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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
(noun) a date that has become so significant because of the killing and destruction associated with it that it needs no elaboration
Hours after the dawn raid by Hamas on southern Israel, experts were describing the attack as a watershed moment for the Jewish state. And that was long before it became clear just how devastating the October 7 assault on kibbutzim, a music festival and Israeli military posts was.
About 1,200 people were killed, making it the deadliest attack on Israeli soil since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948 — and its gravest intelligence failure in at least 50 years. About 240 civilians and soldiers were taken hostage.
The assault was viewed as an existential threat to the promise of a safe Jewish homeland, protected by a vaunted military, on which the state was built.
Israel’s response was fearsome. The government has vowed to wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth” and launched a relentless air and land offensive in Gaza.
More than 21,500 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian officials. Some 1.8mn of Gaza’s 2.3mn population have been forced to flee their homes, and are enduring a humanitarian catastrophe. Vast swaths of the besieged strip have been reduced to rubble-strewn wastelands.
The Middle East is on edge amid fears of a full-blown regional war. Arab leaders worry about radicalisation among their own populations. Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have been on the rise across the west as the conflict has become a polarising force in communities, academia and workplaces.
Yet there is no end in sight. Israel vows to continue its offensive, despite mounting international pressure for a ceasefire. And Hamas is still fighting, and holds more than 100 hostages.