It was not long after midday that Alexei Popov was driving home from a grocery shop when a Hezbollah missile exploded outside the historic city of Acre, northern Israel.

With just seconds to react from the moment sirens started sounding to the rocket striking, he had no time to flee his white Dacia Sandero before it was met with a hail of shrapnel.

Mr Popov, 51, a married father-of-two, was pronounced dead at the scene while a passenger who ducked as the alarm sounded and managed to survive with only minor injuries.

The rocket was one of hundreds fired by Hezbollah towards northern Israeli towns and cities on Saturday last week and part of a daily onslaught of projectiles Israel had hoped would be thwarted by its war with the terror group.

But nearly a month into the ground invasion of Lebanon, Acre and the towns and cities across Galilee still face a daily “wake-up call” from the terror group, which continues to fill the skies with “raining rockets”.

This week, residents of the walled port city 12 miles from the Lebanon border observed a subdued Simchat Torah and Sukkot, with the religious holidays interrupted three times a day by the sound of sirens and explosions.

“I thought that with time it would be less and less scary, you would become adapted to it but actually it’s the other way round, the alarms are just getting more and more stressful,” said Yoav Sagi, 36, as he walked his mixed-breed Louis along the waterfront amid a moment of calm.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was killed in an Israeli air strike last month, and his heir apparent Hashem Safieddine has also been assassinated.

However, rocket fire has continued, with missiles launched towards Acre every day over the past week.

“We did expect it to have gotten better,” Mr Sagi added. “I thought like in a video game, the boss had died, we’ve won, now there are no actual faces to Hezbollah, but the war is not over, the rockets have not stopped.”

He marked Simchat Torah with a quiet pizza with friend Hadar Barzilay, 36, and the pair believed that the situation was now “worse than 2006”.

“It’s on a daily basis, it can be like a wake-up call at 7am,” Ms Barzilay said. “Every time there is a holiday or something important then you can expect the sirens to go off a few times. There are no schools, people barely go out. Normally on a holiday the town would be packed.”

The city has a population of just 50,000, the majority Jewish, but also a significant population of Arab citizens who account for around 25 per cent of residents, and also Christian and Druze communities.

It is also home to Al Jazaar mosque, the largest in Israel outside of Jerusalem, but this does not deter Hezbollah firing rockets indiscriminately.

“It is not like being in Gaza or Lebanon but it is still very dangerous,” said Abed Omary, 46, an Arab Muslim, who owns a bar and restaurant on the beachfront.

“The rockets can hit before there is time to take shelter. I thought there may have been less by now, it’s not been like this for many years.”

With tourism at a standstill, Acre’s famed city walls are no longer besieged by visitors but instead lined by bomb shelters resembling Portakabins every 100 yards.

However, with just 30 seconds to find cover, it is not enough, according to Laura Lubretsky, 41, the manager of Uri Buri restaurant in the Old City.

“Every day around the north it is raining rockets,” she says, pointing to the Mediterranean a stone’s throw from the front door where a series of rockets recently missed the city and splashed into the sea.

“I grew up here, as a child I remember. It’s different now, it’s more dangerous. People with three kids can hardly move from one place to another because of the sirens, you have to have parents and three kids to get out of the car. Thirty seconds is not enough.”

Each day this week staff have taken cover at the back of the restaurant near the kitchen and they acknowledged that the barrage showed Hezbollah was still far from defeat.

“As you can see it’s all day every day. Hezbollah is not dismantled yet,” Ms Lubretsky said as she looked at the deserted street outside. “We killed Nasrallah, that doesn’t mean that Hezbollah is over.”

As they waited to see if the evening would bring another customer or instead a fourth round of rockets, she added: “It’s always worse before it gets better.”

Pushy parents are ditching traditional Hallowe’en costumes for expensive outfits with shock value to make their children more Instagrammable, according to consumer experts and retailers.

Fancy dress shops are reporting a rise in the number of gory disguises, including film serial killers, sold around Hallowe’en every year.

Martyn James, a consumer expert, said: “It’s definitely a trend. A lot of parents have expressed concerns about the appropriateness of some of these outfits and I don’t buy the fact that kids are demanding them. Children shouldn’t be watching Silence of the Lambs.

“Some pushy parents might want Instagram photos and to be shocking for a party. The more exotic the serial killer costume, the more expensive it is. There is this whole competition among parents about the money they are now having to spend.”

