Protesters brandishing banners in support of the terror group Hezbollah marched through central London on Saturday.

Police made more than a dozen arrests as tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian activists staged a demonstration through the capital to Whitehall, ahead of the first anniversary of the Oct 7 attacks by Hamas on southern Israel.

In the crowd were several marchers who held placards and banners expressing their support for Hezbollah, the terror group that has controlled swathes of Beirut and southern Lebanon and launched repeated attacks on Israel in recent weeks.

Israel’s retaliatory air strikes killed Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader, last month and have led to the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians as well as Hezbollah fighters.

Among the placards on display on the London march was one showing a silhouette of Nasrallah, with the words “We will not abandon Palestine”.

Others declared: “Hezbollah are not terrorists” and “I love Hezbollah”.

The placards were on prominent display, despite the Metropolitan Police warning on Friday that it would crack down on any displays of support for proscribed terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

As the pro-Palestine marchers passed the British Library they chanted: “Yemen, Yemen make us proud. Turn another ship around” and “British Museum. Paint it red. Over 100,000 dead”.

Dozens of activists blocked Tottenham Court Road by gathering outside a Barclays bank. A sign was being held near the entrance reading: “Shame on those who looked away from the sadistic genocide of mainly children in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Tension rose as the marchers made their way from Russell Square past Aldwych to Whitehall, with the protest encountering small groups of pro-Israel counter-protesters along the way. Police intervened to keep the two sides apart.

By 4pm officers had made 17 arrests, including one person on suspicion of supporting a proscribed organisation.

There were seven arrests on suspicion of public order offences, three of which were allegedly racially aggravated.

Three people were arrested on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker, three arrested on suspicion of assault and one person was arrested on suspicion of breaching a Public Order Act condition.

The atmosphere in Covent Garden turned hostile as pro-Palestine activists and counter-demonstrators – who were separated by barriers and a row of police – shouted and chanted at each other as they passed.

There were cries of “shame on you” as the pro-Palestine marchers taunted the pro-Israel group. At one stage a man wearing a sweatshirt in the colour of the Palestine flag gestured at the Israeli supporters and screamed: “Freedom fighters, they will finish you all off!”

Another marcher held a banner comparing the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews with the creation of the state of Israel after the war which drove out thousands of Palestinians.

Such a comparison is deemed anti-Semitic according to the international definition of anti-Semitism drawn up by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) intergovernmental alliance, as it belittles the unique nature of the Holocaust.

As the front of the march gathered outside the gates to Downing Street, the crowd stretched back up Whitehall and past Trafalgar Square.

Responding to some of the placards on display, the Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “For the past year, those in power have allowed support for Hamas to run rampant on Britain’s streets week in, week out.

“Now, it seems we are seeing the results of their inaction as anti-Israel protesters have apparently moved on to defending Hezbollah, a proscribed anti-Semitic genocidal terror group.

“With images like these surfacing online from today’s so-called ‘peace-march’, it is clear that one year on from Oct 7, Sir Mark Rowley’s Metropolitan Police force has enabled Jew-hatred and support for terrorists to be normalised on our streets.

“Anyone professing support for Hezbollah or Hamas should be dealt with swiftly and must face the full force of the law, not walking around with impunity.”

In a statement the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which organised the march alongside Stop the War and other groups, said: “Over the past 12 months Palestinians have faced the darkest moment in their enduring struggle for freedom, as Israel has unleashed unprecedented atrocities against them, with its genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, and its attacks on Palestinians across their homeland.

“We are marching to demand that the British government finally ends its complicity in Israel’s genocide, and ends all arms trade with Israel and to demand freedom and justice for the Palestinian people.”

Scotland Yard said it was trying to identify those responsible for any banners and placards expressing support of banned organisations.

It stated: “These images have been passed to officers, including those monitoring our camera systems. We are urgently trying to identify those involved so that action can be taken.”

The Welsh Government will hand out grants to build “anti-racist” public artworks in order to set the “right historic narrative”.

Labour has committed to making Wales “anti-racist by 2030”and issued advice on hiding or removing controversial statues of “old white men”.

Organisations will be able to claim between £3,000 and £15,000 in grant funding per project to create new artworks projecting the correct “narrative” and providing a “decolonised” view of history. 

The Tories branded the grants “utter nonsense” and said taxpayers have been left paying the Welsh Government for their “own propaganda”.

Groups can apply for funding to create art installations that “promote messages of diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism”, with £20,000 released for some projects.

Grant funding is also open to those who want to develop “multimedia art installations” that draw viewers into “conversations about race, identity and anti-racism”.

The purpose of the planned project – supported by the Anti-Racist Wales Culture, Heritage and Sport Fund – is to help “promote a multicultural, vibrant and diverse Wales” in line with Government aims.

Successful applicants for grant funding must ensure that their planned artworks set the “right historic narrative” and deliver a “balanced, authentic and decolonised account of the past – one that recognises both historical injustices and the positive impact of black Asian and minority ethnic communities”.

Funding will also be open to museums and galleries to “create new exhibitions that tell stories through the lens of black, Asian and minority ethnic people’s experiences”.

Money will also be granted to organisations improving their collections, preserving heritage linked to minority communities, creating inclusive community venues, and those providing outreach work to diverse communities.

Racism ‘eradicated by 2030’

The culture fund is intended to help organisations achieve the mandatory goals in the Labour Government’s 2022 Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan, which insists that racism be “eradicated” by 2030.

This followed a Black Lives Matter-inspired 2021 audit of Wales which flagged as problematic statues linked to Adml Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Thomas Picton,  the hero of Waterloo. 

Welsh Government advice on making public artworks accord with “anti-racist” principles suggested that statues of “old white men” could be hidden or destroyed.

Guidance claimed that statues that often glorify “powerful, older, able-bodied white men” may be “offensive” to a more diverse modern public, and public bodies should “take action” to set the right narrative.

Andrew RT Davies, leader of the Welsh Conservatives, said: “In Labour-run Wales, NHS waiting lists have risen for six consecutive record-breaking months and 20 per cent of pupils leaving primary schools are estimated to be functionally illiterate.

“Yet this utter nonsense is what Labour choose to spend taxpayers’ money on.

“This really is the Welsh public paying for their own propaganda. It’s the wrong priority for this cash, which should be going toward our stretched public services.”

The Welsh Government has been contacted for comment by The Telegraph.

Labour is poised to U-turn on plans to tax investors after discovering the policy could have a “net cost to the exchequer”, according to reports.

In its manifesto, the party pledged to stop private equity investors from paying capital gains tax rates of 28 per cent on the money they make, and instead force them to pay 45 per cent income tax rates.

Sir Keir Starmer claimed the policy could raise £560 million but investment firms warned it could backfire and drive millions of pounds out of the UK to save it from the tax grab.

Further analysis by the Government has now come to a similar conclusion, it is understood, suggesting the policy could cost the Treasury hundreds of millions of pounds a year instead of raising any money.

The analysis, carried out by the Treasury, found it would incur a “net cost to the exchequer” of as much as £350 million a year after five years.

This was because wealthy individuals were more likely to leave the UK than pay the higher rates, The Times reported.

A government source told the newspaper: “We are absolutely in the revenue-raising maximising space rather than doing things for ideological reasons.”

In June, before Labour came to power, Rachel Reeves, then shadow chancellor, told the Financial Times: “I don’t think it is right that … what is essentially a bonus is taxed at a lower rate than employment income”.

The Chancellor did also say the Government would exempt private equity bosses who risked their own capital.

The tax break has allowed private equity fund managers to pay capital gains tax on some of their profits, rather than the higher rate of income tax, for decades.

Called “carried interest”, the tax loophole has seen firms earn more than £780 billion since 2000, according to a paper by Ludovic Phalippou, an Oxford School of Business professor.

Earlier this year, a report by investment bank Investec warned that nearly a third of private equity investors would relocate outside of the country if Labour’s tax policy went ahead.

The Government’s U-turn on taxing investors follows a similar decision by Ms Reeves to soften promises of a crackdown on non-doms.

Last month, it emerged the Chancellor was considering abandoning her pledge to abolish non-dom status altogether over fears it may fail to raise any money.

Labour had pledged to end the tax perk for wealthy residents who are domiciled overseas in its manifesto, hoping the policy would raise £1 billion a year.

A Treasury spokesman said: “We do not comment on speculation around tax changes outside of fiscal events.”

A 10-year-old has been arrested for allegedly driving a stolen car around a crowded school playground.

Minneapolis police said the incident happened on Sept 20 at the Nellie Stone Johnson School in the north of the city.

It was caught on CCTV, with the footage showing a black vehicle driving back and forth near the playground, where more than a dozen children were running and playing.

Police said the playground was “crowded” at the time, and a spokesman added: “Fortunately, no children on the playground were struck by the driver.”

The 10-year-old boy was taken to the Hennepin county juvenile detention centre on Thursday. 

It was at least the boy’s third arrest, police said, and he was a suspect in a dozen cases ranging from car theft to robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon.

“It is unfathomable that a 10-year-old boy has been involved in this level of criminal activity without effective intervention,” said Brian O’Hara, the police chief.

“Prison is not an acceptable option for a 10-year-old boy. But the adults who can stop this behaviour going forward must act now to help this child and his family.”

A police spokesman added that the boy’s family members were co-operating and “have asked for help to keep their son or anyone else from being injured or killed”. 

A two-year-old boy is among four people who died while trying to cross the English Channel, French authorities have said.

The other victims are a woman and two men. They died in “two tragedies” on small boats, according to the prefect of the Pas-de-Calais region in northern France.

The boy was crammed onto a boat with 90 migrants on board, while the other contained 83 people making the crossing.

Some of the migrants were allowed to continue their journey to Britain after being rescued.

Bruno Retailleau, the French interior minister, said on X, formerly Twitter, that the boy had been “trampled to death”.

The deaths come after the Home Office confirmed that 395 migrants arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel on Friday in the first arrivals in five days.

The latest arrivals bring the total for the year to 25,639.

Jacques Billant, the prefect of Pas-de-Calais, said that in the first rescue, the French coast guard responded to a boat carrying nearly 90 people that was suffering engine failure after a call for assistance at about 8am on Saturday.

A total of 15 people were recovered and transferred to a tow vessel called l’Abeille, including the boy who was unconscious. Despite a medical team being scrambled by helicopter, he was declared dead.

Another 14 migrants, including a 17-year-old who suffered burns to his legs, were taken to the port of Boulogne to receive care before being questioned by police.

The rest of the migrants were allowed to continue their journey to Britain, Mr Billant said.

In the second rescue, a boat with 83 people on board that had sailed from the Calais area suffered engine failures, which caused panic on board, leading to some of the occupants, who were all later rescued, to fall into the sea.

Mr Billant said that when 71 migrants were transferred from the inflatable boat to the Flamant – a French navy patrol boat, three people were found unconscious at the bottom of the boat.

He said they were “probably crushed and suffocated during the jostling and drowned in the 40cm of water present in the boat”.

He added: “Despite the intervention of the doctors, they were declared dead. They are two men and a woman, all three around 30 years old.”

‘Blood on their hands’

Mr Retailleau said people smugglers had the victims’ “blood on their hands”.

“Our government will intensify the fight against these mafias who are getting rich by organising these crossings of death,” he said.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said she had been “in touch” with the French interior minister following the reports of deaths in the Channel.

In posts on X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday afternoon, Ms Cooper said:

A group of migrants who successfully made the journey to England on Saturday thanked Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, for his “help”.

An Iranian family, including two pregnant women, all from the same family, also crossed on one boat.

They said they had spent £2,000 to £3,000 each for the trip and paid up-front. They had iPhones to communicate with the people smugglers on the progress of their journey.

The French navy escorted another packed boat carrying 50 migrants and gave orders to British Border Force officers to monitor for others.

Anti-smuggling action plan 

The Channel crossing has been busy as smugglers attempt to move as many would-be asylum seekers before winter.

The arrivals came on the same day as the UK and other G7 nations agreed on an anti-smuggling action plan designed to boost co-operation, following talks in Italy.

The Home Office said this included joint investigations and intelligence-sharing to target criminal smuggling routes.

The French and British governments have sought for years to stop the flow of illegal migrants who pay smugglers thousands of euros per head to take the dangerous boat journey across the Channel.

French authorities seek to stop people from taking to the water, but do not intervene once they are afloat except for rescue purposes, citing safety concerns.

Michael Barnier, France’s Right-wing prime minister, said on Tuesday the country needed a stricter immigration policy and to be “ruthless” with people smugglers.

The latest incident comes after eight migrants died in mid-September when their overcrowded vessel capsized while trying to cross the Channel.

In early September, at least 12 people, including six children, mostly from Eritrea, died off the northern French coast when their over-crowded boat capsized.

Paedophiles, burglars and sex offenders have been spared prison despite having dozens of previous convictions for the same offence, new figures have revealed.

In one instance, a criminal appeared in court for their 45th burglary offence but avoided a custodial sentence – despite having a total of 315 previous convictions.

Public safety charities warned that the lack of sanctions undermined the work of police officers and was “a slap in the face” for victims.

The data from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) shows there were nine “career criminals” in 2022 who were let off with a non-custodial sentence despite having been responsible for a catalogue of crimes.

They all avoided an immediate prison sentence and were given alternative punishments such as community service or suspended sentences.

The group included a sex attacker who appeared in court for their sixth occasion relating to sexual assault but was allowed to keep their liberty despite a criminal record with a total of 29 previous offences.

Another person, who was convicted for the fifth time for offences related to internet child abuse content, also avoided jail. They had a total of 24 previous convictions.

An additional sex offender appeared in court for the 20th time for failing to comply with the provisions of the sex offenders’ register but was also not jailed.

The MoJ refused to identify the individuals involved in the cases because it would breach the criminals’ rights under the Data Protection Act.

Another individual came before the courts for their 10th robbery offence and still managed to avoid a custodial sentence despite a criminal record that extended to 34 separate offences.

A persistent criminal who had 56 previous convictions and came before the court for their 27th offence of having a knife still managed to sidestep being sent to prison.

There was one case where a person was brought before the court for breaching an anti-social behaviour order for the 40th time and who had 254 criminal convictions. Despite the catalogue of previous offences the court decided not to jail the individual.

