Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 27 November 2024. © Richard Kemp

Whatever happened to Hezbollah’s solidarity with its jihadist brothers in Gaza? That was the pretext for launching its war of aggression against Israel the day after Hamas’s October 7 orgy of murder, rape, kidnapping and torture. Yet despite the Hezbollah leadership’s cast iron guarantees that ‘the Lebanon front will not stop before stopping the aggression on Gaza’, it seems they couldn’t even be bothered to mention the Gaza Strip in their desperation for a ceasefire. Nothing could be more telling of the once hubris-filled Hezbollah’s sorry state after a year of mauling by Israel.

Their leaders have been taken out by the dozen, huge numbers of fighters cut down, rockets and launchers blown to smithereens and all of the village strongholds in southern Lebanon razed to the ground. Many terrorists have fled for their lives into neighbouring Syria in the face of the IDF bulldozer. This has become the fate of the fanatical and murderous gangsters that until recently were thought of as the most powerful paramilitary force the world had ever seen.

The blow that this ceasefire represents to the Iranian regime is every bit as great. Hezbollah, painstakingly built up at enormous expense over 40 years, was their flagship, the most important part of the ‘ring of fire’ put in place to burn Israel to death. The vessel may not yet have been sunk but it is certainly filling up with water. Manning the pumps rather than continuing to fire broadsides was seen by the ayatollahs as the best way of salvaging something from the wreckage.

As the IDF continued to hammer Hezbollah, its remaining leadership also feared uprising by rival factions in Lebanon, where long standing animosities have been held at bay by its hitherto unchallenged stranglehold on the country. It’s not clear whether that might yet materialise but you can imagine the fear such a prospect would seize in the Supreme Leader and his henchmen who themselves are having to hold off growing dissent at home.

Adding to the woes of Hezbollah and its Iranian masters is the imminent arrival of Donald Trump in the White House. He is going to usher in a new era in Middle East relations with every probability of less restraint towards Iran and its terror proxies. Recognising that peace and stability is achieved not by fear but by strength, Mike Waltz, Trump’s choice for National Security Adviser, says: ‘We will not tolerate the status quo of Iran’s support for terrorism.’ Continue reading →

Article published in The Sunday Telegraph, 9 November 2024. © Richard Kemp

Since Donald Trump was re-elected as US president, the Left in the US and Europe have gone into meltdown. But nobody will feel a greater sense of foreboding than the leadership of the West’s enemies in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.

Most immediately, the return of Trump is Iran’s worst nightmare. The ayatollahs have enjoyed four years of financial and political benefits from Joe Biden’s policies of appeasement, which saw billions of dollars of frozen assets released, empowering Tehran on the world stage. Why else would Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei have allowed or even ordered his terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah to so viciously assault Israel in October last year, if he did not feel confident that a craven US administration would let him get away with it?

The Trump years were very different. As President, Trump had trashed Barack Obama’s irrational nuclear deal and piled on economic sanctions. He went on to order the elimination of Qasem Soleimani, chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, the organisation responsible for terrorism across the Middle East and around the world. Trump’s return to the White House therefore represented a clear and present threat to the continuation of the regime in Tehran.

The Supreme Leader couldn’t tolerate the return of his nemesis to the White House, and that is why the regime ordered Trump’s assassination in September. On Friday, the Department of Justice revealed charges against an Afghan immigrant to the US, Farhad Shakeri, who was allegedly tasked by the IRGC to murder the then US presidential candidate.

There is no question that Khamanei and the IRGC meant business. The regime has successfully carried out multiple political assassinations since it came to power in 1979, and has attempted to murder many others.

On its own, Iran’s intent to assassinate Donald Trump is a casus belli, demanding the decapitation of the regime. But Tehran’s aggression goes beyond even that. In the last year alone, Iran’s proxies have carried out almost 200 attacks against US forces in Iraq, Syria and Jordan. On 7 October last year, more than 40 Americans living in Israel were murdered by Iranian proxies and 12 kidnapped, some of Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 26 October 2024. © Richard Kemp

Israel’s attacks on Iran this morning were devastating. Dozens of combat planes flew 1,000 miles and are reported to have struck 20 military sites across the country. The primary targets were air defence systems and missile manufacturing facilities. This leaves Tehran more vulnerable to future strikes.

But there are two other consequences of Israel’s raids that are even more significant. First, the ayatollahs, already fearful of a direct, all-out war against a stronger power, will now be even more cowed and may be cautious about any retaliation. There was an indication of that in their statement that Israel had not crossed their red lines with this attack.

Second, they will have intensified fears for their top priority: the stability of their regime. There is significant dissent within the country and this latest dramatic sign of vulnerability will encourage those who seek to bring down the government. The dissidents will not be taken in by Tehran’s bluster that the Israeli strikes were blunted by air defences and caused only limited damage, a lie underlined by threats to Iranian citizens of lengthy prison sentences if they share footage of the strikes.

Nor will they believe the regime’s assertions that Israel was deterred by their warnings against the more significant attack that some had expected in response to repeated Iranian aggression, including the failed barrage of 200 missiles on October 1. Israel’s raid was not powerful enough to deal with the Iranian threat but that has nothing to do with any warnings from Tehran.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, knows only too well that a decisive strike is required. But his military actions have to be calibrated according to what will be tolerated in Washington. Fighting a war on seven battle fronts, plus a hugely important eighth front — political warfare fought in the UN, international courts, and capitals around the world — Israel is heavily dependent on continued US support. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →