Articles

Harris doesn’t know how to defeat Hamas. Israel should press the advantage

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2024. © Richard Kemp

The final moments of Yahya Sinwar’s malevolent life are an allegory for the current balance of military power in Gaza. The once mighty terrorist leader was filmed skulking into a building in Rafah like the fugitive he was. His last, dazed act before a tank shell slammed into the room was to feebly toss a stick towards the watching drone.

Where were his layers of surveillance and security, the bodyguards to whisk him away when danger loomed? All gone, shattered by Israel’s ferocious assaults, with even Hamas’s most senior terrorist forced above ground by the IDF’s progressive destruction of his protective tunnels.

The devastation wreaked on Hamas over the last 12 months has left it in dire straits. Its organised structure has been decimated and its military campaign reduced to small-scale guerrilla operations with the priority on survival rather than offensive action. Many of the senior terrorist commanders have been killed. With his chain of command largely ineffective, fearful of using any form of electronic communications and an inability any longer to transit large parts of the Strip above or below ground, in latter days Sinwar could no longer exercise meaningful control over his troops. It is doubtful he could effectively communicate with Hamas elements outside Gaza either.

But his continued existence was still important. He was the embodiment of Hamas’s ‘resistance’ against Israel, the architect of the greatest achievement the organisation has ever had or is now likely to have – the mass murder, rape, torture and kidnapping of Jews on 7 October last year. Indeed he was a hero to the many Gazans who rejoiced in this bestial slaughter. For the Hamas terrorists who have survived until now he has been an inspiration and an example.

His death therefore will be a major psychological blow which in some will undermine the will to continue the fight. Since Israel’s offensive began to gain momentum we have seen large numbers of cornered terrorists surrender and others decide discretion is the better part of valour, discarding their weapons and melting back into the civilian population. I would expect that now to accelerate. Continue reading →

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Israel is being sacrificed to hand Kamala Harris’ failing campaign a few extra votes

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 16 October 2024. © Richard Kemp

The Biden White House’s latest intervention against Israel is nothing short of an abomination. In the middle of a war, it is threatening America’s closest ally in the Middle East with cutting off arms supply in 30 days’ time if its demands are not met. This is clearly not being done for any strategic, moral or diplomatic advantage. It appears designed merely to scrape together a few extra votes for Kamala Harris’s faltering election campaign.

The US administration is demanding an improvement in the humanitarian situation in Gaza, ordering Israel to facilitate increased aid delivery. But I have witnessed first-hand the Israel Defense Forces’ efforts to get aid into Gaza. Since soon after the war began, huge quantities have entered the Strip and continue to do so.

Any shortage of vital commodities should not be blamed on Israel, but on the failure by the UN and other agencies to actually deliver the aid to the people who need it. The UN’s efforts will have been impeded by inefficiency, but even more by Hamas’s seizure of aid. Media reports have shown Hamas terrorists proclaiming that their warehouses are full.

Hamas is reported to have sold aid donated by the international community in order to help sustain its terrorist capabilities. Stolen aid seems to have become a major source of income, with some estimating that the terrorist group has profited by at least half a billion dollars. It also uses aid distribution as a weapon to control the population, in a desperate effort to cling on to its authority. If you don’t do exactly what Hamas says, you are likely to go hungry.

Joe Biden’s attempt to pressure Israel by effectively blaming it for the humanitarian crisis rewards Hamas, empowers its continuing terrorist campaign, and will help prolong the conflict, further endangering both Palestinians and Israelis.

Israel is unquestionably winning its seven-front war, including in Gaza and Lebanon. Nevertheless, it does depend on US weapons and military equipment to finish the job. Should the United States follow through with an embargo, the consequences for Israel and the West could be catastrophic.

The administration’s threatening letter to Israel also speaks about growing health risks, especially in the over-crowded humanitarian areas in the south, where Gazans have sought refuge from the conflict. These concerns are real. But where are the demands on Egypt to allow refugees across onto their side of the border? The silence on this from the US, the UN and the international community is in stark contrast to the blame constantly being heaped on Israel, the country doing its best to defend its people against terrorist aggression.

Not only that, but earlier this year the Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza was shut. Where are the demands on Cairo to re-open the Continue reading →

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The Nobel Peace Prize has become a sick joke

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 11 October 2024. © Richard Kemp

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner is being announced on Friday. Like so many other once-respected institutions, the Norwegian Nobel Committee appears to have been roundly captured by Left-wing wokeism. What seems to have seized the committee’s imagination in 2024, at the height of war in the Middle East, with peace nowhere in sight? The anti-Israel movement of course. It is all so sickeningly predictable.

The only surprise is that Hamas terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar and Iran’s supreme aggressor Ayatollah Khomeini are not on the list of potential winners, or perhaps a posthumous nomination for the late unlamented Hezbollah murderer-in-chief Hassan Nasrallah.