Other criminals who avoided the immediate clang of the prison gates were a joyrider being sentenced for the eighth occasion for stealing cars and a drug offender convicted of their 28th offence in relation to illegal substances.

Criminals ‘let loose’

Rory Geoghegan, founder of the Public Safety Foundation, said: “These damning figures reveal a justice system that, even for the most prolific offenders, enables rather than prevents further offences by convicted criminals.

“The case for substantial prison expansion and tougher supervision should be clear to see when individuals with hundreds of convictions are spared jail despite committing serious offences.

“Failing to send such criminals to prison undermines the hard work of police officers and is a slap in the face for the victims and witnesses who provide evidence in such cases and who, like the rest of us, want to see criminals locked up rather than let loose.”

It comes after Sir Nic Dakin, a justice minister, said short prison terms were more likely to result in making offenders “better criminals” rather than rehabilitating them.

Labour’s forthcoming sentencing review – due to be announced this month – could pave the way for scrapping many short jail terms.

These would be replaced with community punishments geared towards rehabilitation, meaning some low-level criminals would avoid jail.

The review is expected to be headed by David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary, who has argued that introducing a legal presumption against sentences of under a year and scrapping those under six months could reduce reoffending.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “Sentencing decisions are made by independent judges and they can impose a range of tough requirements including curfews, tags and exclusion zones. 

“If offenders do not meet these requirements they can be sent to prison.”

Rachel Reeves’s plan to significantly increase borrowing in the Budget risks pushing up mortgage rates, Treasury analysis suggests.

An official modelling exercise indicates that the Chancellor’s plans to rewrite Britain’s fiscal rules could increase the cost of debt for consumers and businesses.

The Treasury research paper warns that a “fiscal loosening” of just one per cent of GDP could lead to a “peak increase in interest rates” of up to 1.25 percentage points.

The document goes on to warn that every increase in annual borrowing of £25 billion could increase interest rates by between 0.5 and 1.25 percentage points.

It is widely expected that Ms Reeves will use her October 30 Budget to ease borrowing rules, a move that could unlock up to £50 billion of spending.

Treasury sources confirmed that the policy paper, which was published in December and is titled “The impact of borrowing on interest rates”, reflects the department’s current thinking.

It comes just as mortgage rates were beginning to cool, with some deals falling below 4 per cent for the time in months.

Central interest rates currently stand at 5 per cent, but a rise to 6.25 per cent would add around £200 a month to a typical mortgage.

Jeremy Hunt, the former Chancellor, said on Saturday night: “The consistent advice I received from Treasury officials was always that increasing borrowing meant interest rates would be higher for longer – and punish families with mortgages. 

“That would be a hammer blow and lead to mortgage misery for many people just at the moment the Bank of England is expected to bring interest rates back down.”

Mr Hunt has called for the Office for Budget Responsibility to be legally obliged to publish a full analysis of any changes to the fiscal rules. Britain’s debt recently surged to 100 per cent of gross domestic product for the first time since the 1960s.

Despite this, Ms Reeves on Saturday dropped her strongest hint yet that she intends to increase borrowing to fund a multi-billion-pound capital programme, pledging to “invest, invest, invest”.

It follows warnings from Sir Keir Starmer that his party’s first Budget “is going to be painful”, and it is expected that the Chancellor will raise some taxes in an attempt to plug a £22 billion black hole she claims to have found in the public finances.

It is thought this could include a raid on capital gains tax, inheritance tax or a tax on pensions.

Economists said some of the effects of higher borrowing had already been “priced in”. Yields on the 10-year gilt were at 4.13 per cent when markets closed on Friday, the highest since late July, partly reflecting concerns that Ms Reeves intends to boost borrowing in the Budget.

However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) also warned Ms Reeves’s “opportunistic” attempt to fiddle with Britain’s fiscal rules risked causing a surge in interest rates.

The think-tank has said that any move to alter the Chancellor’s self-imposed fiscal rules “would not be without risks” and that borrowing an extra £50 billion in 2028-29 could have a “material impact on interest rates”.

Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the IFS, said: “If you borrow a lot you are taking more of a risk that interest rates will be higher in response. One lesson for Rachel Reeves is to be cautious about borrowing because there is a risk to interest rates.

“Some will have savings and will endure higher interest rates on their savings. The main risk you would worry about is people’s mortgages being a bit more expensive.”

Mr Emmerson added that the impact on mortgages would hinge on the extent to which the additional borrowing was used to fund either “current” or “capital” expenditure.

“If you inject money into an economy, there is more cash going around which could cause inflation and the Bank of England will respond with higher interest rates. This would happen if they saw a giveaway Budget that they felt wasn’t going to be beneficial to the supply side of the economy,” he said.

“But if you make some investments that perhaps encourage the private sector to invest, improve the growth rate and increase capacity of the economy to produce, you then won’t have the Bank of England’s concern that it is inflationary and that higher interest rates are needed.”

The Treasury’s analysis does not take into account measures with “supply-side benefits” and notes that the impact on interest rates would be smaller “where those policies do have a material benefit for the supply side”.

The official advice from the Treasury cautions that an “unanticipated increase in spending, or reduction in taxation, that is funded by additional government borrowing, will increase the level of demand in the economy, thereby increasing inflationary pressures, which may lead to an inflation-targeting central bank increasing interest rates”.

A Treasury spokesman said: “This analysis is clear that the relationship between fiscal plans, inflation and interest rates is complicated and can change significantly over time. The Chancellor has repeatedly said she will not play fast and loose with the public finances and will protect working people.”

Three weeks ago, I travelled to Israel to try and work out what October 7 had meant as the first anniversary approached. The massacres committed by Hamas on that black Sabbath were among the foulest of the modern era and saw the worst loss of life for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Not much time elapsed, though, before the bloodcurdling crimes were sidelined as international attention switched, rather too eagerly, to Israel’s war in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians were tragically killed as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) tried to root out an enemy which used billions of charitable aid to build itself a network of tunnels more extensive than the London Underground. One military expert summed up Hamas’s strategy in two chilling words: Human Sacrifice.

A proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas – like Hezbollah – is dedicated to the annihilation of Israel. It’s quite hard to fight a group which hides behind women and children, burrows under nurseries and hospitals; it’s quite hard to do a deal with terrorists whose charter demands your own extinction. Regardless of the provocation, it is always Israel that is blamed for “escalation” and called upon to exercise “restraint”. 

As Sir Tom Stoppard, our greatest living writer, observed exactly a year ago: “Who can say where Israel’s response to October 7 will sit in the calculus of suffering by the time the region subsides into the next configuration of uneasy neighbours… We are aware that Jews are not the only victims of this tragedy, Hamas knew that there would be consequences to October 7, but the consequences did not weigh with Hamas. Before we take up a position on what’s happening now we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilisation and barbarism.”

I was one of those who thought it was the latter; 7/10 seemed to me to be every bit as pivotal as 9/11, one of those hinges in the history of the world when a profoundly shocking event triggers changes heretofore considered unimaginable. That was not always a popular view, particularly among the young who had been taught to see the only democracy in the Middle East, a haven of women’s equality and gay rights, as a colonialist oppressor. (Even within Jewish families, Israel has the ability to set generations at loggerheads). Fear of “Islamophobia”, seeded in progressive minds with considerable skill by Islamists, may have been part of it. One wit put it well on social media: “Israel is fighting to save Western civilisation before Western civilisation can stop it.”

The legacy of October 7 is complicated, although the evil done that day is not. Some Jews have experienced antisemitism for the first time, and they are living in fear, even here in the UK. In Belsize Park, north London, a man recently waved a placard saying: “I HEART 7 October.” He was not arrested.

On Monday, Israel’s official commemoration of the first anniversary will be pre-recorded. Security may be a factor, but so is the risk of angry protests against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. A warrior hero for a nation still in trauma, the prime minister is also believed by many Israelis to have failed to get the remaining 101 hostages home, or to agree a ceasefire, because the end of the war will mark the end of his own career.

Since I got back from Tel Aviv, events in Lebanon, including the breathtaking and ingenious humiliation of Hezbollah, have moved the dial again. “All part of the rehabilitation of the IDF image – back to what we expect, intel and technological excellence,” one analyst enthused. But that raises an awkward question: how can a country so smart, so Q from James Bond it can set up a factory to manufacture pagers, fit them with mini explosives, have Hezbollah distribute those pagers to all its members and get them to blow up at the same time, have failed to prevent thousands of barbarians breaching its border security and raping, burning and butchering 1,200 of its citizens?

So many questions still unanswered from October 7. I put those queries to scores of Israelis – survivors, soldiers, politicians, bereaved parents, mothers of hostages and just regular people who had to step up for their nation on that dark day. 

Some of what follows is horrifying and hard to bear, I know. I am warning you in case you’d rather not read on. But it is important to write it down. We know how important it is because on the BBC news on Thursday, Hamas’s deputy leader told international editor Jeremy Bowen that Hamas didn’t set out to kill any Israeli women or children on October 7. Hamas “resistance fighters” were ordered only to kill “occupation fighters”, although he did concede that “there were certainly personal mistakes” and the fighters, who just popped into family homes on kibbutzim to have a chat and a bite to eat, “may have felt they were in danger”.

The accounts told to me by the individuals below, and many others who shared their insights, paint a very different picture. As always, the Devil is in the detail. 

‘There were hundreds of bodies – the smell was incomprehensible’

6.30am: It was going to be a happy day, one of the happiest days of the year. Simchat Torah, which was scheduled to start at sundown, at the end of Sabbath, is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the conclusion of the annual cycle of Torah readings. There is a lot of food and dancing. The siren woke up Shari Mendes in her family’s apartment in Jerusalem. Shari and David thought it was a mistake. But the architect and her surgeon husband went down to the shelter in the basement of their building with the other residents, just in case. False alarm. 

They came back upstairs and started to get dressed. “We were getting ready to go to the synagogue, and then there was another siren and another,” Shari recalls. “People kept going back downstairs into the shelter with each siren at a different stage of dress –  half dressed, almost dressed – and it was quite funny.” 

The Mendeses didn’t have their phones switched on because they don’t use electricity or any electrical devices on the Sabbath.

After a while, Arab neighbours came up to show them the news on their phones. “We were horrified,” says Shari. She switched on her own phone to find Emergency Order #8 in Hebrew (tzav shmoneh). She was stunned. “This only happens during a war, right?” 

Order 8 is sent to IDF reservists during an emergency telling them to report immediately to their base. Shari Mendes had never done military service, as all Israelis must when they leave high school. She missed it because she was born and brought up in the United States, only moving to Israel in 2003 to raise her family. Just a couple of years ago, however, she had been approached to be part of a small, all-female unit which would help take care of the bodies of women soldiers in the event of a mass casualty event. In the Jewish tradition, it is women who prepare female bodies for burial. As more young women were seeing frontline service, the army thought it was a necessary precaution.

On Saturday night, Shari drove to the Shura army base and joined her unit. “My first shift was Sunday morning. It was unimaginable. There were refrigerator trucks lining up as far as you could see. There’s this massive intake area like an airport hangar and it was packed with bodies, body bags stacked one on top of each other right up the walls. Hundreds of bodies. The smell was incomprehensible. I’m very sensitive to smells, and I had never smelled this before. It was like the secret smell of death. I don’t even know how to describe it, you couldn’t breathe the smell was so bad. Literally gasping, struggling to breathe. 

“The floors were wet. Fluids were dripping from the bags. There was blood on the floor, so much blood. It was like walking into horror.”

Around Shari and the team, people were working at record speed, putting up sheetrock walls to create new rooms to stack the bodies in, bringing in more and more shipping containers with refrigeration and shelves. A decision had been taken to bring all the casualties of October 7 to the military morgue instead of sending civilian corpses to a hospital. Many of the bodies were so disfigured or destroyed you couldn’t tell if they were soldiers or kibbutzniks or young people from the Nova festival anyway. Some were just ash.

Shari’s first job was in the identification room. “I can’t overemphasise how shocking this was, even to professionals. Like, there were forensic doctors and army photographers and army dentists and army physicians all in this room gathered around a girl’s body trying to establish who she was. Most of the people in my unit have no medical background. We’re normal people, like secretaries or lawyers or retail workers, whatever. And suddenly there we were dealing with things that no one ever thought you could deal with.”

We are sitting at Shari’s kitchen table. Sixty-three-years old, she is both striking and imposing, somehow radiating moral authority, yet also warm and hugely sympathetic. She has baked brownies for me and they smell delicious, but they sit in the tin untouched. The family’s elderly dog sniffs around at our feet. I think I want to know everything, every thing she went through, but do I really?

There’s an imperative in Judaism that the modesty of the dead woman should be respected. Shari says that was what her team were trying to do. “Even in the rush and in the horror, we said, ‘Please, let’s cover the body when no one’s working on it’ and everybody said, ‘Yes, let’s cover her.’ I was very touched by that. You know, that takes sensitivity in the midst of that unimaginable nightmare, and it was our job to do all the touching of the woman that wasn’t medical. 

“If clothes needed to be taken off, we would take them off and it’s important to give back to the family all the personal effects. We were taking things out of pockets like cigarette lighters. Every single thing, we wiped off the blood, put it in a special bag with a number to go into a certain box, to be returned to her parents.” (Shari has a friend down her street whose son was killed. “She told me what it’s like to open that box and how meaningful it is to them.”)

The team did their best to take off the jewellery. “Sometimes, it was very difficult. These young women had nose rings, and their faces were completely smashed up. And me who’s squeamish is working with a dentist trying to take off a nose ring and there’s nothing left of the face but the nose.”

The women were shot many times in the head. “Why? Why? We saw that these women were shot to be killed, maybe in the heart, in the head, but then they were shot many times in the face, and it looked like systematic mutilation because it seemed like they wanted to ruin these women’s faces. A lot of them were young soldier women, and a lot of them had been very beautiful. The first few we saw weren’t too bad because they might have been caught in their sleep and Hamas just shot them. But, after a while, we got women who had clearly been awake when they were murdered and these women came in and their mouths, their teeth were in grimaces and their hands were clenched, if they had hands.

“We got notified that a woman’s coming in and she has no legs, so the terrorist cut off her legs. There was clearly immense sadistic violence.” A lot of the women had bloody, stained underwear, Shari says, some had no underwear at all. “People were shot in the breast, they were shot in the crotch, and that was not done to kill them.” She is a calm, thoughtful person, but her voice is stiff with anger now.

One body Shari dealt with personally still had a knife stuck through her mouth. “There was so much violence and it was totally sexual.”

Shari Mendes went to the United Nations on December 4 to tell them about the sexual violence, the unbelievable depravity she saw inflicted on women and girls. (As well as Jews, they were Christian, Druze, Hindu, Muslim.) It was an incredible speech, but the UN was notably slow to respond to the mass violation of Israeli women giving rise to the hashtag, #MeTooUnlessYoureAJew. “The UN is supposed to represent all nations,” says Shari, “and they had an exhibit on August 17. It was the International Day of people who were killed in conflict and terror attacks. And they showed a picture of every single terrorist attack that happened that year, but they did not include October 7. What does that say about the UN?” They did eventually send the special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict to Israel from January 29 to February 14. Shari and others testified to Pramila Patten. Her report said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October”. That’s not good enough, Shari snaps. “I haven’t heard most women’s organisations condemn the sexual violence. And what about the fact that there are still 101 hostages, living and dead? Including the young woman we saw taken with bloody jogging pants. What’s being done to them? Why are their names not on everyone’s lips? Every. Single. Day.”)

After October 7, Shari and her colleagues worked 12-hour shifts, non-stop for two weeks; they often slept at the base. Their own children were being called up. “I had a son, a daughter-in-law and another son who were on active duty. I didn’t know where they were, were they safe?

“You ask me, Allison, how could I bear it? You asked how we got the strength. I mean, I remember thinking that first day I was just in shock, and everybody was just doing, doing, doing. We were using masks, and they were giving us lavender, but all the senses were being assaulted. By the third, fourth day, I was losing it, and I thought, ‘I don’t know that I can do this anymore’.”

After the bodies had been definitively identified, they were taken to a second room, the burial room, where the atmosphere was calmer “and it was just us women with the woman”.   

The team would look after her, showing all the tender care that was the opposite of her final moments alive. One morning, amidst the grey, they saw a flash of pink. “A beautiful manicure with a flower on each fingernail. And that was such a terrible moment for all of us women because a manicure is such a sign of hope for a woman. They’re making themselves beautiful, aren’t they? It was the only colour in the room.” 

They didn’t wash the bodies. Shari explains that someone who dies in war or in terror, according to Jewish law, is not washed because even that dirt is holy, that they died in a sacrifice for God. “They’re already as holy as they could be. We took our time with them, said a prayer. You put dust of Jerusalem above the eyes. And you ask the person for forgiveness.”

She tried not to know their names. “I didn’t want to associate them with the news stories. I’d go home and learn they had a dog and a sister and a mother who was crying. I made that mistake the first day, and it almost destroyed me. I had to keep going.”

She says she knew she would probably be the last person who saw them “and that’s a responsibility. Because they could have been our daughters.”

Of all the young women whose bodies she took care of and prepared for burial, how many were in a fit state to be shown to their parents?

There is total silence in the room, except for the ticking of a clock on the kitchen wall. I pat the dog beside me, pressing my hand deep into his fur to bring me back to this world and away from that place where jihadi psychopaths annihilate the faces of young women for kicks. 

Shari looks at me. I can’t tell if her eyes are full of sorrow or glittering with rage. “None,” she says at last. “Not one girl we could show to her parents.”

‘I’ve seen what happens to the Jewish people without an army’

6.35am: Around the time Shari Mendes got her Order 8, Nimrod Palmach, who was staying near Tel Aviv, received an order from his company commander to report to army HQ near Jerusalem. Former special forces, Nimrod was now a reservist in the search and rescue team. He disobeyed the order, arguing that his brigade should head south to the Gazan border, although he’s still not quite sure why. He told his commander something didn’t feel right. “A hunch. I felt it was much worse than we were being told. There were two voices; one was telling me to trust my instincts, the second was saying, ‘Be modest, trust the IDF, who do you think you are?’”

Choosing the former, Palmach, who runs an NGO that involves networking and outreach for young Israelis across the Arab world, drove south trying to build a picture of what had happened along the way. The only weapon he had was a pistol which contained nine bullets.

Nimrod, 39, got a call from his ex-wife who was sobbing. Her new husband was from Kibbutz Nir Oz – it was under attack from hundreds of terrorists. “I had already heard about the attack on Sderot [the closest Israeli city to the Gaza border, where more than 50 residents were killed]. So now I understand. Israel has been invaded and the Gaza division has been overwhelmed. Hamas took down intelligence, they took down antennae, even my phone was scrambled. No one [in the hierarchy] knew what was going on. The radio is supposed to give members of the IDF a secret password to tell them go, go! Red alert, it’s a war. But they couldn’t even do that. No radio. Three thousand rockets in the first 20 minutes; we were overwhelmed, the entire system is crippled.”

He says he suddenly had “the most crushing realisation that I’m about to die. There are thousands of them.” He paused briefly by the side of the road to record a video saying goodbye to his two kids so when the army found his body his children would have something to remember. “I said, ‘Daddy loves you and he will be proud of you the rest of your lives.’” Then, he texted army mates telling them to get down there asap. “If you have a gun come here now, you’ll save lives.”

He was stopped at a special forces checkpoint near Netivot around 9am, and they prevented him going any further. So he hopped on a pick-up truck, which was allowed through, and soon found himself fighting alongside a collection of random soldiers and ordinary Israelis outside Kibbutz Alumim. He managed to pick up a dead terrorist’s gun. “I was one of the first responders, the only one who survived the whole day, I think. There wasn’t time to communicate with people. It was the fight of our lives, a handful of us against hundreds and hundreds of terrorists. You’re outgunned, outnumbered. I saw many examples of bravery, even civilians. We gave everything we had to try to stop it.”

Everyone he came across until 7.30pm that night was dead. At the Alumim junction, he counted 23 bodies. “All of them were kids, like young adults. I didn’t know about the Nova festival. I was asking ‘Why are they dressed like that?’” Near the roadside, he found the body of a young woman, “her trousers pulled down, her underwear, blood on her backside.” Instinctively, Nimrod started to dress her.

“Of course they raped women,” Nimrod almost shouts. On one terrorist’s body, he found a detailed map of the kibbutzim and a list of Hebrew phrases. “Pull your pants down” was one of them. It was hard to preserve evidence, he says, because everyone was picking up the bodies as fast as possible. Hamas was still kidnapping the dead and taking them over the border. 

Palmach believes that Hamas was unaware the Nova festival was taking place. He thinks they could have made serious progress towards Tel Aviv, but conversations the terrorists had on video suggest the lure of raping beautiful young girls at the desert party was too tempting. “Suddenly, after all those years, the monster was released. A lot of them left their tasks. They were supposed to go to Israeli air force bases. Imagine the humiliation of a bunch of jihadists wearing their sandals standing next to an F35!”

He will never forget the carnage he witnessed in places like Kibbutz Be’eri. “I saw it all – women raped, dead kids in cars, families burned, some with body parts, some without. And the damage to the buildings, like a tornado passed. I saw the Holocaust,” he says. “So many dead bodies, many mutilated. The creativity of the deaths was overwhelming. A head speared on a rake. Hamas terrorists took their time. We didn’t have an army that day. I’ve seen what happens to the Jewish people without an army.”

Palmach, who spent five years in the special forces, says he wanted to go into Gaza. “I wanted to go not for revenge, but to see the Israeli army in a strong position. Our army was caught by surprise that day. I want to see the strength and power of the IDF again.” 

Militarily, he thinks Israel has been doing the right thing. “We’ve moved slowly, taken our time. You can’t clean Gaza in a week. We’re not shooting then checking, we’re checking then shooting. That’s what we do. We’re obligated in our moral fabric to bring the hostages back. We can strike Hamas to the point where it’s no longer a threat. I think we are 90 per cent of the way there.”

Like many survivors, Nimrod Palach is haunted by What Ifs. There is a desperately sad video, unbearable actually, of two girls being pursued by a terrorist. He shoots the first one, then the other drops to her knees and begs for her life. There is a brief pause before he shoots her in the head.

Nimrod thought he recognised the place where it happened. It was a few feet away from where he was at the Alumim junction. Why couldn’t he have saved her? Recently, he couldn’t sleep and he got in the car and drove to the spot. When he got there, he knelt down and said a prayer. In the dirt, he spotted the young woman’s credit card. “I saw her name, I called her mother. She answered. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ We both cried.” 

Earlier this week, as Iranian missiles were launched against Israel, I texted Nimrod to check he and the family were OK. It took a second before he texted back, “WE WILL WIN!” With people like him, of course they will.

‘We know our daughter is alive, and that’s enough for us to continue fighting for her life’

6.35am: Of all the traumatic starts to October 7, Meirav Gonen had one of the worst. Her daughter, 23-year-old Romi, had arrived at the Nova festival with her best friend Gali at 4.38am. There is a short video of the girls dancing, they look so happy. At 6.35am, Romi called her mother to say she was terrified because there were rockets. “She has PTSD because of the war in Lebanon, because we live in the north of Israel near the border and we always have rockets fired by Hezbollah.”

The girls went to look for their car. Eventually, they found it and managed to go one mile to the east, where they got stuck in a traffic jam that didn’t move. “They were trapped and then they started hearing people shouting, screaming, ‘Get out of the car. They’re coming to murder us.’”

The girls fled into a valley where they tried to hide but there wasn’t really any cover. A male friend of Gali came to rescue them. He had already got 12 people to safety, but, courageously, he came back. They picked up another guy and they were driving very fast on Route 232 and when they reached the Alumim junction (Nimrod would reach there later, but not in time to help Romi) there were terrorists waiting for them, and they sprayed the car with bullets.

Meirav received a phone call at 10.14 saying, “Mommy, I was shot. I’m bleeding, and I think I’m gonna die. Gali is not answering me anymore, the driver is killed, and I’m shot. There is another guy in the car. He was shot in the stomach.” Meirav says she could hear the guy barely breathing and suffering. She was talking to her daughter, trying to help, telling her to try and bandage the wound in her arm. But she was crying and she said she couldn’t.

There was fighting, soldiers on one side and terrorists on the other side of the car, they were in the middle. Meirav knows they were shot at 10.12am because Gali was on the phone with her father, and the driver was on the phone with his girlfriend. “And Gali, my daughter’s best friend, she died on the spot. We heard her last breath, and knew she was murdered.”

Meirav felt helpless hearing the terror in her child’s voice. “Once I understood I couldn’t help Romi, I just started telling her how much I loved her and she [was] strong. And what we would do when she comes back if they take her. Romi started hushing me, telling me to be quiet. Then, I heard the terrorists come into the car. I heard them opening the door. They were shouting in Arabic. And later on, I understood they said, ‘She’s alive, she’s alive! Take her, take her to the car’, something like that. 

“Romi told me they took her by the arm and pulled her by her hair, dragging her on the road. They punched her and she had a big bruise on her eye. Her phone fell and it was lying in a pool of blood, and I knew that she couldn’t pick it up, but I heard part of what was happening and I kept talking to her although I don’t know what she could hear. Then the phone went off.”

One of the benefits of mobile phones is the way they allow us to keep in touch with our kids, mostly about stupid stuff like missing keys. It was miraculous Meirav could be with her daughter for those moments, but also incredibly painful. I wonder how she feels about it now?

“Relief,” she says. “I have five kids, Romi is my third one, and the kids are glad she was with me and I was with her.”

Romi was supposed to be among the women released by Hamas last November but, agonisingly, she didn’t come out. “Women that came back told us she was with them in the tunnels. We know she’s alive, and that’s enough for all of us to continue fighting for her life.”

Meirav says her daughter is strong, a girl scout kind of person, resilient, with a big smile. “But, you know, after 349 days maybe she does not get enough food to be strong physically. Maybe in her mind she is, but she can lose her life in a minute. We saw that three weeks ago when they shot six of the hostages. We don’t trust, we don’t have the same assumptions any more that Western people have. Hamas are cruel. They will use the hostages to hurt us. Not just those 100 people, not just the Jews, but us as human beings, and we need to fight together.”

Two days after October 7, Meirav and her son went to the Nova festival site to try to retrace Romi’s steps. “We found underwears, bras hanging on bushes. Private stuff spread all around.” She hates the Nova memorial. “It’s too clean, too nice, too beautiful, very tidy. It doesn’t show anything of the hate that happened. It was hell, HELL! This is not a story. There were barbarians, monsters, they killed our children, they took them.”

Like many people I speak to during my days in Israel, Meirav is keen to stress that Hamas and their Iranian paymasters are a threat to the UK and to the entire free world. “What people don’t understand is that it’s not about Israel. It’s not antisemitism. And I would like us to stop talking about antisemitism. They didn’t come to kill us because we are Jews, because they murdered, butchered, raped Bedouin women, Christian women. People said, ‘I’m a Muslim’ and they killed them too. They came to kill whatever represents freedom. Sorry, this is about anti-freedom, anti-human, everything that humanity represents, they are against it. They are also anti-Palestinians, anti-Gaza people. But what they did to those young women, they are outside the human race. They are evil, not just to kill, but to delight in obliterating. Our aim is to live. We cherish life, and they cherish death, that’s the difference.”

Does she feel that enough has been done to bring the hostages home?

“It cannot be enough if they are not here. Everybody wants the hostages home, but I think that our leaders are not using their capabilities. They have a different role now, and that role is to unite us.”

Meirav and I are talking in a conference room in the Hostages HQ. On the walls, there are posters of all those still imprisoned in Gaza. Being here with her I feel the horror of it with sickening clarity. As it’s almost a year, all the hostages have had a birthday in captivity, a terrible thought somehow. Their ages have been updated on the posters:

• Shlomo Manzur – 85 86
• Iden Shtivi – 28 now 29
• Naam Levy – 19 now 20 (the young soldier seen on a Hamas video with bloodied jogging bottoms being manhandled out of the boot of a car)

Occasionally, just one word is written in the corner of a poster: “MURDERED” 

I look up at Romi’s lovely fresh face on her poster, Meirav catches my eye and knows what I’m thinking. What will be Romi’s fate? Israel was built on trauma. The trauma from October 7 goes on and on. The country won’t begin to heal until her people are home and safe, or at least home.

Does Meirav talk to Romi? 

She nods. “Yes, all the time. I tell her I love her, I tell her she’s strong. I tell her all the things we’ll do when she’s back. Sometimes, I feel too ashamed and too guilty.”

