kirklees, the non-Islamic population protested the other year when it was revealed that their school children were been fed halal meat at schools. The answer by Council Leader Shabir Pandor accused those campaigning for the policy to be reversed of using animal welfare as tool to stir up racial hatred. He said: “This debate has been generated deliberately on the back of creating divisions, hatred and putting communities against one another.
In Ireland the other year there a huge outcry when Dr Ali Selim spokesman for the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland on national TV advocated for FGM to be legalised if carried out by a doctor.
We see similar chip, chipping away of European culture and of hard won safeguards all in the name of not offending Muslims, but the problem there is Governments, organisations and people have started to go out of their way in which to ensure they placate the intolerance we see creeping into our lives. Just look at how the police frogmarched a white down syndrome boy with his mother into a packed mosque in Wakefield after he scuffed his own copy of the Koran in which to apologise last year (that’s also in the Khan report) yet they did nothing about the death threats he had received.
My niece is a police Sgt and the other year she stopped a car for speeding on seeing she was a Muslim, the lads demanded she let them go, she refused and upheld the law. That night my brothers (her dad) hers and our sisters cars had their windows smashed. I asked what happened next, he sorted it by getting the local mosque to deal with it. Why? It’s the Uk, we subscribe to the rule of law and not Sharia. And if this is the Uk, think what its like across the levant
Thanks for your well informed reply Farouk.
Maybe you should read the Palestinian polls made by Palestinians…
Or maybe you just have to listen to what they say about Jews.
So you forgetting all knowledge and weapons intel about Soviet and Russian weapons. Are you really that ignorant about the world?
You even probably have to thank Israel for Cold War not getting hot by Communists at start of 80’s. At least that is what a Czech general said, that the defeat of Syrians in 1981-1982 in air war made the most agressive generals in Soviet army stop pushing for a gamble against central Europe.
Lest we forget, the fledgling IDF conducted a terrorist campaign against British soldiers in Palestine in the late 1940s – no gratitude for the liberation of the concentration camps and creation of a Jewish homeland there! Indeed, the earliest Jewish defence forces were actually created by the British in early WWII: Orde Wingate was one of the founders.
In 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s government stopped all British arms exports to Israel during the IDF’s invasion of Lebanon: we actually had some influence in those days. Now we have none, and can merely send this token effort of food aid. I’m not against sending aid, but the IDF have to stop killing far too many non-combatants in the pursuit of its enemies, otherwise we’re trying to fill a leaky bucket.
The ‘hell’ that Grant Shapps is talking about has been created by the IDF in Gaza, as a direct act of vengeance for their failure to adequately protect their borders against a proven fanatical, ruthless and well-armed enemy. Minimum manning and happy thoughts aren’t a substitute for effective defence, anymore than they were in the undermanned Bar-Lev line on the East bank of the Suez Canal in 1973.
The IDF should have manned their strongpoints with a company of troops in each, constantly patrolled the gaps in between with heavily armed or armoured units, and have had artillery and reserve infantry units on immediate readiness to move- nothing less will do in this age of polarised human relations. The Hamas fighters should never have crossed the fenceline.
We in the Western Free World will also have to build up even greater defenses against our own implacably hostile enemy in the East: a mere 2% of GDP and hoping someone else will have their child serve in the UK’s Armed Forces isn’t going to cut it in this day and age.
It is significant that you talk about a war between UK and Jews but not the alliance of Israel and UK in Suez and much latter some cooperation in Cold War and after.
Well Margaret Thatcher had the Marxists in Foreign Office and the Business class allied themselves. The result of that brilliant policy is Palestinians being nothing more than a death cult when they could have been a Singapore or Hong Kong
The problem is culture.
The 1956 Suez Crisis proves my point: getting involved in the Middle East is a mug’s game for us. Notice that the EU countries are staying clear of this latest one.
Britain had to get involved in re-opening the Suez Canal in that earlier operation, much as we are keeping that important trade route open today. We allied ourselves with a former enemy then because the priority was to achieve that mission. Eight years is a long time in politics, so having Israel as an ally was a better option than having the Egyptians control world trade, particularly since their military had begun to be supplied by the USSR.
The Palestinian ‘Death Cult’ are winning right now: they made the Israelis react how they wanted them to (i.e. in the only way they know how), with the result that all Arabic countries once again have poor or hostile relations with Israel, and there is the added benefit to Hamas of rising anti-Semitism throughout the rest of the world.
Those people calling for a genocide of the Palestinian people in order for the IDF to achieve its mission are Netanyahu’s Useful Idiots, and those calling for ‘Palestine to be free’ (by a genocide of Israelis) are Hamas’ Useful Idiots.