But the next best thing, the organising committee seems to have wheeled out UNRWA. That is a direct affront to all those Israelis and Palestinians who have suffered under the UN agency’s malignant role as effectively an adjunct to Hamas. UNRWA schools have helped indoctrinate and incite generations of Palestinian children to hate and attack Jews. UNRWA facilities of all kinds have housed Hamas armouries, missile launch points and command posts.

Meanwhile, some UNRWA staff were active participants in the murderous invasion of Israel on October 7. How is it possible that UNRWA can feature on the list of potential peace prize winners when many nations were so disgusted by its activities that they withdrew funding?

A reported nomination for the International Court of Justice adds insult to injury. The ICJ has jumped on the bandwagon with its obscene indulgence of South Africa’s accusations against Israel of genocide in Gaza. The IDF’s well documented efforts to minimise civilian deaths show the opposite to what is alleged. Hamas on the other hand does have genocidal intent, both with its own actions on October 7 as well as the words of its leaders confirming the purpose set out in its charter to kill Israelis and Jews everywhere. Allowing itself to be used in this way as an instrument of political warfare against Israel would disqualify the ICJ from nomination for a peace prize in any sane world.

The UN and its Secretary General Antonio Guterres also reportedly feature this year as Nobel Peace Prize nominees. The UN itself has Continue reading →

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Israel is right to take fight to Hezbollah – a ceasefire would only kick can down road

Article published in The Daily Express, 1 October 2024. © Richard Kemp

After a year of almost daily missile and drone attacks from Lebanon into Israel, the Israel Defence Forces has now stepped up its operations inside Lebanon.

We have witnessed the use of explosive-packed pagers and radios as well as air strikes against senior leaders. The pinnacle of that campaign came last week with the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah for three decades.

Having decimated Hezbollah’s leadership, in the last couple of days the Israel Defence Forces has mounted limited ground raids into southern Lebanon.

This operation might well expand into a full-blown air and ground offensive to push Hezbollah terrorists north at least as far as the Litani River, 18 miles from the Israeli border.

That will include air strikes into the depth of the country to destroy long-range missiles and drones that the terrorists will try to use both to hit IDF troops in southern Lebanon and fire deep into Israeli population centres.

This and the war in Gaza are just two arenas in a seven front war that Israel has been fighting for the last year, including the West Bank, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

The final front is Iran itself, which created, directs, funds and arms this ‘Ring of Fire’ around Israel intended to bring about its destruction.

The ayatollahs are watching in horror as Israel relentlessly degrades their two main proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. The loss of Hezbollah’s military power would be particularly devastating, as the 150,000 rockets in its armoury are there to deter Israeli or US military action against Iran.

As Hezbollah’s future is threatened there is every likelihood that Tehran will now attempt further direct strikes against Israel, along the lines of the failed missile and drone attacks in April.

It is also possible that Iran, directly or through its proxies, will try to strike Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in order to pile pressure on the US to restrain Israel.

So far Israel has resisted US and European demands for a ceasefire both in Gaza and Lebanon. It has been right to do so. There can be no reasoning with the fanatical jihadists bent on its destruction. Any diplomatic solution can be nothing more than a temporary cessation, kicking the can down the road rather than crushing it. Continue reading →

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The New York Times’ Hezbollah terrorist worship exposes the Left’s moral collapse

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 30 September 2024. © Richard Kemp

Hassan Nasrallah was a vicious, murderous terrorist with the blood of many thousands on his hands, in Israel, across the Middle East and around the world. But you may not have known that had you read the New York Times’s hero-worshipping eulogy of the dead Hezbollah leader, in which they labelled him a ‘beloved’ and ‘powerful orator’, who supposedly championed equality among Muslims, Christians and Jews. Associated Press joined in the applause, calling him ‘charismatic and shrewd’, an astute strategist, idolised by his Lebanese Shiite followers, and respected by millions across the Arab and Islamic world.

All this is reminiscent of the Washington Post’s infamous 2019 headline that described Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi as an ‘austere religious scholar’ after he was killed during a raid by US special forces. This insanity illustrates just how dangerous the Left-leaning media’s shift away from moral clarity on such issues has become.

We saw the effects of such distortion last year when Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’, published on the Guardian website, went viral on social media. The letter, which called for assault against ‘Americans and Jews’, was widely praised by many TikTokers.

That was a reaction by pro-Palestinian activists to the war in Gaza, and may well have been orchestrated by the well-funded anti-Israel propaganda campaign that has been gaining immense traction in the West since Hamas terrorists, along with hundreds of Gazan civilians, invaded Israel in an orgy of murder, rape, torture and kidnap on October 7. That abomination was quickly forgotten – and even wilfully denied – by swathes of the progressive Left amid Israel’s defensive campaign in Gaza.