Why? 

“Because it’s too long.” 

It’s not your fault. 

“But I’m her mother. Nobody else is her mother.”

On my final day in Israel, I visit Yad Vashem, the nation’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. You have to come here, to this museum of incomprehensible suffering, to begin to comprehend, I think. In one gallery, there is a large glass case containing thousands of pairs of shoes. Eighty-five years old at least now, the shoes are gnarled, grey and brown. But there, amidst the mushroom mulch of sad sameness, are two pairs of women’s shoes. One has the faintest thread of gold, glamour;  the others were pumps, embroidered with flowers. I think of what Shari Mendes said about the young woman in the morgue with the beautiful pink manicure. The victims, those missing millions, were people, with vanity, with hope, with fancy footwear.

After several days at the morgue, when they were doing deep-tissue DNA extraction because some of the women had been so badly burned they could not be identified any other way (a year on, and five bodies still have no name), Shari wrote to her commander saying, “I’m not sure I can keep doing this.” What made her go on was the importance of testimony. Shari’s mother was a hidden child in the Holocaust, she survived, starving, in Slovakian woods. But almost everybody else in the family was murdered in terrible ways. The only way their descendants know what happened is because someone saw and passed the story on.  

Shari had a great-uncle Jacob, aged 20, a gentle soul by all accounts who ended up in Auschwitz in the Sonderkommando, the very worst job, loading the dead bodies into the ovens. “I kept saying, ‘If Jacob can do it, I can do it.’” Shari never dreamt she would have horror stories of her own to pass down.

Israel has been accused of weaponising 7/10, of exaggerating the sexual violence and Hamas’s sickening depravity. Of using it as “an excuse”. I have come to believe that the opposite is true. Nimrod told me he thought that government ministers and the army felt ashamed and humiliated that they had not protected people, the women in particular. That’s why Shari feels obliged to talk for them, however much she is attacked, “otherwise they’ll be forgotten”.

A group of new IDF recruits were at Yad Vashem that afternoon, maybe they were 18 or 19 years old. All around them was the onerous legacy of what it means to be born Jewish. At least you come out of that museum in no doubt as to why Israel has to exist.

In the final room, a guy with an Old Testament beard addressed the baby soldiers in Hebrew. I asked someone what he was saying, and they said, “He is telling them that the Jews were weak back then. Now we are the strong ones we must never behave as the Nazis behaved to us.”  

Trying to be the good guys and doomed to be seen by the world as the baddies; that is Israel’s burden. After October 7, they could not care less what the world thinks. Let’s finish with one astonishing young man who did his nation proud 12 months ago, and who should never be forgotten.  

‘I’ll catch the grenades and throw them back – and if I miss any, you throw them back’

If there is a single image of October 7 that will go down in history, it is of a tall, fair-haired young man in a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops standing at the entrance to a shelter, catching grenades with his bare hands. Aner Shapira had travelled to the Supernova festival in the Negev desert with his best friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin. It was “the best party in the world,” according to one excited girl with flowing dark hair, although Hersh did briefly fret about how close they were to the border with Gaza.

Just after dawn, when the sleepy crowd was admiring the fireworks in the sky (they were rockets), Aner, Hersh and their group took one last selfie. They look blissed-out; just your average young people who have stayed up all night at a trance party dedicated to love, peace and psychedelic drugs. They didn’t know that horror was lurking just outside the frame. The milky, early-morning sky was speckled with black dots – a demonic squadron of paragliding terrorists.

Hamas had breached the 40-mile southern border in 30 different places, along with an estimated 3,000 Gazan civilians eager to become shahids (martyrs). At Nova, they found 3,500 defenceless kids to hunt down at their leisure. Over the next six hours of scarcely credible barbarity, that idyllic location became Israel’s killing fields. It was like a Biblical exodus. A new BBC documentary, Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again, uses footage from the festival-goers’ own phones to show the visceral reality. They stumbled across the barren, pitted landscape in their party gear; desperately trying to escape, they were gunned down or burnt alive in their vehicles. Hamas’s own body-cam film shows those who stumbled or were dragged from bushes being put to death with a shrug of the shoulders. “Another dog (Jew) – it is his fate.”

Some, like Noa Argamani, were taken hostage on a motorbike, others hid silently in skips and orchards, playing dead as they listened to the screams of their friends. Shani Louk, a striking, dreadlocked 22-year-old German-Israeli, was abducted from the festival she had adored. Her half-naked body (brutally dislocated, one leg at an obscene right angle) was paraded by her captors on the back of a truck through the cheering streets of Gaza. They spat on her. Sexual violence was common that disgusting day. One police officer came upon a glade where young women, clothing torn, underwear wrenched aside, were tied to trees with their wrists bound above their mutilated heads. (Shari Mendes and her unit would soon be preparing those girls from Nova for burial.) 

Aner and Hersh ran to the highway, Route 232. (Nimrod Palmach, who was desperately fighting terrorists a couple of miles north couldn’t understand why the bodies strewn across the road were dressed in party clothes. Communication was so bad soldiers didn’t even know about the Nova festival.) The boys took refuge in a migunit (a small roadside public bomb shelter with no door) where up to 30 young people were already hiding. During his military service, 22-year-old Staff Sgt Aner Elyakim Shapira had been promoted to an elite army unit when his commanders noticed what an incredible soldier and all-round terrific person he was.

“Hi everyone,” he announced. “I am Aner Shapira, I serve in the Orev unit of the Nahal brigade. My friends from the army are coming soon. I am going to take care of things here, so don’t worry.” A video taken on a phone picked up someone in the shelter responding, “Thank you, Aner, we feel calmer now.”

Realising that the terrorists would throw grenades into that dangerously small, enclosed space, Aner told the group to lie down and cover their heads: “I’ll catch the grenades and throw them back – and if I miss any, you throw them back.”

He was as good as his word. A camera on the dashboard of a car parked outside recorded terrorists walking up and lobbing a grenade through the megunit doorway; and the grenade coming right back out again. Aner caught at least seven of them. Legend has it (for he is already a legend) that the eighth exploded, but his father, Moshe Shapiro, believes it was a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that finally killed his beloved son. 

“A military historian says that, since the grenade was invented, there is nothing like this, somebody thinking they could hold a grenade – hold it not once, not twice, but eight times. And throw it back,” Moshe tells me with fierce paternal pride. That lonely last stand – Aner against 20 terrorists – endured for 34 minutes. Moshe knows almost every second of it by heart. “It’s amazing when you think 20 terrorists came heavily-armed with grenades, with RPGs, everything. And Aner was without anything, just a broken beer bottle. And he succeeded in holding them for 34 minutes till the third RPG hit the migunit. And the RPG, you can’t do anything, the explosion is very, very strong. So – boom! – and, therefore, he saw it coming to him, but he wasn’t able to hold it, and he died.”

We are talking in the penthouse kitchen-living room of the Shapiras’ apartment which has a panoramic view over East Jerusalem. Propped up in one corner is an enlarged photograph of Aner, which was taken over the crouched forms of people packed like sardines inside the shelter. He is standing just inside the threshold, his body tilted forward, tensed, ready for a catch, like a cricketer in the slips.

Both Aner’s parents are architects. Mum Shira is a British Israeli who was born in Oxford when her father was studying for a PhD. Preoccupied today, Shira is on the phone arguing for a thousand burnt-out cars that lined the route away from Nova to be preserved as evidence (insurance people want to sell the vehicles, still full of unquiet ghosts, because for each car you can get $2,000 for the iron). Eventually, the Shapiras hope they will be historic artefacts featured in a 7/10 exhibition or permanent monument.

Moshe, strong-featured and handsome, gets up and comes back with a shallow, glass-topped wooden case which he sets down on the table between us. It’s full of bullets, cartridges, shards of glass and other bits that the Shapiras gathered from the shelter a month after their boy’s murder. Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s left arm was blown off, possibly by the same blast that killed his boyhood friend. Hersh was taken hostage along with three others from the shelter and held in Gaza for 330 days, becoming the poster boy for all of those brutally abducted, thanks to the tireless efforts of his mother Rachel. (On September 1, a fortnight before I arrive in Israel, Hersh and five other young hostages are executed in a tunnel under Rafah, in southern Gaza, with bullets to the back of the head. The appalling conditions in which they were held and the failure to broker a deal or a ceasefire to rescue them weighed heavily on all of Israeli society, I was told. It reopened agonising wounds barely scabbed over since October 7, and it brought further heavy criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. Failure to bring the remaining 101 hostages home is widely seen as breaking the social contract between state and citizen, a serious matter in a country where so many are expected to put their lives on the line.)

Moshe gets me a coffee before talking me through his mementoes. “This is what we found in the liquid on the floor, the blood, all these bullets. This is a hand grenade which exploded and this is the RPG.” Moshe holds up the weapon’s steel tail which is like the bristling insides of a hefty umbrella. As he tells me more about the eldest of his seven children, he clutches the RPG that ended Aner’s life, like a Catholic would use a rosary to pray.

Aner Shapira most certainly did not fit the stereotype of the “genocide-committing IDF” which is drawn by pro-Palestine “River to the Sea” marchers and moronic American college kids sporting recreational keffiyehs to match their anti-semitism. An artist and musician (he played classical piano from the age of six and latterly wrote and recorded rap songs), Aner, as his father recalls with fond bemusement, was “an anarchist. He didn’t believe in nationality. He was against flags. He believed in the good in people, and that society should be free of police systems. He was also against the army, so he lived in a conflict with himself about that, but he saw the need for the army to defend the country, and he gave his all to serve.”

As a small boy, Aner already had a fierce sense of social justice. He would loudly berate police on the street if he saw them treating illegal immigrants roughly and called out racism in particular and unkindness in general. “We kept telling him the police may open a file against you,” Moshe laughs, shaking his head, “but he didn’t care. Aner was always against what he saw as evil being done to anybody.” Two months before the massacre, Aner took a vacation in Greece where he saw some Free Palestine posters in a café window. “He went in to talk to them,” Moshe recalls. “He thought he could help them understand the conflict, that it’s not always black and white. He believed in people.”

Moshe takes a more cynical view than his son. He points out that Hamas took control in Gaza after free elections, “and they got a big support so that’s really sad. Where is the resistance to terrorism among Palestinians?” He gestures outside to the roof terrace and to an Arab village beyond. “After the slaughter of October 7, they started letting off fireworks to celebrate. These are our neighbours. I mean, the village it’s like 100 metres from my house.” 

The Muslim villagers, Moshe points out, enjoy a good life in Israel, they own the local bus company, nice houses, full civil rights, “but the hatred is so deep”. He blames UNWRA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) and schools in Gaza for feeding children anti-semitic poison. “Even the Right-wing extremists in Israel would never teach their kids to slaughter and regard people as not human.”

Out of respect for his son’s tender nature, Moshe is at pains to point out that Aner’s “act of bravery” was for “the surviving of people, not the killing of the terrorists”. In fact, Aner Shapira perfectly encapsulates GK Chesterton’s maxim: “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

Moshe tells me one story which reveals a bigger truth about Israel, I think. Not long before the war, Moshe took part in the widespread demonstrations against plans by Netanyahu’s government to overhaul the judicial system – cancelling the Supreme Court’s ability to block government actions and appointments, it was felt by many to be a threat to democracy. He asked Aner to join him. Aner refused. He said he had heard people at a protest saying that soldiers should disobey commands, and he couldn’t stay because he was disgusted. “But why, you’re an anarchist?” his father pointed out. Aner rebuked his dad, saying his unit was fighting terrorists who were trying to kill civilians. “When you have a cruel enemy that wants to kill us, we need discipline,” Aner said. “I can’t disobey the commands because they are for rescuing people, it’s not a game, we have to save lives. I will never let somebody else risk his life in order to save me. I prefer to be the one that rescues.” And so he was.

Aner died on Saturday the 7th, but the Shapiras had no idea what had happened to him until they got a call on the Monday. The entire family sat on the sofa and heard the voice of a girl on speakerphone saying: “I can’t speak, but I want to tell you how Aner handled the situation and, thanks to him, I’m alive.”

“What situation? We didn’t know. She couldn’t speak, she was in shock.” Later, the father of the guy that took the picture of Aner in the shelter called Moshe and said: “I don’t know if he’s dead or heavily injured”, but his own boy had seen Aner in action, catching multiple grenades. “He said, ‘Thanks to your son, my son and his girlfriend are alive.’” Although the family found it hard to believe the grenades story, a video from the dashcam which soon went viral proved it.

Aner was buried at Mount Herzl on October 10. Rachel Goldberg-Polin posted a remarkable tribute to him on Facebook. “How can I talk about beautiful Aner? I remember him as a boy, in Hersh’s room, sitting on his bed laughing and speaking to me in his heavily accented English… always in English, to make me feel comfortable. And I remember listening to his music; he composed the music and created the lyrics in such a beautiful and sometimes hilarious way. I think of the treks and adventures the boys went on together, starting at a young age and continuing through as they became young men. And I think of the 11 people who walked out of that bomb shelter on October 7. Eight of them sleeping at home tonight and three sleeping in Gaza, and I know the ONLY reason any of those people are alive is because of sweet, brave, clever, fearless beloved Aner. Why isn’t there a word bigger than hero? Aner, you are our bigger-than-hero. May your beautiful memory be for a blessing.”

I tell Moshe I can’t believe how mature Aner was for a 22-year-old, instinctively taking command and assuming responsibility for so many others, and Shira corrects me; “he was 22 and a half, he’d be 23 now.”

The Shapiras clearly get huge consolation from the strangers that Aner saved. “They said that they didn’t see any fear in his eyes,” Moshe says. “He was focusing on the mission.” He takes out his phone to show me the video of Hamas attacking the megunit. You can see the grenades that Aner is throwing back at the terrorists. 

“We are lucky,” his father says. “We have recordings from inside the shelter and we have the movie from the outside. They were not exaggerating what Aner did. It’s a gift from God to have this documentation, otherwise nobody would have believed it.”

I get that, but I still wonder how I’d feel watching the video if that was my son, who is close in age to Aner. “You’ve collected all these things, Moshe,” I say. “Is it helpful to you and Shira to know exactly what happened to him in those terrible minutes?”

