Just hours after attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran, Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated.  Hamas released a statement early Wednesday morning denouncing the “Zionist raid on his residence”, and blaming Israel for Haniyeh’s death. Early reports suggest that he was killed by a rocket, though details are still emerging. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have so far declined to comment on the death.  While the details surrounding the strike remain unclear, it’s already apparent that Haniyeh’s death could upend whatever fragile stability remains in the region. As the head of Hamas’s political wing and its face abroad, Haniyeh has played an active role in negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza from his homebase in Doha. Haniyeh ...

Rest in peace, Dilnot reforms. These complex plans, aimed to make the cost of social care more equitable, have staggered on for over ten years. They were pronounced dead shortly after 3pm on Monday by Chancellor Rachel Reeves during a grim statement in the House of Commons in which she surveyed the “unforgivable” financial inheritance left to her party. In their short history, these reforms have never been given adequate fiscal headroom, and with the government facing a £22bn overspend there certainly isn’t much space for them now. The plans were first developed by the economist, Andrew Dilnot in 2011 during the early years of the coalition. They included, as their headline policy, an £86,000 lifetime cap on care costs. This ...

The deterioration of Israeli civil society since 7 October culminated in a violent assault on Israeli institutions on Monday, when protesters – including members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament – stormed two army bases. The demonstrations were sparked by the detention of Israeli soldiers, who have been accused of torture.  The nine soldiers had been charged with the physical and sexual abuse of a Palestinian detainee. In response to news, protesters stormed the Sde Teiman base, roughly 20 miles from the Gaza border, where the nine soldiers had been arrested, before moving to the Beit Lid military court, where they were being held. As the riots worsened, the Israeli military recalled troops from the Nahal Brigade in the Gaza Strip to protect ...

In March, I spent several days in the company of Kim Sengupta, who has died suddenly, aged 68. We were on a trip to Israel and the West Bank. He was an inspirational foreign and war correspondent of great courage, resilience, and determination. I sat next to him on the flight out to Tel Aviv and, as we enjoyed a gin and tonic, it was fascinating to talk to him about his early days in journalism, working in local papers and then at the Daily Mail. We also chatted about our mutual love of cricket. He had a rich, warm, deep voice and was a man of considerable charm and good humour. He loved newsrooms and newspapers and was invariably ...

Say what you like about Kwasi Kwarteng, and most people have, but at least he believed in something. Wrongly, as it turned out, and with such fervour that he took a rather exciting punt with millions of people’s retirement savings, but he tried. And then along came Jeremy Hunt, the smug prefect, and he did what people like Jeremy Hunt do: he smoothed things over. Yesterday Rachel Reeves explained just how much greasepaint and duct tape Hunt had used to make the public finances look presentable at the tail end of Tory government. As soon as Reeves became Chancellor, she asked the Treasury to draw up an audit of the real state of public finances. This audit shows the government’s finances ...

A few days ago, Keir Starmer spoke at the New Statesman summer party. Most of his remarks were of the kind one might expect in the circumstances. But the Prime Minister went out of his way to highlight the threat of right-wing populism.  He may have just won a 172-seat majority, with Reform winning only five MPs, but there is little sense of complacency. With a volatile and fragmented electorate, there is an awareness that if it all goes wrong for Labour in this parliament, the opportunity will be there for the populists to benefit. Morgan McSweeney, the party’s chief strategist, cut his teeth taking on the British National Party in Barking in the late 2000s. The UK is currently an ...

Political success depends on controlling the past as well as the future. The last Conservative government used “the mess” left by Labour to justify austerity from 2010 onwards. Margaret Thatcher and her allies repeatedly invoked memories of the “Winter of Discontent”; Tony Blair and Gordon Brown never allowed the Tories to forget “Black Wednesday” and the era of “boom and bust”.  In her statement to the House of Commons today, Rachel Reeves showed that she has learned from this tradition. Deploying authentic anger, she accused the Conservatives of a £22bn “cover-up”, casting the supposedly prudent Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt as reckless profligates. “They exhausted the reserve. They put party before country. They continued to make unfunded commitment after unfunded commitment,” ...

The supremely frustrating part of visiting any city is transit: the gruelling, hot, bureaucratic business of getting from park to landmark to cathedral. It’s the most boring and yet fortunately the most forgettable component of any holiday. But, in a baffling turn for an event that is at least partially a tourism advert, it seems the ambition of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony was to try to recreate that experience and serve it up as televisual longform. The overwhelming mood of the opening ceremony was tedium. And perhaps its one salvation was that, in its later stages, it featured enough madness to distract from the banality.   Ahead of yesterday evening’s proceedings, the much-touted USP was its en plein air quality. That is, instead ...