Despite unprecedented Israeli efforts to minimise civilian casualties and enable aid delivery, both of which I have personally witnessed, the Israel Defense Forces have been widely vilified as war criminals, while Jerusalem’s opponents have been given the sort of treatment Nasrallah enjoyed from the New York Times. The bias is shamefully blatant. Continue reading →

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Israel is winning its war against Hezbollah. We should celebrate

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2024. © Richard Kemp

Israel’s leaders have announced that the focus of the war is now shifting northwards from Gaza to Lebanon. This follows a lightning bolt delivered to the Hezbollah terror army in which dozens of terrorists were killed and over 3,000 wounded when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded.

It’s not clear yet how this extraordinary event, perhaps the greatest single blow ever inflicted on a terrorist organisation, connects to the announced strategic shift.

But what we do know is that the IDF is reinforcing the divisions that have defended against Hezbollah’s daily attacks on the northern front for the past year. These reinforcements are coming out of Gaza, which is possible now because Hamas as an organised terror army has been destroyed.

Last week I drove with the IDF along the Philadelphi Corridor that forms the border between Gaza and Egypt. While Israel holds this terrain, Hamas cannot reconstitute. Although the fighting is far from over – there are still many hostages to free, terrorists to eliminate and tunnels to destroy – sufficient forces can now be released for the north.

The conflict may involve piling pressure on Hezbollah in the wake of the pager attacks to force them to cease fire and move north of the Litani river. If this fails, then a large-scale air and ground offensive may become necessary.

A struggle in the region won’t be easy, but it can certainly be won. We have seen the extraordinary achievements of the IDF in Gaza, fighting from the air, on the ground and beneath the surface.

In the past 11 months they have killed an estimated 20,000 terrorists against 340 IDF deaths. On probably the most complex battlefield seen in modern warfare, they have also achieved great success in minimising civilian casualties and maximising aid deliveries.

Much of this experience from Gaza will be applied in Lebanon. There are differences of scale, terrain, population and tactics, but Continue reading →

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Al Qaeda will be even bigger threat than they were in 2001 under Osama Bin Laden’s son

Article published in The Daily Mirror, 13 September 2024. © Richard Kemp

Coalition forces succeeded in their mission in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021. That statement may come as a surprise to some, but it’s true. Our primary purpose was to prevent another 9/11 — the worst terrorist attack in history — emerging from Afghanistan, and during that period nothing like it was ever launched from there.

Today the picture is very different, with a leaked intelligence report showing Al Qaida dramatically regaining strength in a country now under Taliban rule as it was on 9/11. And it’s not just Al Qaida. The Islamic State is also on the rise in Afghanistan. They carried out a horrific attack at the Crocus Hall in Moscow in March killing 145 people.

I was Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan in 2003. Back then, the Taliban and Al Qaida were pretty much at bay, following the successful US-led operation to drive them out that began in 2001. Later they became resurgent again but were being held back by the Afghan National Security Forces and Coalition troops, including the British. That all ended when President Joe Biden ordered his disastrous withdrawal in 2021. It led directly to the collapse of the Afghan forces and the Kabul government. As a result jihadist terror came full circle.

According to the leaked report, Al Qaida is now led by Usama Bin Laden’s son Hamza, along with other members of the Bin Laden terror dynasty. They have an open field now in Afghanistan, despite Biden’s boast in 2021 that US “over the horizon capabilities” would be sufficient to deal with the threat. In reality the intelligence and combat vacuum that he created means Al Qaida and the Islamic State will become an even greater danger to us all even than they were in 2001. And Hamza Bin Laden will be intent not only on jihadist conquest but also on vengeance for his father.

 

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The US should sanction the ICC

Article published in The Spectator, 31 August 2024. © Richard Kemp

The actions of the International Criminal Court’s Chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, will deprive Israel of its sovereignty and undermine the West’s defence against terrorists and despots. The US must put a stop to it.

In a submission to the ICC last week, Khan doubled down on his demands to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. He was responding to a multitude of submissions made to the Pre-Trial Chamber contesting the arrest warrants he demands. Most of these submissions questioned the ICC’s jurisdiction over Israel.

Israel, like the US and many other countries, is not a state party to the ICC. Before 2015, that placed Jerusalem outside the scope of the ICC’s legal powers, much as the court might have wished otherwise. That year, ‘Palestine’ became a member of the ICC, even though it is not a full member state of the UN. In order to secure jurisdiction over Palestine, and by extension over Israel too, the court unilaterally and without any legal authority decided on its boundaries: ‘the West Bank’, east Jerusalem, and Gaza. Of course borders can only be agreed by direct negotiation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which has not been achieved. That though is an inconvenient detail to be ignored by an ICC that wants Israelis in the dock at the Hague.