Moshe nods: “There is a phrase in Judaism that’s called ‘the mercy of truth’. It deals with all the things that you’re doing for somebody that died. It’s a charity because you won’t get anything from it. But I think that we got a charity of truth. To get the truth as it was for Aner is a charity, yes, because so many people don’t know what happened to their kids on that day.”

Some 364 young people who attended the Nova festival were murdered, and 44 were taken hostage (Meirav Gonen’s darling Romi is still in Gaza 12 months on. “We love you, stay strong.”). Noa Argamani was rescued by ground forces, but the boyfriend she cried out for from the motorbike – Avinatan Or – has not come home. The only way Shani Louk’s death could be confirmed was when a piece of her skull was found in Gaza.

“Aner didn’t succeed in saving his life,” Moshe says. “But he succeeded in showing that you can’t go to slaughter like a sheep. You have to stand, and it’s amazing, you know, he did succeed. He succeeded because you show the world that if you have a spirit, even if you’re unarmed, you can face evil and you can fight.”

I visited the Nova festival site on a perfect sunny afternoon. It is an eerily beautiful place; no screams now, no remorseless gunfire, no jubilant monsters hellbent on martyrdom, just the tinkle of wind chimes attached to memorials with their photos of each young victim (so many faces so full of promise, my God, so many), and the sound of visitors softly weeping.

On the drive home, we stop at the megunit, the site of Aner’s last stand. Rust-coloured blood everywhere, on the floors, on the walls pitted by gunfire. It is shockingly small, the size of a garden shed; so small that the living managed to stay alive under the bodies.

As long as they live, today’s young Israelis will always be the Nova generation. Their attitudes have hardened, or so people say, because they saw what your enemy does to you if you don’t pay attention. That’s a cruel lesson students in the West, who idly lend their support to Islamist rapists and murderers, should pray they never have to learn. 

What a leader of his country Aner Shapira could have been. A sensitive soldier who inhabited the contradictions of being a Jew surrounded by hatred, a peace-lover who had to take up arms to save people. Who knows? Aner might have persuaded the world that Israel was on the side of good. On the first anniversary of October 7, we may glimpse the tall, fair-haired young man standing there in the doorway still, alert, ready to protect. “I’ll catch the grenades and throw them back.”

In a windowless room, somewhere in the bowels of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters, Chief of Staff Lt Gen Herzi Halevi jabbed his index finger forward.

Israel had just assassinated the Hezbollah leader and was about to invade Lebanon when he summoned his generals and commanders to take instructions.

But pictures of the meeting released to the press showed a seemingly unrelated image in the background.

Up on a screen mounted on the wood-panelled wall are fourteen mugshots of the Hamas chain of command – most of them with a giant red cross over them to mark that they had been killed.

At the top of the chain was public enemy no 1, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, with his grey hair and salt and pepper beard. For the first time since the war began, he had a question mark over his head.

The image set off a fresh round of speculation that Israel’s most wanted, the man who planned and ordered the Oct 7 massacres, was finally dead.

A little over a week until the anniversary of the terror attacks this coming Monday, was it possible the IDF had finally got their man?

Rumours about his possible death had emerged a few weeks earlier when intelligence officials began briefing that one of the precision airstrikes that had levelled Gaza may have killed the leader.

No concrete evidence has emerged since, but the pattern follows similar high-level assassinations in Gaza, which have taken a few weeks to be publicly announced.

Two well-placed Israeli officials told The Telegraph that the defence establishment believes that Sinwar is now dead.

One of the sources said that “it is highly likely that Yahya Sinwar was eliminated in one of the IDF strikes. The assessments in Israel’s security leadership suggest that Sinwar was most likely killed.”

However, plenty of caution remains. Sceptics question the timing around the Oct 7 anniversary and how Israel would have killed a man said to have been hidden deep underground and surrounded, according to reports, by Israeli hostages.

Sinwar could have decided the best way to keep himself safe as assassinations take down his top leaders is to retreat entirely from view. American officials told the New York Times they believed Sinwar is still alive and making key decisions for Hamas. 

The clues

Israeli sources told The Telegraph that one piece of evidence emerging about his possible death was an end to communications with the leader.

One source said the handwritten notes delivered by couriers that had been keeping the hostage negotiations alive had dried up.

However, Israel also announced on Thursday it had killed Sinwar’s right-hand man some three months ago. Rawhi Mushtaha was allegedly one of those involved in the complex human chain of delivering the notes.

Israel’s intelligence machine has relied on tracking couriers in the past, notably to find and kill Hamas’ military chief Mohammed Deif, who was killed in an airstrike in Gaza in July. The US adopted a similar technique to find Osama bin Laden.

Sources suggested Israel’s defence establishment is believed to be currently in a situation similar to when an airstrike targeted Mr Deif in Khan Younis on July 13. The official confirmation of his death was announced nearly three weeks later on August 1.

Sinwar was appointed the political leader of Hamas after Ishmail Haniyeh was killed in an alleged Israeli attack in Tehran in July, making him the all-powerful figure of the terror group.

Widely seen as the architect behind the Oct 7 massacre, he is considered the most valuable target for Israel, which refers to him as a “dead man walking.”

Israeli forces have scoured Gaza for Sinwar since they invaded the enclave in late October and even came close to capturing him several times. The IDF assessed early on in the war that the Hamas leader was hiding in southern Gaza, specifically in a tunnel deep underground.

In February, the IDF released the first footage of Sinwar since Oct 7, showing his children and wife walking through a tunnel under a cemetery in the Bani Suheila area in Khan Younis.

Sinwar is seen in flip flops and carrying a bag as he walks through the tunnel behind his family on Oct 10 but Israeli soldiers only reached the tunnel in February where they found the surveillance footage.

IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said that the tunnel from which Sinwar escaped before Israeli forces came contained “bedrooms of senior Hamas officials and the office of the commander of the Khan Younis Brigade’s Eastern Battalion, from where he directed the attack on Oct 7”.

Senior Hamas officials resided in the compound in “comfortable conditions” with food and bathrooms, along with safes with “personal funds of millions of shekels and dollars in cash,” Mr Hagari added.

In December, Mr Netanyahu announced that Israeli troops had surrounded Mr Sinwar’s home in Khan Younis.

“I said last night that our forces could reach anywhere in the Gaza Strip. Now, they are encircling Sinwar’s home. His home is not his fortress, and while he may flee, it is only a matter of time until we get him,” Mr Netanyahu said.

In August, the outgoing commander of the IDF’s 98th Division, Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus, told Channel 12 that the army was “minutes” away from catching the Hamas leader.

“We were close. We were in his compound. We got to an underground compound.  We found a lot of money there. The coffee was still hot. Weapons strewn around,” Mr Goldfus said.

And as Israel continues to kill Hamas commanders, Mr Sinwar is running out of places to hide.

“Every day, he has trouble finding places where he can hide. The list of associates and confidants is being reduced,” a security source told the Jerusalem Post in August.

But Israel is also dealing with a far wider and more complex network of tunnels than they believed existed before the invasion.

That leaves intelligence gathering as the key.

The hunt

Hunters fall under an umbrella of units under the Israeli Security Agency and include intelligence officers, special operation units from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), military engineers and surveillance experts.

Teams of experts entering the tunnels, like the special section of the Combat Engineering Corps, are armed with ground-penetrating radar.

Yahalom, a special section within the Combat Engineering Corps, has more experience in tunnel warfare than any of its counterparts in Western armies and has access to state-of-the-art US-made ground-penetrating radar.

Many clues have turned up in Hamas compounds revealing everything from the terror group’s plans, orders, maps and blueprints of compound structures.

Seized computers, documents and surveillance footage have all helped keep the trail warm.

“Hundreds and thousands of interrogations of terrorists and senior leaders would not have yielded such intimate intelligence on their methods of order and organisation in such a short period,” a military official said in July.

But the interrogations of thousands of members of Hamas and other terror groups who were arrested since Oct 7 has also helped.

They have so far led to the IDF finding tunnels and weapon depots and revealing hospitals and Red Crescent facilities Hamas allegedly uses to operate from.

“Each and every investigation leads to the incrimination of new sites, and the human intelligence that emerges… is an inseparable layer of the complete intelligence picture,” the IDF said already back in November.

The importance of tracking Sinwar’s communication with other members has also become clear.

Previously Israel’s secretive signals intelligence unit 8200 had been employed to eavesdrop on Hamas communications.

But their role was reduced since Hamas leadership ditched all electronic communication in favour of notes and oral messages delivered by runners.

“Using complex means, he communicates with all the leadership of the movement both inside (Gaza) and outside, and also with the (Ezzedine) al-Qassam Brigades,” a senior Hamas leader told AfP.

“He follows complex security procedures for his personal protection, but this does not prevent him from continuing his duties and making decisions,” he added.

The repercussions

If Mr Sinwar has been killed, it raises a number of questions.

Khaled Meshaal, the former leader of Hamas, is perhaps the only person who could fill his shoes and govern the terror group effectively, albeit from abroad and not inside Gaza.

There is also the possibility that hostages may have been killed in the same strike on Sinwar.

If so, the Israeli government will be met with fury from the vast majority of the public that wants a ceasefire deal with Hamas.

In theory, killing Sinwar could give Mr Netanyahu the win he needs to sign a deal that could end the war and release the remaining hostages.

Khalil al-Hayya, the deputy leader of Hamas, is currently representing the terror group in the negotiations, which notably have been stalled for weeks.

But since he doesn’t have a mandate to strike a deal by himself, there won’t be any ceasefire until Mr Sinwar either shows signs of life, and re-engages with mediators, or he is announced dead and a new leader is appointed.

Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s national security council, told The Telegraph that there are definitely “signs” that Sinwar has been killed.

But he added he hasn’t received any information from Israeli officials he’s spoken to in recent weeks.

“It’s still a mystery,” he said.

Mr Netanyahu’s speech on Sunday raised eyebrows as it listed Sinwar alongside other commanders killed by Israel.

“The regime in Tehran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves and to exact a price from our enemies. Sinwar and Deif did not understand this; neither did Nasrallah or Mohsen,” Mr Netanyahu said.

When a group of young Bangladeshis started playing cricket in a park in the Italian town of Monfalcone, the reaction from local authorities was uncompromising.

They were ordered to pack up their bats and balls and leave the park that sits beneath the town’s medieval stone fortress. Then they were issued with heavy fines.

“We don’t have any opportunity to play cricket. There are 9,000 of us Bangladeshis in Monfalcone, and there is no pitch,” said Sakib Miah, 25, a keen cricketer. “If we go and play, the police arrive and we get a 100 euro fine.”

Mr Miah is one of thousands of Bangladeshis and other south Asians who live in Monfalcone, drawn to the town over the last 20 years by the promise of work in the nearby Fincantieri shipyards, which are among the largest in Europe.

Of the town’s population of 31,000, a third are migrants – one of the highest proportions of any town or city in Italy.

Not everyone in Monfalcone has welcomed the newcomers, or their fondness for cricket.

Anna Maria Cisint, the mayor of the town in the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, has effectively banned cricket from being played. She is a member of the hard-Right League party which is part of Giorgia Meloni’s governing coalition.

She insists that cricket is a menace to public safety, saying that errant balls have smashed the windows of houses and damaged parked cars. The ban applies to any sport that could be dangerous, she says, such as baseball.

While the resounding thwack of leather on willow conjures up images of immaculate village greens and long lazy afternoons, at least in British minds, in this corner of Italy close to the border with Slovenia, cricket has become a battleground.

“Cricket balls have caused serious damage to homes and cars – they travel at 160 kph. They’re heavy and they’re very dangerous – if they hit you in the head, they could kill someone,” said the mayor, whose father and grandfather worked in the shipyards.

But the Bangladeshi community views the prohibition as an unnecessary act of spite.

They have been asking for years for the council to provide them with a cricket pitch where they can play in peace.

The clash of cultures is in many ways a microcosm of the rapid changes that Italy is undergoing as it evolves from a largely white society into a more multicultural country of first, second and even third generation immigrants.

“First of all, we don’t have any space. Also, we don’t have the economic resources,” said the mayor in her office in the town hall, which overlooks Monfalcone’s elegant main piazza.

‘We just want to have fun’

The town’s cricket enthusiasts don’t buy that argument.

“That’s not true, there is plenty of space,” said Tanim Hossain, 27, who like many of the local cricketers works at the Fincantieri shipyards.

“We’ve been asking for years and years. We can’t take part in tournaments because we can’t train.

“We just want to play and have fun after our shifts. We use a soft ball not a traditional, hard ball. We have never broken windows or damaged cars.”

The immigrants say that without them, work at the shipyards would grind to a halt. They arrive in their thousands each day, riding beaten-up old bicycles which they park in racks outside the entrance to the docks.

It is not just cricket that the mayor has a problem with. She takes issue with many other aspects of the immigrants’ presence in Monfalcone, saying their way of life is incompatible with Italian society.

“They don’t want to integrate. The women walk around fully veiled, with only their eyes visible. It is unacceptable that a little girl of six goes to school with her face totally covered,” said Ms Cisint, who has been mayor since 2016 and was recently elected an MEP representing the League.

“We have had cases of young women being beaten by their parents and forced into arranged marriages.”

The mayor will be taking her warning about the dangers of “Islamification” and the migrant “invasion” to Brussels, she says.

She is currently engaged in a battle to shut down the town’s two Islamic cultural centres, saying they lack planning permission because one was set up in an old pizzeria and the other in a former fishmonger’s shop.

Mayor had death threats

She says that past media coverage has cast her as “a monster”, as a result of which she has received death threats from Islamists. For the last 10 months, she has lived under police protection.

“Having foreigners as a third of our population is maybe the highest percentage of any town in Italy. It’s not easy to live like this. This is not Milan or London, it’s a small town,” she said.

All these criticisms are vigorously contested by Sani Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi community leader and an opposition councillor representing the centre-Left Democratic Party.

“You can’t generalise. If there is one person who is not integrated, you cannot say that everyone is like that,” he said.

“There are 9,000 Bangladeshis in this town. If a woman wants to wear a hijab, or wants to walk around nude for that matter, that is her right. Bangladeshis pay taxes, they contribute to the economic growth of this country.”

Mr Bhuiyan, 34, who runs a financial and migration consultancy, came to Italy in 2006 at the age of 16 after his father found a job in the shipyards.

“I came here, I learned Italian, I can speak six languages, I have been elected a city councillor…how can I integrate more than this?” he asks.

