“Oct 7 2023”

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.

As part of President Donald Trump’s 21-point peace plan to end the war in the Gaza Strip and expand the Abraham Accords, Hamas turned over 20 remaining living hostages held for more than two years in horrific conditions.

Now, the terrorist group is again playing games by refusing to turn over the bodies of murdered hostages, failing to disarm and engaging in violence against other Palestinian tribes in the Gaza Strip. All violations of the current ceasefire agreement.

Today is a great day for the slandered supporters of Israel’s line led by Benjamin Netanyahu. After the Hamas massacre, despite protests all over the world, Netanyahu pressed ahead with military strength, seeking the release of Israeli hostages and the destruction of Hamas until he achieved the best possible agreement.

It is estimated that more than 80 of the 250 Israeli hostages were killed by Islamic terrorists in the past two years.

Meet Adrian. With round wire-rim glasses, shaggy brown hair, and a beard, he looks like a throwback to the student radicals of the 1960s. His politics are a throwback, too. Standing on a sidewalk in the South Bronx, around the corner from the Mitchel Houses project on Alexander Avenue near East 135th Street, he speaks of war crimes and genocide, of the sins of capitalism and imperialism. He calls on those in the “belly of the beast” need to become seditious and “side with the people of the world” against the United States of America.

For the last two years, when Israelis or diaspora Jews would talk about bringing the last living hostages home, there was a belief their spoken words would never betray: the hostages would not come home. Not all of them. Not all at once.

The hostages were too valuable to Hamas, serving as their only real bargaining chip in a war that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) will win on strength, military intelligence and strategy every time. In 2011, Israel exchanged 1,027 prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas and held in captivity for five years. So what concessions could Hamas extract holding onto a handful now?

But he’s still a despot!

Israeli hostage families have confirmed the identities of three of four bodies handed over by Hamas in Gaza on Tuesday.

The bodies of Tamir Nimrodi, 20, Eitan Levy, 53, and Uriel Baruch, 35, were part of the latest return, the Hostages Families Forum said. Scientists are still working to identify the fourth body.

So far seven hostages’ bodies are confirmed to have been sent back from Gaza. Hamas has yet to return the other bodies as agreed under a ceasefire deal brokered by the US.

Donald Trump has said that Hamas will be forced to disarm after questions swirled around the group’s status following the signing of a peace deal meant to bring an end to the war in Gaza.

Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Trump said: “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them and it will happen quickly and perhaps violently.

“But they will disarm, do you understand me?” he added, saying it should take place in a “reasonable period of time”.