One of the main issues raised by those challenging Khan’s application, including the previous UK government, is that ICC jurisdiction over Israel violates the Oslo Accords. No matter, says the Prosecutor: the Rome Statute, which founded the ICC, overrides even that legally-binding bilateral treaty.

Khan objects to the restricted legal powers granted to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords, which effectively nullify ICC jurisdiction over Israelis in PA-controlled territory including Gaza. According to him, that can’t be so because it is not up to Israel as an ‘occupying power’ to impose legal restrictions on a sovereign people. He of course rejects the reality, so hotly debated for so many years, that ‘Palestine’ is not in fact a sovereign state and Israel cannot be an occupier of territory over which, since 1948, only Continue reading →

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Israel is winning the war but losing the world

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 30 August 2024. © Richard Kemp

The confrontations in the West Bank starkly illustrate the challenges Israel faces today on the world stage. Even before October 7 the level of violence there was on the rise. Since Hamas’s murderous invasion along the Gaza border, terrorist aggression in the West Bank has increased further. Much of this is down to Hamas as well as Fatah terrorists who are being pressed forward by Iranian funds and arms as well as encouragement by the Palestinian Authority. Until now, the IDF carried out limited raids to contain it. A couple of days ago it launched a division-sized operation.

The BBC, which has displayed repeated hostility towards Israel, has been questioning whether it was necessary for Jerusalem to defend itself against West Bank terrorism, rather than first questioning why they had to do so. Predictably the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has called for an ‘immediate cessation’ of Israeli operations. In a tweet he recited the worn-out solecism so beloved of international diplomats who have no answers: ‘Only an end to the occupation and a return to a meaningful political process that will establish a two-state solution will bring an end to the violence.’

Guterres is living in an alternate universe. After Israel withdrew its forces and uprooted all its citizens from Gaza in 2005, the strip was turned into an engine of war. Hamas’s fortress could be contained without full-scale military operations until October 7, but that doesn’t apply to the West Bank with its proximity to major Israeli population centres as well as its long border with Jordan. A terrorist army left unchecked would not only threaten Israel but Jordan as well.

Already Iran has been trying to destabilise Amman and develop a base of attack against Israel from the country. So no, Mr Guterres, the utopian vision of a two-state solution, which polls show the majority of Palestinian Arabs don’t want in any case, is not possible, especially not now.

We see this same picture with Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Israel has been attacked on all fronts and has responded in each case, both defensively and offensively, with tactical brilliance. Yet it has also been condemned repeatedly for doing so, in the media, in international bodies and in Western capitals. The traditional response among political leaders and diplomats always begins with ‘Israel has the right to defend itself but …’ before the predictable calls for restraint and ceasefires, topped off by the obligatory mumblings about a ‘two-state solution’.

The sort of restraint demanded has never been asked of any other country under attack. An example of the double standards applied to Israel can be seen in two tweets by David Lammy a few days ago. In response to attacks by Russia on Ukraine, he said: ‘The UK utterly condemns Russia’s cowardly missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure across Ukraine today. These assaults are in flagrant violation of international law and those responsible must be brought to justice.’ The day before, responding to Hezbollah missile and Continue reading →

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Israel’s persecution has exposed our two-tier international justice system

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 20 August 2024. © Richard Kemp

It looks like International Criminal Court justices will soon decide whether to issue arrest warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister and Defence Minister. The very prospect of this is nothing short of outrageous.

Successive ICC Chief Prosecutors have long had Israel in their crosshairs, and Hamas’s October orgy of mass murder, rape, torture and kidnapping gave British lawyer Karim Khan, the current incumbent, the pernicious excuse to move forward. Not against the Hamas terrorist perpetrators, of course, but against Israel.

To make the point that everyone is equal under the law, Khan requested arrest warrants concurrently for Hamas and Israeli leaders. That obviously would have zero effect on Hamas, already designated terrorists around the world and with absolutely nothing to lose. A meaningless, symbolic gesture – you might think.

But it is far, far worse than that. Creating a false equivalence between arch terrorists whose currency is blood and suffering and the leaders of a democratic state defending their people from attack is nothing short of morally bankrupt. It is like indicting Osama Bin Laden and President George W Bush at the same time. Or dragging Winston Churchill into the dock at Nuremberg beside Heinrich Himmler.

The High Level Military Group, ten former chiefs of staff, senior officers and cabinet ministers from Nato countries, of which I am a member, has submitted to the court a strong professional objection to Khan’s schemes. The HLMG, whose members are from the US, UK, Spain, France, Italy and Finland, were in Israel in July.

Among other military issues, we focused on Khan’s allegations that the Israeli ministers intentionally attacked civilians in Gaza and intentionally used starvation as a method of war. In our submission, Continue reading →