Mr James added: “People would love to go back to the days of cutting a couple of holes in a sheet but they can’t because the next door neighbour has bought Freddie Krueger. It’s the pushy parent factor, and this is another occasion where the expense is getting more and more.”

The owners of Halloween House, Europe’s biggest superstore dedicated solely to the fright festivities, said that in recent years families have been increasingly choosing the more gory costumes for both adults and children.

Tom and Manjit Cheema, who founded the shop in Dudley, West Midlands, in 2018, said its most popular masks and costumes include the haunting white Ghost Face from Scream films, the featureless Michael Myers death mask from the Halloween films, and the scarred Freddie Krueger disguise and glove from the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

Outfits that accompany more recent movie releases, including Terrifier 3, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and Joker Folie a Deux, are also proving hugely popular.

Mrs Cheema said: “When I was a child it was bin liners and bed sheets to dress up as witches and ghosts.

“Now people are spending £100 on a Michael Myers mask or the Pennywise clown costume from Stephen King’s It.

“Entire families dress up. None of it is sinister, it’s just good fun which is very family-friendly.”

Mr Cheema added that some people collect such masks, with the most expensive branded ones costing about £100.

“Many people don’t realise how huge Hallowe’en has become in the UK,” he said.

“It’s American culture coming over here. Most people are familiar with the US horror movies and we’ve seen in American films how they love trick or treating, and we want a slice of the magic of Hallowe’en.

“We have nightclub owners who come to us to buy their decorations who say Hallowe’en is the biggest night of the year.”

The UK Hallowe’en industry is estimated to have expanded to be worth more than £1 billion as the American trick or treat tradition has become far more common here.

The Hallowe’en House, which now covers 8,000sq ft and sells 5,000 products, opens from August to November. Mr Cheema, 59, said that customers travel as far north as Inverness and as far south as Cornwall to purchase outfits from their shop.

“The classic witches and vampire outfits are still really popular. Some children do have an awareness of classic horror characters, which may well be down to their parents’ love of such films,” he said.

‘Some people want to be pumpkins’

The couple stressed that many items, particularly plastic knives, machetes and claws, are age-restricted.

Mr Cheema added: “Not everyone wants to be a horror character. Some people dress up as pumpkins.”

Sheila Power, the assistant manager at the Non-Stop Party Shop, a London-based costume vendor, said children’s costumes were increasingly influenced by popular Netflix shows and pop icons.

“It’s really opened up in terms of what people wear for Halloween. It used to be that it had to be scary, now it’s a bit more whatever you want to be,” she said.

“Superheroes are very big and kids have come in with pictures of pop stars to dress like Taylor Swift. It doesn’t have to be scary.”

While she does sell some costumes of infamous horror film villains, Ms Power said they were only for adult customers.

The future of the SAS could be at risk over Labour’s plan to tear up the Troubles Legacy Act, former senior members of the elite unit have warned.

Three former senior members of the SAS said the Government’s plan to repeal the Legacy Act meant there was “no fair legal framework” for counter-terrorism operations.

The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act sought to address issues from the counter-terrorist military and police actions in Northern Ireland between 1966 and 1998.

The Bill, which came into force in May, ended historical inquests and transferred all Troubles-era cases to a new Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery.

The controversial act was welcomed by veterans groups, who felt former soldiers were being tormented by a legal process weighted against them when terrorists had been freed from jail and given immunity from prosecution as part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to the Troubles.

However, the Legacy Act has been opposed by victims’ groups and all main political parties in Northern Ireland.

Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, a former SAS squadron commander, said: “The 1998 [Good Friday] agreement stipulated immunity for terrorists [but] the human rights of the soldier are being disregarded.

“If people think they’re going to do their duty then face two decades of harassing and hounding, having been found not to have any case to answer, nobody is going to volunteer to join the SAS.”

George Simm, a former regimental sergeant major said: “It would be fantastic if somebody finally supported us instead of making us the punch bag for the latest political fad that passes through Parliament.”

Retired Brigadier Aldwin Wight, a former commanding officer of 22 SAS, added: “Within the regiment is the sense that we’re being left to hang out to dry because of this anomaly in the legal system.”

“Those at the tip of the spear, who actually have had to go out and attempt to apprehend armed terrorists, have been left flapping in the wind because of deficiencies of the current system,” he said.

In July, Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland secretary, set out plans to repeal the provisions found by the High Court to be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

But Johnny Mercer, the former minister and original architect of the Act, said the Labour government’s attitude to Legacy issues was “naive”.