Mr Bhuiyan also says It is “ridiculous” to deny the south Asian community a cricket pitch, adding: “You bring people to work here, to build nice cruise ships in the shipyards, but when it’s time to recognise their rights, you deny them.

“In Monfalcone we have skating rinks, football pitches, basketball and volleyball courts – everything except a cricket pitch.

“They’re acting like the pharaohs who built the pyramids, treating us like slaves. It’s discrimination against non-Europeans. They don’t accept diversity. In a time of globalisation, this is ridiculous.”

‘It’s a lack of respect’

Nicola Pieri, the centre-Left mayor of the neighbouring town of Turriaco, accuses the mayor of Monfalcone of denying immigrants a cricket pitch out of “spite”.

“Monfalcone is big – they could easily find the space and provide a cricket pitch for them. It’s a lack of respect, it’s out of spite,” he said.

“These young guys just want to play cricket. Sport is one of the ways in which you can help integration. Bangladeshi kids play football, maybe the opposite can be encouraged – that Italian kids play cricket.”

The culture clash in Monfalcone is a distillation of many of the issues that Italy, as an increasingly multicultural society, is having to confront.

That includes a rancorous national debate about changing the law to make it easier for the children of migrants to become Italian citizens. Currently, they cannot even apply for citizenship until they reach the age of 18, leaving an entire generation in limbo and putting Italy at odds with most other European countries.

Changes worry locals

“The country is changing. The birth rate among Italians is constantly declining. We need to expand our vision and think about what Italy will be like in 10 or 20 years’ time. It will be a much more multi-ethnic country,” said Mr Pieri.

For some locals, it is not cricket per se that they object to, but the dramatic demographic and social changes that have occurred to the town since the Bangladeshis and other immigrants started arriving two decades ago.

“When you go into the piazza, you don’t recognise anyone you know anymore. The Bangladeshis keep to themselves. The mothers speak very little Italian. Their kids have to translate for them. Some want to integrate but they are rare cases,” said Emanuela De Matteis, the owner of a restaurant in the town centre.

Sakib Miah, the 25-year-old who is desperate to play cricket, says he and his friends are now thinking of trying to raise enough money to buy a plot of land to make a pitch.

If each of them chips in 20 euros a month, they might have enough funds within five years, he calculates. He looks forward to the day that he can play a few overs after a long week of working shifts in the shipyards.

“It would be not just for us, but for our kids, and for Italian kids too, if they would like to learn to play,” he said.

“It’s cricket. It’s just a game. We never wanted it to become so political.”

A “diva” beaver who was raised in captivity is at the centre of a court fight after it was mandated that it must be released into the wild.

A judge has said that for now, two-year-old Nibi will be allowed to stay in its home at Newhouse Wildlife Rescue in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, north-west of Boston.

Its release was ordered by MassWildlife, the state’s division of fisheries and wildlife, after caregivers applied for a permit for Nibi to become an “educational beaver”, which would allow them to take it to schools, libraries and town halls.

But the permit was rejected, and Nibi was ordered to be released. A hearing has been set for Friday in the case the rescuers filed against MassWildlife to stop it.

Jane Newhouse, the rescue group’s founder and president, said that after Nibi was found on the side of a road, they tried to reunite it with nearby beavers who could have been her parents but were unsuccessful. After that, attempts to help it to bond with other beavers also failed.

“It’s very difficult to consider releasing her when she only seems to like people and seems to have no interest in being wild or bonding with any of her own species,” Newhouse said.

Nibi has a large enclosure with a pool at the rescue operation, and will also wander in its yard and rehabilitation space, Newhouse said. “She pretty much has [the] full run of the place. Everybody on my team is in love with her,” she said.

Nibi has been a hit on the rescue group’s social media since it was a baby, and posts about its impending release garnered thousands of comments.

An online petition to save Nibi from being released has received over 25,000 signatures. Lawmakers have also weighed in, and this week Maura Healey, the Governor of Massachusetts, pledged to make sure Nibi is protected.

MassWildlife said Thursday that it is “committed to protecting the well-being of all wildlife, including Nibi the beaver”. It added that Nibi “will remain in place at this time” as agency officials “work with Newhouse Wildlife Rescue on the best steps forward.”

A police force has apologised after putting down a family’s pet XL bully dog by mistake.

Lancashire Constabulary said it had given the family an “unreserved apology” for euthanising the seized dog, named Bruno, while the owners were in the process of applying for an exemption to keep him.

In a statement, the force said Bruno was put down due to an “administration error”.

“In August we seized an XL bully dog from an address in Morecambe as part of our powers under the Dangerous Dogs Act as XL bully dogs are a banned breed,” the statement said.

“A file was being prepared for consideration of the owner being prosecuted for the relevant offences.

“However, unfortunately, due to an administration error the dog was subsequently euthanised before the court hearing.”

A ‘never event’

The force added that it has introduced a process “to ensure the same mistake cannot be made again”.

Lizzi Collinge, MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, told the BBC that she is demanding answers over the incident.

“This should be a ‘never event’ and I have taken this issue up directly with the police,” she said.

Ms Collinge added: “I was shocked to see that a much-loved pet dog, Bruno, was wrongly euthanised while in police care.

“Processes should have been in place to ensure this never happened.

“There is a legal process when dogs are under police care and it appears this hasn’t been followed.

“I will continue to support the family and I appeal to the police to disclose how they are changing their practices so that this is something that can never happen again.”

Schools as well as Labour’s VAT raid are to blame for the middle-class exodus from private education, the former headmaster of the King’s alma mater has said.

Mark Pyper, who ran Gordonstoun for two decades, said private education had become “cripplingly expensive” because independent schools had spent millions on high-tech facilities.

He said those in charge had been guilty of “extraordinary profligacy” at parents’ expense.

His comments come ahead of Labour imposing VAT on independent school fees from Jan 1 2025, adding 20 per cent to education costs.

The Government hopes the measure will raise an extra £1.5 billion for the Treasury, but has also recognised that it will lead to pupils leaving private schools for the state sector.

Writing for The Telegraph, Mr Pyper said: “It is school heads and governors who have made independent education so cripplingly expensive in the first place.

“All those state-of-the-art sports facilities with their Astroturf pitches and Olympic-sized swimming pools and multi-million-pound music halls and ‘performing arts’ centres (AKA theatres)? Lovely to have but hardly essential.

“Brilliant concerts can be given in old gymnasiums and great plays can be performed in backyards.

“As for the ever more imaginative extra-curricular activities, does anyone really need polo, or origami lessons?

“Bluntly, those in charge have been guilty of extraordinary profligacy at others’ expense,” he added.

Real-terms increase

A report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that there had been a 20 per cent real-terms increase in average fees since 2010, and a 55 per cent rise since 2003.

Mr Pyper added: “While they competed to provide the smartest facilities for work, play and pleasure – forgetting that the finest education depends not on the edifice but on the educator – most parents were never even asked if this is what they really wanted.

“Given the choice between ever higher fees and less discretionary spending, I think I know how the majority of parents would vote.”

The former headmaster, who has been a governor of eight other independent schools, urged the sector to “call halt to building more Valhallas and pleasure domes” to save money.

He also suggested that the curriculum be cut down to offer fewer subjects and exam systems, as well as enlarging class sizes, to save the school, and parents, money.

Mr Pyper said that private schools could look to generate more revenue “without attempting to squeeze yet more from parents”.

“Making better commercial use of facilities during holidays would be an obvious place to start. Most schools are in full operation for only 34 or 35 weeks of the year.”

The King attended Gordonstoun from 1962 until 1967. Earlier this year, in an apparent nod to the five formative years he spent at Gordonstoun, the monarch accepted a patronage to mark the first anniversary of his coronation.

A planning row has erupted in a Georgian conservation area after the council ordered an orange and blue shopfront to be repainted.

Peters’ Cleaner in Stamford, Lincolnshire was given the bold makeover in October 2022 in an attempt to make it “stand out”.

Vicky Whiter, its owner, has since been locked in a battle with South Kesteven district council because she did not apply for planning permission before the “unacceptable” paint job.

Conservation rules in her area of Stamford, which has been dubbed “Britain’s most picturesque” town, mean that any repainting of shopfronts needs to be approved by the council.

Ms Whiter said that she was unaware of the rules when she had it painted the shopfront and that she cannot afford to pay to have it changed, which she estimates would cost as much as £5,000.

She said: “I budget to re-decorate the shop front every four years and will happily adhere to all planning when I plan to re-decorate in the summer of 2026.”

“At this time however I cannot put the survival of my business at risk by spending now.”

Ms Whiter’s shop was previously painted dark blue, which she said made it hard to identify.

The new colours were introduced along with a vinyl orange screen covering the top of the front window which Ms Whiter said was necessary to protect her and her employees from the sun which shines into the shop for most of the day.

Several other shops in Stamford have eye-catching shades, including Oliver Bonas, which stands out in pink in the High Street, and Joules, which sports yellow.

Ms Whiter said she fears that she will be taken to court by the council if her request for more time to repaint the shopfront is refused.

According to the Stamford Shopfront Design Guide, a document drawn up by the district council to ensure that the heritage is retained, the maximum penalty for breaking the rules is two years in prison and an unlimited fine.

The rules include a recommendation to use white or neutral colours on slender shopfronts, and a single colour for all the major elements of the design.

But there is no indication of what colours are and are not allowed.

“This bullish attitude is unfathomable,” Ms Whiter said.

“Stamford’s independent shops are the heart and soul of the town and are what makes it special.”

She added: “I very much hope the council will take a pragmatic and supportive stance and work with small independent retailers to ensure that by improving the look of the high street they don’t immeasurably damage it by driving independents out of business.”

A spokesman for South Kesteven district council said any changes to the shop were subject to conservation area and listed building rules.

They said: “Listing ensures that the architectural and historic interests of buildings are carefully considered separately from the merits of any development proposals and before any alterations, either external or internal, are agreed.

“Listed building consent is required for any changes that would alter their special character.

“No advice or guidance was sought prior to the painting of these premises but council officers have since suggested alternative paint colours that would be appropriate and are happy to continue to work with the applicant to agree both these and a timescale for the repainting of the shopfront.”

Britain has never been fatter – with the average man weighing 14st by middle age, according to new data.

The NHS statistics show that we weigh around a stone more than we did 30 years ago – while waistlines keep expanding.

Middle-aged women now weigh an average of 12st, the figures show, with waists of around 36in.

Men of the same age tip the scales at 14st, with a waistband of around 40in.

Health officials said the figures, which reflect the average weights for those aged between 45 and 64, were “worrying” – saying obesity is now one of the greatest challenges facing the country.

It comes as new research suggests that adult obesity may now have peaked in the US. Rates have fallen by around two percentage points since 2020, to 40 per cent.

In England the figure is 26 per cent. Experts said increased employment of weight-loss drugs, which one in eight American adults have used, could be behind the recent US dip.

The NHS is now gearing up for the mass rollout of weight-loss jabs for the first time. The proposals will see up to 1.6 million people offered injections of tirzepatide, marketed as Mounjaro, with some prescriptions issued via “remote clinics” following online consultations.

The jabs will be targeted at the heaviest patients with the most health problems, starting with those with a BMI over 40 and multiple chronic illnesses.

But the national research results reveal a far wider problem – with two in three people losing in the battle of the bulge.

‘Diabetes, heart attack and stroke’

Dr Clare Hambling, NHS national clinical director for diabetes and obesity, said: “These worrying figures highlight that obesity is now one of the greatest public health issues we face in this country.

“It has a major impact on our health, increasing the risk of many diseases including diabetes, heart attack and stroke, and action is urgently needed across society to turn the tide on the rising rates seen in recent decades and stop so many lives being cut short.”

She said the NHS was “here to help” those trying to lose weight, rolling out 12-week courses which offer behavioural coaching and lifestyle advice for obese patients with health conditions such as Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

“Maintaining a healthy weight can be difficult, but the NHS is here to help those at greatest risk through our effective digital weight management programme and providing access to new weight loss treatments, while supporting wider efforts to tackle the issues contributing to obesity to help save lives and reduce its cost to families, the health service and the economy,” Dr Hambling said.

The figures for England show that in 1993, when data collection began, the country was already battling a major weight problem.

In total, 44 per cent of men were overweight, while 13 per cent were obese.

Now 39 per cent are overweight – while 28 per cent are obese.

For women, 32 per cent were overweight and 16 per cent obese.

Now, the figures are 31 per cent and 30 per cent respectively.

The statistics from the Health Survey for England 2022 shows that the peak age for excess weight is 55 to 64, when 80 per cent of men and 69 per cent of women are overweight or obese.

Average heights come in at 5ft 9in for men, and 5ft 4in for women.

Across all ages, the average woman now has a waistline of 34.9in – around two and half inches more than in 1993. For men it is 38.3in, almost two inches more than it was 30 years ago.

The rest of the UK collects data in different ways, but the figures show similar trends.

Tam Fry from the National Obesity Forum said the statistics “highlight the abysmal failure of every administration since 1993 to tackle obesity.”

Katherine Jenner, director of the Obesity Health Alliance, a coalition of charities and medical royal colleges, which is calling for extra taxes on unhealthy foods said: “We all want to grow old healthily, and maintaining a healthy weight is an important factor in living out our years in good health.

“However, it is not always easy to access a healthy, nutritious diet, especially if you are juggling responsibilities such as being a parent, carer, worker and managing a household, as many people in middle age are.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “This country has failed to tackle the obesity crisis, harming people’s health and costing the NHS billions of pounds.

“This government is urgently tackling the obesity crisis head on – shifting our focus from treatment to prevention – to ease the strain on our NHS and helping people to live well for longer.”

Labour has suffered a dozen by-election defeats in less than a month as it grapples with the row over donations and freebies.

Sir Keir Starmer’s party has lost council seats across the country to all parties since mid-September, in a blow to his premiership in his first months in office.

Labour has had a net loss of 11 councillors since Sept 16, results far worse than the Conservatives who have gained four seats in the same period and Reform gaining two.

Analysts warn that the by-election results confirm the “lack of honeymoon” for the Prime Minister, with voters already keen to “punish” Labour.

It comes after weeks of negative headlines for the Government over Sir Keir and other Cabinet ministers accepting donations and freebies.

The Prime Minister received thousands of pounds from Lord Alli, a Labour peer, for glasses and clothing, including for his wife, and the use of an £18 million penthouse during the election campaign.

Members of his frontbench team have also declared large donations from the peer.

Cabinet ministers have come under scrutiny for accepting freebies such as concert and football match tickets.

Sir Keir last week announced that he would be giving back more than £6,000 for the freebies he had received since entering Downing Street, but said his colleagues did not need to follow suit.

Since the revelations began to emerge, the Conservatives have gained five council seats from Labour in areas such as St Albans, Worthing in Sussex and in Wales.

Meanwhile, Reform UK won their first council seat in Marton, Blackpool, from Labour in a victory described by Lee Anderson, the party’s whip, as a “political tsunami”.

Luke Tryl, the director of the More in Common think tank, said that while council by-elections are “low turnout affairs” and can be affected by local circumstances, they should be a cause for concern for Labour.

“Firstly, the fragmentation of our politics into a multi-party system where the Greens and Reform occupy the Left and Right flanks is continuing.

“Secondly, the rapid drop in Keir Starmer’s approval ratings and lack of honeymoon for this administration is so far being played out in these by-elections, with voters already showing a willingness to punish Labour.”

Sir Keir has lost four seats to the Tories, one seat to the Liberal Democrats, two to the Scottish National Party and one to the Greens.

As well as Reform’s success in Blackpool, the party won a town council seat in Heanor and Loscoe in Derbyshire on Friday night.

Over the decades, Formula 1 has been full of playboy drivers, their glamorous girlfriends and rivalries revving up off the track. And today it seems nothing has changed, as a love triangle has recently emerged between two young rival drivers. 

The talk of the paddock right now is the law student, influencer and model Estelle Ogilvy. The 25-year-old used to be in a relationship with Williams’ Argentine driver Franco Colapinto. She was then dating Ferrari’s junior driver Oliver Bearman, who became the youngest Briton ever to race in an F1 Grand Prix earlier this year. But this summer, she split with Bearman, and is reportedly now back with Colapinto. Even by F1 standards, it sounds pretty… intense.

So who is the young woman who has captured the hearts of two of motor racing’s hottest properties? 

She was born Estelle Langinier in Paris to a British mum, who is a lawyer, and a French father. After going to school in the south of France, she moved to the UK, where she lived in Surrey with her mum and brother Mattieu, 23, before moving to St Albans. 

She attended the £16,000-a-year mixed boarding school St George’s, and later adopted her mother’s maiden name of Manning, when she moved to London to follow in her footsteps and study law. Ogilvy is seemingly an adopted name and a relatively recent addition.

Although there are hints that Estelle always wanted to be famous. There is a video of her being interviewed for the show Secrets of Our Stars, aged just 10 years old. But it wasn’t until her relationship with Bearman that her popularity soared.

Estelle was by Ollie’s side in March when he was thrust into the spotlight after finishing seventh on his debut at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. The 18-year-old was called up last minute after Carlos Sainz, the Spanish driver, got appendicitis. At  the time, Tatler described them as Britain’s “glitziest young couple”. 

Ollie has 2.2m Instagram followers in his own right and Estelle has been signed up by model agency Storm Model Management. She posed for a photoshoot for luxury watch brand Longines, and appeared on the catwalk for Paul Costelloe at Paris Fashion Week.

“Lettie” as she’s known to her friends, now has over 139k followers on TikTok, using the handle @silly_lettuce. She posts clips of her at the gym or sucking lollipops at her laptop as she studies for her law degree. With a cut-glass British accent, she makes videos which nod to her dual-heritage; think strolling around Paris eating eclairs, or posing in front of a London bus. She’s very fond of a micro miniskirt and one of her most-watched videos is her getting ready to party at the Monaco Grand Prix. She often makes content with her friend, the model India Rawsthorn, who she calls the “Serena to my Blair” – clearly, she’s a fan of Gossip Girl. Which is apt.

Because after her and Bearman reportedly called it quits in July, Ogilvy became the one everyone has been gossiping about. She started following her ex, Franco Colapinto on social media again. The 21-year-old Argentine has driven for Williams three times to date, finishing 12th on his debut at the Italian Grand Prix. Franco and Estelle are yet to step out in public together, but insiders claim they’re back on.

Journalist and F1 expert Jessamy Calkin says that it’s not surprising that Ogilvy has dated two up-and-coming drivers. “Formula 1 is a very small world,” she says. “There’s an unwritten rule that if you’re an F1 driver you have to live in Monaco, play golf and have an influencer girlfriend. They all go to the same parties and events. The social circle is tiny, but that means that this love triangle could get awkward for them, or might lead to even more competitiveness on the track between Bearman and Colapinto.”

Even before this rumoured partner-swap, Colapinto and Bearman were being compared as two of the most promising new drivers on the circuit. “When you look at the job Oliver Bearman has done when he jumped in the Ferrari at one of the toughest tracks on the calendar in Saudi, he looked like a veteran,” said Christian Horner, principal of Red Bull Racing and Mr Ginger Spice. “Colapinto has been a complete surprise because he was largely unnoticed in F2. Nobody was even talking about him. He jumps in that Williams in the couple of races he’s done and he’s been exceptional. He’s been really, really impressive. The young guys, they get in, they’re hungry, and they just drive the wheels off it.” 

The excessive wealth, element of danger and undeniable glamour of Formula 1 have long made its drivers a magnet for beautiful women. Nineteen-seventies British champion James Hunt had the motto: “Sex, breakfast of champions” sewn into his racing overalls and boasted of bedding 5,000 women. Sir Stirling Moss admitted that while racing he could keep, “One eye on the track, another on the gauges and still… spot a pretty girl in the crowd.” 

Argentine racing legend Juan Manuel Fangio dated famous first lady Eva Peron. In the Nineties, “Fast” Eddie Irvine was linked with Rachel Hunter, Kelly Brook and Pamela Anderson. Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton was in an on/off relationship with Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger until 2015, and has subsequently been linked to pop stars Rita Ora and Shakira, and models Kendall Jenner and Camila Kendra.

So while a salacious F1 sex scandal is nothing new, this particular love triangle will be watched in a new way, by a new audience. In recent years, there’s been a so-called “fangirlification” of Formula 1, which has seen the notoriously pale, male and stale sport gain an adoring new following from young women. On YouTube, countless videos have been created by fans featuring handsome F1 drivers such as Sebastian Vettel, Charles Leclerc, and Daniel Ricciardo. They’re almost the new boy band members – think slo-mo, moody shots, a Wag running up to ruffle their hair, all set to a Taylor Swift soundtrack. Some have millions of views. There’s even a popular Formula 1 romance-novel series, Dirty Air by Lauren Asher, and podcasts, such as Two Girls One Formula, where an audience of “girls, gays, theys (and cool dudes)” get together to dissect the sport.

The reason for this transformation is that Formula 1 was purchased by the US company Liberty Media in 2016. It axed the sexist tradition of grid girls and relaxed previously strict social-media restrictions. In 2019, it partnered with Netflix for the massively popular docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which opened up the world of the drivers – and the Wags – in a whole new way.

“It’s reality TV – we got to see heightened drama, we got to see relationships play out in real time. It’s ‘The Real Housewives of Formula 1’,” says Nicole Sievers, co-host of Two Girls One Formula.

There’s now a whole subculture of fans intensely following the lives of F1 Wags like Ogilvy and co. There are numerous Instagram accounts – WagsF1 (with 53,000 followers), Love 4 Wags F1 (19,900 followers), and F1 Wags (27,500 followers) – which document their designer wardrobes, their men and their every move. And these F1 Wags are making serious money in their own right, with sponsorship deals and fashion campaigns.

But the reality of dating an F1 driver may not be all sipping flutes of Veuve from the paddock. “These guys have barely any life outside of the circuit,” says Calkin. “Often they’ve been doing this since they were eight and they have barely any other interests or human experience. I think it’s quite a lonely life and despite the sport opening up, there’s still a sexist atmosphere at the track.”

It remains to be seen if Colapinto and Bearman will develop a rivalry that will make them the Nicki Lauda and James Hunt for the Instagram generation. Or if Estelle Ogilvy will be able to use this springboard to launch a long-lasting modelling career. But one thing’s for sure – Formula One just got a  whole lot more va va vroom.

Gary Lineker joked he was hosting his final Match Of The Day show on Saturday amid speculation over his future on the programme.

The BBC this week denied an announcement was pending regarding its highest-paid star, who it said is under contract until the end of the football season.

The 63-year-old introduced this week’s edition of the BBC’s flagship football highlights show saying: “Hello. Seven games on the way and it’s my final show.”

After pausing with perfect timing, he added: “Before the international break.”

There will be no episode of Match Of The Day next week as the Premier League stops after this weekend until October 19, to allow its players to fulfil international fixtures.

Alan Shearer smiled at Lineker’s quip while fellow pundit Micah Richards remained motionless.

Former England footballer Lineker took over the flagship football highlights show in 1999 after predecessor Des Lynam joined ITV.

Lineker has been the BBC’s highest paid on-air talent for seven consecutive years and was estimated to have earned £1.35 million in the year 2023/24, according to the corporation’s annual report published in July.

Sir Keir Starmer on Saturday night warned the Middle East conflict risks lighting the “touchpapers in our own communities” and urged parties to “act with restraint and return to political, not military, solutions”.

The Prime Minister, writing in The Sunday Times, called on all sides to “do everything in their power to step back from the brink” ahead of the Oct 7 anniversary.

He added that “a better future will not be won by traumatising, orphaning, and displacing another generation”, in an apparent warning to Israel.

An Israeli military official indicated a “significant” response would be staged in response to Iran’s attack last Tuesday, in which it fired almost 200 ballistic missiles at Israel in revenge for the killing of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah late last month.

Sir Keir described Iran’s “outrageous attack” on Israel as bringing us to a “dangerous inflection point”.

He added: “A direct Iran-Israel conflict would have devastating consequences for the people of the Middle East and across the world.

“All sides must do everything in their power to step back from the brink and avert it. Because the anniversary of the October 7 attacks should remind us of the cost of political failure.”

He raised concerns over the impact of the conflict in the UK and said: “The flames from this deadly conflict now threaten to consume the region. And the sparks light touchpapers in our own communities here at home.

“Since October 7, we have watched vile hatred against Jews and Muslims rise in our communities.

“So we will not look the other way as Jewish children are afraid to wear their school uniforms, Jewish shops are defaced, or Jews targeted on the streets. And we will not ignore it when mosques are attacked, and British Muslims are assaulted or told to ‘go home’.

“Any attack on a minority is an attack on our proud values of tolerance and respect. We will not stand for it.”

The Community Security Trust, a safeguarding charity, said: “It is no surprise that this would be seen as a time of increased risk for the community, with levels of anti-Jewish hatred still running unacceptably high.

“In particular, Hezbollah and Iran have a long record of terrorism against Jewish and Israeli targets around the world, especially as a form of reprisal, and the possibility that they may look to do something overseas to avenge Nasrallah’s death forms an important part of our discussions with police.”

Dame Judi Dench was moved to tears on Saturday after she was asked about her late friends Maggie Smith and Barbara Leigh-Hunt.

The acting legend, 89, was being interviewed at the Cheltenham Literature Festival by Brendan O’Hea when he referred to them both.

Dame Judi became emotional as he said: “I know I probably shouldn’t bring this up, I know the last week has been tricky for you because you lost your great friends Maggie Smith and Barbara Leigh-Hunt.”

He also asked as to why she defined grief like petrol when she talked about her husband Michael Williams.

He died from lung cancer in 2001.

Dame Judi said: “I suppose the energy that’s created by grief…” before she broke down in tears.

Met backstage at the Old Vic

Maggie Smith died last week aged 89 and they had had a close friendship since the 1950s.

They first met backstage at the Old Vic theatre in London.

Smith, in a tribute event for Dame Judi back in 2002, said: “What I remember mostly about that time, it was the beginning of a friendship, and I remember laughter more than anything in the world.

“Judi’s the most tremendous friend. She’s been a huge support and hugely loyal.”

They had appeared together in the 1985 film A Room With a View, the 2004 drama Ladies in Lavender and the 2011 comedy The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Meanwhile, actress Leigh-Hunt and close friend to Dame Judi also died last month at the age of 88 and was the godmother to the latter’s daughter, Finty Williams.

Leigh-Hunt had appeared in the 1992 BBC sitcom As Time Goes By with Dame Judi.

Dozens of Labour MPs are pushing for more people to be eligible for assisted dying, The Telegraph understands.

Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, will table legislation on Oct 16 to legalise assisted dying after her Private Member’s Bill was selected for debate. Her decision to propose the law change means there could be a free vote by MPs before Christmas.

The bill is expected to give terminally ill adults the right to choose to shorten their lives if they wish.

As many as 38 Labour politicians, including 13 who hold government roles, are understood to back proposals for the bill to go further and to apply not just to the terminally ill, but more broadly to those “incurably suffering”.

They are among a cross-party group of 54 MPs calling for the scope of the bill to be widened, according to Humanists UK, which has long called for a change in the law. It is likely to raise fears over introducing ambiguity into who would be eligible for state-sanctioned euthanasia.

A key fear of those who oppose assisted dying is that too loose a definition of who qualifies could lead to people suffering from depression and other non-terminal health issues being allowed to take their own lives.

Backers of a change in the law say that it is inhumane to keep the terminally ill alive if they are experiencing unbearable suffering.

A change would also end the practice of terminally ill people travelling abroad to end their lives, often separated from their friends and families.

It will be the first time the topic has been debated in the House of Commons since 2015, when an assisted dying bill was defeated.

While polling shows that a majority of the public backs legalising support for terminally ill people who wish to end their lives, the issue could cause serious divisions across parties.

Ahead of the bill’s first reading, Ms Leadbeater must decide on its title, which will determine the breadth of the debate. If the bill is defined narrowly as assisted dying for the terminally ill, it would make it difficult for MPs to debate the merits of whether the legislation should be broadened in scope.

But if the bill is given a more open-ended title, it means MPs could introduce amendments, including on whether those with incurable illnesses should be eligible for legalised assisted dying as well as the terminally ill.

Ms Leadbeater said she intended for the bill to be focussed on legalising assisted dying for those who were terminally ill but added that it was “important that the debate is broad and robust and very open”.

“I haven’t decided the title of the bill yet,” she said. “I will meet and speak to people with different views. I am open-minded and the important thing is that the debate needs to be broad. It’s always really important to get back to the point that it’s about choice.”

Several Labour MPs are expected to seek meetings with Ms Leadbeater in the coming days to discuss the wording of the bill.

Suffering ‘not limited to terminal illnesses’

Lizzi Collinge, the Labour MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, said she believed assisted dying should be legalised for those with incurable illness and had already written to Ms Leadbeater about the issue.

“It is an important position because ultimately this is about human suffering,” she said. “Unfortunately suffering is not limited to those who have a terminal illness. Some people who do not have a prognosis of six months or less will be suffering in  a way that no matter what you do, no matter the care you receive, their suffering becomes intolerable. That, I think, needs to be reflected in the law.”

Nathan Stilwell, Humanists UK’s lead campaigner on assisted dying, said he was “thrilled to see so much support in this new Parliament for assisted dying”.

He added: “Humanists UK has consistently campaigned for over a century for a compassionate assisted dying law that includes the incurably suffering and terminally ill.

“We’ve been continuously speaking to MPs and have identified at least 50 who would want to see an assisted dying law that allows people who aren’t necessarily dying, but are incurably suffering from conditions like multiple sclerosis and locked-in syndrome the right to choose. We suspect that when MPs begin to read the proposed changes, that number will be higher.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, issued a furious denunciation of Emmanuel Macron on Saturday over his calls for a worldwide arms embargo on Israel.

“I have a message for president Macron,” Mr Netanyahu said in a video address.

“Israel will win with or without,” the support of France, the prime minister said as he cited the threats to Israel on seven fronts.

Referring to Mr Macron’s remarks as a “disgrace”, Mr Netanyahu said France’s “shame will continue long after the war is won”.

“As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilised countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side. Yet, president Macron and other Western leaders are now calling for arms embargoes against Israel. Shame on them.”

As the world waits to see how Israel will respond to the 200 missiles Iran fired at air bases and Mossad’s headquarters last week, Mr Netanyahu promised a forceful response.

“Israel has the duty and the right to defend itself and respond to such attacks – and this is what we are going to do,” Mr Netanyahu said.

Mr Macron had said: “I think that today, the priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to fight in Gaza.”

“France is not delivering any,” he added during an interview recorded early this week.

The United States provides about $3 billion in weapons to Israel each year.

In May, the State Department said it did not have enough evidence to block shipments of weapons but that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel has used arms in ways inconsistent with standards of humanitarian law.

In September, Britain said it was suspending some arms exports to Israel, citing a “clear risk” that they could be used in a serious breach of international humanitarian law.

On Saturday, Israel was increasingly confident it had killed the likely successor to Hassan Nasrallah, former Hezbollah leader, in an air strike last week.

Contact with Hashem Safieddine has been lost since the Israeli attack on Beirut on Thursday night, a high-level Hezbollah source told AFP.

“We don’t know if he was at the targeted site, or who may have been there with him,” the source said.

60 tons of bombs

Israel’s strike at Hezbollah’s underground intelligence headquarters in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh involved around 60 tons of bombs, according to Israel’s N12 news.

Saudi TV channel Al Hadath quoted sources who said that “the scope of the attack in Beirut, which was aimed at the culprit Safieddine, leaves no room to escape alive”.

Reuters quoted Lebanese security sources who said that ongoing Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh since Friday have kept rescue workers from scouring the site of the attack.

Ronen Solomon, an Israeli intelligence and defence analyst who has worked for over a decade in the Ministry of Defence, said the hit on Safieddine, who was serving as part of the group’s executive council that oversees the military operations and civilian structure, paves the way for more to come.

“Safieddine is well known as number two in the pyramid. But now, his deputy Sheikh Ali Damoush, the commander of the foreign relations unit, hasn’t been killed yet, so maybe he will be next on the blacklist,” he said.

Safieddine’s brother Abdullah oversees relations with Quds Force and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and is deeply entrenched in Iran’s political and military elite, based in Tehran. 

“Abdullah is also a possible target,” added Mr Solomon. “He is well known as the head of the business unit of Hezbollah, connected to the external relationship unit and is the connection man between Iran and Hezbollah.”

‘More extreme than Nasrallah’

In 2017, the US Treasury added Safieddine to its counter-terrorism blacklist. “He was more extreme than Nasrallah,” added Mr Solomon, comparing Nasrallah’s apparent successor to the ageing leader killed in an air strike last month.

“Nasrallah was very realistic about Israel and took decisions step by step. Safieddine was much more unpredictable and took his lead from the commanders of the Radwan Force,” Mr Solomon said.

Gabriel Noronha, who from 2019 to 2021 served as special adviser for the Iran Action Group at the US Department of State, said the latest assassination of a possible new leader for Hezbollah puts the group’s sponsor, Iran, in a quandary.

“I don’t think Iran has recourse,” he said. “They made a very risky decision to do this counter-strike this week,” in response to the killings of Mr Nasrallah in Beirut and July’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas political leader, in Tehran.

“They’d already proven in April the inability to penetrate the Iron Dome and do real damage. To really overpower the Iron Dome, they’d have to launch multiple salvos, and more like 500 missiles, which is essentially a declaration of war.”

Hezbollah has been severely damaged by Israel’s combination of targeted strikes, explosions of communications devices, air strikes and a ground invasion, Mr Noronha.

“From the pager attack onwards, it was about hitting command and control,” he said. “The combination of the complete lack of command and control and the inability of the leadership to speak to the rank and file, has paralysed the Hezbollah response. The further you go into that leadership level is eliminating a will to fight and ability to coordinate any kind of response.”

Jason Brodsky, the policy director at the NGO United Against a Nuclear Iran, said that the suspected killing “has highlighted the succession crisis Hezbollah now faces”.

“The decapitation of figures with relationships, networks, institutional memory, and experience hobbles the organisation,” he said.

Rachel Reeves’s plan to significantly increase borrowing in the Budget risks pushing up mortgage rates, Treasury analysis suggests.

An official modelling exercise indicates that the Chancellor’s plans to rewrite Britain’s fiscal rules could increase the cost of debt for consumers and businesses.

The Treasury research paper warns that a “fiscal loosening” of just one per cent of GDP could lead to a “peak increase in interest rates” of up to 1.25 percentage points.

The document goes on to warn that every increase in annual borrowing of £25 billion could increase interest rates by between 0.5 and 1.25 percentage points.

It is widely expected that Ms Reeves will use her October 30 Budget to ease borrowing rules, a move that could unlock up to £50 billion of spending.

Treasury sources confirmed that the policy paper, which was published in December and is titled “The impact of borrowing on interest rates”, reflects the department’s current thinking.

It comes just as mortgage rates were beginning to cool, with some deals falling below 4 per cent for the time in months.

Central interest rates currently stand at 5 per cent, but a rise to 6.25 per cent would add around £200 a month to a typical mortgage.

Jeremy Hunt, the former Chancellor, said on Saturday night: “The consistent advice I received from Treasury officials was always that increasing borrowing meant interest rates would be higher for longer – and punish families with mortgages. 

“That would be a hammer blow and lead to mortgage misery for many people just at the moment the Bank of England is expected to bring interest rates back down.”

Mr Hunt has called for the Office for Budget Responsibility to be legally obliged to publish a full analysis of any changes to the fiscal rules. Britain’s debt recently surged to 100 per cent of gross domestic product for the first time since the 1960s.

Despite this, Ms Reeves on Saturday dropped her strongest hint yet that she intends to increase borrowing to fund a multi-billion-pound capital programme, pledging to “invest, invest, invest”.

It follows warnings from Sir Keir Starmer that his party’s first Budget “is going to be painful”, and it is expected that the Chancellor will raise some taxes in an attempt to plug a £22 billion black hole she claims to have found in the public finances.

It is thought this could include a raid on capital gains tax, inheritance tax or a tax on pensions.

Economists said some of the effects of higher borrowing had already been “priced in”. Yields on the 10-year gilt were at 4.13 per cent when markets closed on Friday, the highest since late July, partly reflecting concerns that Ms Reeves intends to boost borrowing in the Budget.

However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) also warned Ms Reeves’s “opportunistic” attempt to fiddle with Britain’s fiscal rules risked causing a surge in interest rates.

The think-tank has said that any move to alter the Chancellor’s self-imposed fiscal rules “would not be without risks” and that borrowing an extra £50 billion in 2028-29 could have a “material impact on interest rates”.

Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the IFS, said: “If you borrow a lot you are taking more of a risk that interest rates will be higher in response. One lesson for Rachel Reeves is to be cautious about borrowing because there is a risk to interest rates.

“Some will have savings and will endure higher interest rates on their savings. The main risk you would worry about is people’s mortgages being a bit more expensive.”

Mr Emmerson added that the impact on mortgages would hinge on the extent to which the additional borrowing was used to fund either “current” or “capital” expenditure.

“If you inject money into an economy, there is more cash going around which could cause inflation and the Bank of England will respond with higher interest rates. This would happen if they saw a giveaway Budget that they felt wasn’t going to be beneficial to the supply side of the economy,” he said.

“But if you make some investments that perhaps encourage the private sector to invest, improve the growth rate and increase capacity of the economy to produce, you then won’t have the Bank of England’s concern that it is inflationary and that higher interest rates are needed.”

The Treasury’s analysis does not take into account measures with “supply-side benefits” and notes that the impact on interest rates would be smaller “where those policies do have a material benefit for the supply side”.

The official advice from the Treasury cautions that an “unanticipated increase in spending, or reduction in taxation, that is funded by additional government borrowing, will increase the level of demand in the economy, thereby increasing inflationary pressures, which may lead to an inflation-targeting central bank increasing interest rates”.

A Treasury spokesman said: “This analysis is clear that the relationship between fiscal plans, inflation and interest rates is complicated and can change significantly over time. The Chancellor has repeatedly said she will not play fast and loose with the public finances and will protect working people.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, issued a furious denunciation of Emmanuel Macron on Saturday over his calls for a worldwide arms embargo on Israel.

“I have a message for president Macron,” Mr Netanyahu said in a video address.

“Israel will win with or without,” the support of France, the prime minister said as he cited the threats to Israel on seven fronts.

Referring to Mr Macron’s remarks as a “disgrace”, Mr Netanyahu said France’s “shame will continue long after the war is won”.

“As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilised countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side. Yet, president Macron and other Western leaders are now calling for arms embargoes against Israel. Shame on them.”

As the world waits to see how Israel will respond to the 200 missiles Iran fired at air bases and Mossad’s headquarters last week, Mr Netanyahu promised a forceful response.

“Israel has the duty and the right to defend itself and respond to such attacks – and this is what we are going to do,” Mr Netanyahu said.

Mr Macron had said: “I think that today, the priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to fight in Gaza.”

“France is not delivering any,” he added during an interview recorded early this week.

The United States provides about $3 billion in weapons to Israel each year.

In May, the State Department said it did not have enough evidence to block shipments of weapons but that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel has used arms in ways inconsistent with standards of humanitarian law.

In September, Britain said it was suspending some arms exports to Israel, citing a “clear risk” that they could be used in a serious breach of international humanitarian law.

On Saturday, Israel was increasingly confident it had killed the likely successor to Hassan Nasrallah, former Hezbollah leader, in an air strike last week.

Contact with Hashem Safieddine has been lost since the Israeli attack on Beirut on Thursday night, a high-level Hezbollah source told AFP.

“We don’t know if he was at the targeted site, or who may have been there with him,” the source said.

60 tons of bombs

Israel’s strike at Hezbollah’s underground intelligence headquarters in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh involved around 60 tons of bombs, according to Israel’s N12 news.

Saudi TV channel Al Hadath quoted sources who said that “the scope of the attack in Beirut, which was aimed at the culprit Safieddine, leaves no room to escape alive”.

Reuters quoted Lebanese security sources who said that ongoing Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh since Friday have kept rescue workers from scouring the site of the attack.

Ronen Solomon, an Israeli intelligence and defence analyst who has worked for over a decade in the Ministry of Defence, said the hit on Safieddine, who was serving as part of the group’s executive council that oversees the military operations and civilian structure, paves the way for more to come.

“Safieddine is well known as number two in the pyramid. But now, his deputy Sheikh Ali Damoush, the commander of the foreign relations unit, hasn’t been killed yet, so maybe he will be next on the blacklist,” he said.

Safieddine’s brother Abdullah oversees relations with Quds Force and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and is deeply entrenched in Iran’s political and military elite, based in Tehran. 

“Abdullah is also a possible target,” added Mr Solomon. “He is well known as the head of the business unit of Hezbollah, connected to the external relationship unit and is the connection man between Iran and Hezbollah.”

‘More extreme than Nasrallah’

In 2017, the US Treasury added Safieddine to its counter-terrorism blacklist. “He was more extreme than Nasrallah,” added Mr Solomon, comparing Nasrallah’s apparent successor to the ageing leader killed in an air strike last month.

“Nasrallah was very realistic about Israel and took decisions step by step. Safieddine was much more unpredictable and took his lead from the commanders of the Radwan Force,” Mr Solomon said.

Gabriel Noronha, who from 2019 to 2021 served as special adviser for the Iran Action Group at the US Department of State, said the latest assassination of a possible new leader for Hezbollah puts the group’s sponsor, Iran, in a quandary.

“I don’t think Iran has recourse,” he said. “They made a very risky decision to do this counter-strike this week,” in response to the killings of Mr Nasrallah in Beirut and July’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas political leader, in Tehran.

“They’d already proven in April the inability to penetrate the Iron Dome and do real damage. To really overpower the Iron Dome, they’d have to launch multiple salvos, and more like 500 missiles, which is essentially a declaration of war.”

Hezbollah has been severely damaged by Israel’s combination of targeted strikes, explosions of communications devices, air strikes and a ground invasion, Mr Noronha.

“From the pager attack onwards, it was about hitting command and control,” he said. “The combination of the complete lack of command and control and the inability of the leadership to speak to the rank and file, has paralysed the Hezbollah response. The further you go into that leadership level is eliminating a will to fight and ability to coordinate any kind of response.”

Jason Brodsky, the policy director at the NGO United Against a Nuclear Iran, said that the suspected killing “has highlighted the succession crisis Hezbollah now faces”.

“The decapitation of figures with relationships, networks, institutional memory, and experience hobbles the organisation,” he said.