Can Israel take more war?

No telling in Jerusalem this morning that Israel resumed its war and poured hell on Gaza last night. In the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, shopkeepers receive pallets of soft drinks, and spilled Coke runs red-brown down the Via Dolorosa. A couple of streets away the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is very quiet. A few men chant lowly in the tomb of Christ.

Thirty-three hostages and 1,900 Palestinian prisoners were freed in the ceasefire agreed in January, but the promised talks afterward about a permanent end to the war went nowhere. Donald Trump said last December that there would be “hell to pay” if Hamas did not return the hostages before his inauguration, and that is why the deal between Israel and the terrorists was done. Neither side was really ready to end the conflict: Benjamin Netanyahu wants to eliminate Hamas; Hamas refuses to disarm.

Israel is shelling Gaza again and three kilometers away in Sderot a man named Escapov is relieved. Early on October 7, 2023, Escapov heard gunfire and looked out his window to see terrorists who he knew to be Hamas by their headbands. They were attacking the police station opposite his flat so he got his pistol and went out and saved a man who had been shot. There was a standoff for hours between the terrorists and the police but eventually the army came and razed the station and the Hamas fighters in it. “I’m 70.” says Escapov, who is an easy-going guy wearing sandals and sunglasses. “I’m too old for this shit.” I ask if it is good that the war is resumed and Escapov’s answer is that he wants to be able to walk through Gaza from one end to the other.

Down Route 232 to Kibbutz Nirim, just one kilometer closer to Gaza, we meet Adele Raemer, who has prepared a PowerPoint presentation about October 7. She delivers it smoothly, often smiling — she’s done it many times before. Telling her story helps ease the trauma. Nirim was founded in 1946 and had 430 residents before Hamas attacked. Like most kibbutz members, Adele says life in Nirim before October 7 was “95 percent heaven and 5 percent hell.” “It wasn’t roses and butterflies, but it wasn’t a war zone,” she says. I’m in Israel with a group of journalists on a trip organized by the British Israel Communications and Research Centre. Adele used to know some Gazans and once supported a two-state solution, but now she rejects the idea completely. Still, she doesn’t seem as pleased as Escapov that Netanyahu has resumed the war. “It’s very scary,” she says.

Infernal threats got the previous 25 living hostages released from Gaza, but it also angered their kidnappers. That is why there are mixed feelings today in Israel about Netanyahu’s decision. The freed hostages say they suffered more when Israel’s attacks were harder or when ceasefire talks hit a bad patch. What if Hamas starts killing hostages in response to the new offensive? Colonel Dotan Razili seems to expect this. “Israel has to decide which is more important: bringing back the hostages or ending Hamas,” he tells me.

On the evening of 18 March in the Beit Ariela Shaar Zion Library in Tel Aviv I meet Ilay David whose younger brother Evyatar was kidnapped from the Nova music festival. Ilay is smart and relaxed. What does he think about the resumption of war? “Everybody was surprised” he says. “Hopefully it’s for the best. I understand nothing about warfare. Hopefully it’s for the best…”

Ilay is put together for a man who knows his brother is perhaps getting beaten up tonight. There is nothing he can do so often he laughs and smiles in a way that you can’t imagine being possible for someone living his nightmare. A man who was held with Evyatar was released by Hamas a month ago and brought messages to Evyatar’s family. We will play songs by Queen and AC/DC together when I am released, he told his brother. Ilay plays the piano and says his brother is a brilliant guitar player.

We leave Tel Aviv, pass the Sea of Galilee and go up high to the town of Majdal Shams in the Golan. On 27 July last year as the sun was about to set a rocket flew over Mount Hermon and crashed into a football field in Majdal Shams, killing 12 children. Seemed like it came from nowhere, but it was Hezbollah; Lebanon and Syria are both just a couple kilometers away. The 20-year-old sister of one of the murdered boys talks to us, and she is as put together as Ilay. She speaks English and her dad hugs her proudly. Many Druze reject national identity. Once they were Syrian but now they’re Israeli.

Adham Safadi is an ambulance driver in the neighbouring town of Mas’ada and to be honest he looks finished. He got a call on 27 July that there had been an incident at the football field and saw his daughter lying dead when he arrived. Just cover her face, he told someone, and he tried to help the children who were injured but still living. “We want a future that will be white and not black,” he tells me in the ambulance station. It will not come soon. Israel called in air strikes on Lebanon yesterday after someone in Lebanon fired rockets at Israel.