“It’s a continuation of the status quo, a determination by the Government to keep everybody happy except the cohort of people who actually got their hands dirty.”

‘Part of reconciliation’

Citing parts of the peace process, such as prisoner releases or the presence of Gerry Kelly, the convicted IRA terrorist, on the policing board as “very uncomfortable”, Mr Mercer said: “We were prepared to accept all that because that is part of reconciliation.”

Allowing the levers of state to be used to “rehash, relitigate and change the narrative of history to suit political ends” was wrong, he said.

“You have to take a stand against that. You can’t be ambivalent about it. You can’t be morally relaxed about it, because the truth is they will just keep going.

“My issue was never with the victims’ families. If it was my dad or my brother and there was a one per cent chance of finding out what happened, I’d do it too. So I have huge sympathy for the families.

“The people I despise are those trying to make a name for themselves, who are using [continued litigation over Legacy issues] for political ends. They’re destroying the lives of veterans and the lives of victims’ families because they’re giving them a false hope.”

‘Bitter thing to swallow’

Sir Liam Fox, the former defence secretary, said the Good Friday Agreement and de facto amnesty for terrorists “was a fairly bitter thing to swallow” but said most people would accept the outcome “if it led to peace and reconciliation”.

“What is much harder to swallow is if it applies to one side and not the other,” he said.

A Northern Ireland Office spokesman said: “The Government remains committed to repealing and replacing the Legacy Act.

“Addressing the legacy of the past must be done in a way that can command the support of victims and survivors, including families of those killed whilst serving the State, and comply with our human rights obligations.

“The Government is consulting widely on a practical way forward that can obtain support and comply with our human rights obligations.”

German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Ukraine strategy has “kissed goodbye” to decades of Western nuclear deterrence and exposed Germany to blackmail from rogue states like Iran, a senior opposition figure has warned.

Norbert Röttgen, a foreign policy expert and MP from the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), said Germany will face long-term consequences over Mr Scholz’s reluctance to send more powerful weapons to Ukraine due to fears of triggering a global nuclear war.

Mr Röttgen wrote in his new book Democracy and War, which examines the main foreign policy and security threats facing Berlin: “On April 22 2022…the chancellor offered his assessment that Putin could respond with the use of nuclear weapons to the supply of armoured tanks and howitzers.

“In doing so, Scholz kissed goodbye to the philosophy, politics and historic success of the West’s nuclear deterrence during the Cold War.”

Mr Röttgen warned that Mr Scholz’s responsiveness to nuclear threats will have long-term consequences for the West, such as encouraging Iran – which is actively seeking nuclear weapons – to bully Berlin with similar threats in future disputes.

“What would it mean to various nuclear powers and those such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, which wants to become one, if the West as a whole behaved like the German chancellor and exhibited fear openly about nuclear threats?” he wrote. 

“The world would become more dangerous and an unimaginable shift would occur in favour of those states willing to use nuclear threats as policy.”

Mr Röttgen, a member of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee, has published his book in the run-up to general elections in Germany next September. 

His centre-Right CDU party, led by Friedrich Merz, is likely to emerge as the victor and replace Mr Scholz’s centre-Left government.

The CDU has already vowed to become a much stauncher ally of Kyiv than Mr Scholz, such as by delivering Taurus missiles straight to Ukraine if Russia refuses to stop bombing civilian targets.

Mr Röttgen’s book goes on to argue that Vladimir Putin cannot be allowed to win the war in Ukraine as the Russian dictator will simply move on to other conquests in Europe.

It also appeals to the German spirit of economic prudence, making the case that victory for Putin will prove more expensive for Europeans in the long term as it will lead to further Russian aggression in Europe.

“If we allowed Putin to win this war it would be by far the most expensive of any alternatives for Europeans,” he wrote. “Repelling Putin’s Russia in the wake of a Ukrainian defeat would be incomparably more expensive and certainly more dangerous.”

Beyond Ukraine

Looking beyond Ukraine, Mr Röttgen called for strong German support of Israel in the ongoing Middle East war but stressed the importance of a future two-state solution. 

This demanded not just an end to the violence in the West Bank and Gaza, but also an end to Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, he said.

On China, he warned that Germany ending its dependency on Russian imports such as gas since the invasion of Ukraine has coincided with increased reliance on Beijing for cheap imports of raw materials.

This could put Germany in a difficult trade position if China chose to invade Taiwan in future, he said, which would be similar if not larger in scale to its energy dilemma after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.