In reality we’re all Hamas’ Useful Idiots, because we are the ones playing their game and losing. The only thing the UK will get out of this by taking the side of Israel is an increased Islamist terrorist threat towards our vulnerable civilian population. The sensible decision taken by our government in 1982 meant we didn’t have the divisiveness we are now experiencing in our country.
We had our own Middle East sponsored terrorist threat in those days, but we didn’t respond to that by turning Northern Ireland into a massive concentration camp, occasionally flattening parts of it with bombs in response to terrorist atrocities.
Even now we’re not hitting the Houthi insurgents that hard, although I can see we might have to if the ‘restless natives’ don’t calm down. That’s called Air Policing, like we did successfully in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan between the World Wars, and similarly over Iraq in the 1990s and up to 2003.
We should send an invoice to the Chinese government, who seem unable or unwilling to project their own military power in that region to safeguard their own shipping. Just telling the Houthis “We’re Chinese sailors: please don’t attack our vessel” isn’t any better a defence plan than the IDF had to protect the Gaza border fenceline on the 6th of October last year.
“The Palestinian ‘Death Cult’ are winning right now” curios definition of winning, on my TV they are having their ass handed to them, and rightly so.
Hamas’ mission was to turn the Arabic and Islamic world against Israel by bringing the destruction of Gaza and the murder of tens of thousands of non-combatants down upon them, using the IDF to do it for them. Everyone knows Israel’s response to attacks upon her territory are heavy-handed, and an atrocity on this scale would bring about a final reckoning with Gaza, or solution to the problem.
The rise in anti-Semitism and growing hatred of Israel amongst non- Arabic/Islamic people in the western world is an added bonus, not to mention that Israel’s actions are now being compared to those of N@zi Germany.
One can criticise the policies of the Israeli government without being anti-Semitic, but comparison of Israel’s policies or actions with N@zism is defined as anti-Semitic.
Mission accomplished.
Read what you wrote. You can’t conduct a terrorist campaign against soldiers, especially occupying ones. Terrorism is by definition (these days at least) conducted against civilians. Nor had Britain created a Jewish homeland at the time for which the IDF should be grateful. In fact we never did. We had promised it even before we gave autonomy of nearly 80% of the Palestinian Mandate to the Arabs in 1923 and full independance in 1946 when it became Jordan. We proposed further partition of the remaining land in 1947. Before that we (Neville Chamberlain) effectively opposed our own declaration, working against a Jewish state. Even between the UN vote accepting partition in Nov ’47 and May ’48, we still didn’t act to implement an Israeli state or a Palestinian Arab state. In May ’48, Israel was simply declared by its prime minister, Ben Gurion, and we were asked to leave, which to our credit, we did.
Orde Wingate, a classic eccentric, founded the Jewish night squads in 1938 to counter Arab insurgency. He became a campaigner in favour of the Jewish state, which caused him to be removed by the British powers before the war started. He was sent to the Sudan where he successfully commanded a Special Operations Force in the East Africa campaign against Italy. However he was disliked for being far too direct and was broken back to Major and sent to Burma without a staff role. He acted by leading from the front, “inviting” others to join him if they wished! He was eventually given control of the Chindits.
However there were what you can fairly call Jewish terrorists. The Irgun rejected the moderate mainstream response to Britain’s actions in the 30s and at the end of the decade organized illegal immigration to Palestine of Jews fleeing the Holocaust (which we had strictly limited from 1939). This included attacks on British military. It agreed to moderate its actions the following year. The fringe Jewish extremist group called the Lehi or Stern Gang, operating between 1940 and 1948, grew out of the Irgun, refusing to accept that moderation. They can definitely be called terrorists. However they were never accepted by the mainstream and certainly were not the fledgling IDF. They attacked the top civilian administration, including assassinating Lord Moine in Cairo in 1944, who was implementing the anti-immigration policy zealously. The Lehi blamed him for the death of thousands of European Jews who could otherwise have been saved. We now know the numbers who died unnecessarily because of our policy were significantly higher. The assassins were hanged in 1945.
The Irgun also restarted attacks on the British administration in 1944. In 1946, the more moderate Haganah, which was the fledgling IDF and included many of the Jewish Brigade that had fought alongside the British in WW2, moved against the Irgun to try and stop it. It failed. The Lehi disbanded in 1948 on declaration of the state, and the Irgun morphed into an opposition political party.
We can probably credit Orde Wingate’s creation of the Special Night Squads along with the existence of the underground Hagana as the true foundation of the IDF as it later became. Also those Jewish veteran pilots and soldiers who served in the British forces in WWII.
The Palestinian Mandate period which we have been discussing has a bad reputation and legacy amongst military historians of the post-WWII British end-of-empire period, along with other operations in Greece, Cyprus and Aden. We came out with more credit from Malaya, Borneo and Kenya in their transition to independence.
No-one comes out of Palestine then or right now dominating the moral high ground, and certainly not the UK Government: hence my belief that they shouldn’t take sides, or be seen to be aiding either side in the latest conflict. Our politicians don’t read the military history that matters: the counter-insurgency campaigns that make up the bulk of military operations. If they did, we wouldn’t have gone into Helmand Province with inadequate forces and no clear aim.
What makes both the Gaza and Ukrainian wars so murderous is that in addition to the military objectives is the desire for revenge, which is used to justify using excessive military force to target civilians in addition to capturing ground or defeating the enemy’s army. We see this in the allied bombing campaigns in response to the Blitz or Pearl Harbour, and the War on Terror after 9/11. Putin believes Ukraine has ‘betrayed’ him personally, and the Israelis need to seek and exact revenge for the 7/10 Hamas atrocity.
In all cases, revenge justifies the use of weapons of mass destruction: thousand bomber raids, massed artillery, large-scale destruction of the natural and built-up environment, firebombing, fuel-air explosive bombs and atomic munitions.
The contravention of the Geneva protocol of ‘causing no more damage to civilian infrastructure or loss of life amongst the civilian population’ is therefore inevitable, and desired by the aggrieved party, although they never admit that to be one of the war aims.
Lastly, I’m trying to think of an insurgent force who have not terrorised civilians in order to get them to side with and actively support the insurgency whether the latter people want to or not. So an insurgent battles both the occupying army as a freedom fighter, and oppresses non-combatants as a terrorist. It doesn’t always work for them: Che Guevara’s attempt to foment revolution in Bolivia resulted in his betrayal by the locals to the government forces, and many IRA terrorists were betrayed to the authorities by men within their organisation. Guerrilla armies usually execute any enemy soldiers they capture, having no PoW facilities in which to hold them. This means that captured Guerrilla commanders must rightly face trial for those murders committed under their command.
I went back to my history books to remind myself of the development of Israeli defence organisations. Thanks for the synopsis of the political situation of the post-WWII period. The more one reads about that aspect, the more one realises that the Europeans are being sensible in keeping out of it all. It’s the foreign policy ‘grasping the Third Rail.’
Of course, if I was an American, Israeli or even Palestinian, I’d have a wholly different opinion upon this conflict. But I’m not, I’m British, so I don’t have to take on theirs.
BXXXXXIT – if we held a grudge over everybody that took a shot at the British Army or RN, our list of friends wouldn’t go far past Bolivia and we would be napalming Dublin every wednesday.
The “hell in Gaza” (its hardly Stalingrad) was caused by one bunch of people alone, Hamas………….and their supporter scum in London on a Saturday.
I had no idea gang rape and female mutilation was so popular amongst the left- I have learned something.
Grant Shapps described it as ‘hell,’ not me. At least in Stalingrad the civilians could escape and let the soldiers fight it out amongst themselves.
The UK is now the ‘Useful Idiot Nation’ of both Israel and Hamas: being involved at home and abroad, and with no power to affect the conflict from one side or the other.
I keep writing and saying that we shouldn’t have touched the place with a bargepole. It’s doing our country no good at all. Responding to the Houthi attacks upon shipping in the Red Sea is another matter: that’s just routine air policing of restless backward natives, and nothing to get excited about.
To the moderators on this forum. My comment of a few hours ago appeared for about 5 minutes and the disappeared. Why??
How the title of this article was written with a straight face…
How is it possible to say that the airdrop will not be to supply Hamas?
There are no heroes or villains in this conflict. Everyone involved is doing no more than is asked or expected of them:
No great moderating statesmanship from either Tory Boy or Sleepy Joe; the United Nations as impotent as ever; Netanyahu versus whatever raving Islamist ball of hate who hasn’t yet been killed by a drone strike Hamas leader isn’t like Putin Vs Zelensky – the charismatic megalomaniac being stood up to by the plucky underdog; the IDF are taking no risks or displaying any great tactical acumen – they even killed three of their own guys who had escaped from captivity; Hamas blew any chance of redemption within the first hour of their operation; the victims can do no more than suffer as usual; medical personnel in Gaza have no option but to martyr themselves as always; no maverick blockade-busting aid shipments getting to the people who need it; no united front from senior Jewish, Moslem and Christian religious leaders appealling for a ceasefire; no anything apart from six months of predictable savagery.
Humanity has developed technically but not evolved morally, and we seem to be regressing.