Starmer to convene urgent Cabinet meeting on Gaza to set out pathway to peace
The Prime Minister will call senior ministers in during the summer recess for the meeting on Gaza on Tuesday afternoon, the PA news agency understands.
Sir Keir shared plans he is working on with France and Germany to 'bring about a lasting peace' with US President Donald Trump when they met in Scotland, Downing Street said.
And he plans to share details with Arab states and other key allies in the coming days.
Sir Keir is facing mounting calls to recognise Palestinian statehood immediately.
The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: 'This week, the Prime Minister is focused on a pathway to peace to ensure immediate relief for those on the ground, and a sustainable route to a two-state solution.
'We are clear that the recognition of the Palestinian state is a matter of when, not if, but it must be one of the steps on the path to a two-state solution as part of a wider plan that delivers lasting security for both Palestinians and Israelis.'
Amid international alarm over starvation in Gaza, Israel announced at the weekend that it would suspend fighting in three areas for 10 hours a day and open secure routes for aid delivery.
The UK confirmed it was taking part in airdrops of aid into the territory.
Aid agencies have welcomed the new measures but said they were not enough to counter the rising hunger in the Palestinian territory.
Sir Keir said that the British public is 'revolted' at the scenes of desperation in Gaza as he appeared alongside Mr Trump at his Turnberry golf course on Monday.
'It's a humanitarian crisis, it's an absolute catastrophe.
'Nobody wants to see that. I think people in Britain are revolted at seeing what they're seeing on their screens, so we've got to get to that ceasefire.'
The US president hinted at sticking points in US-led negotiations over a peace deal, saying Palestinian militant group Hamas had become 'very difficult to deal with' in recent weeks.
He suggested this was because they only held a small remaining number of Israeli hostages.
Sir Keir has likened the plan he is working on with France and Germany to the coalition of the willing, the international effort to support Ukraine towards a lasting peace.
The Prime Minister's official spokesman said the plan would build 'on the collaboration to date that paves the way to a long-term solution on security in the region'.
Sir Keir is meanwhile facing calls from a growing number of MPs to recognise a Palestinian state immediately.
More than 250 cross-party MPs have now signed a letter calling for ministers to take the step, up from 221 on Friday.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds on Monday dismissed the idea that there is a split at the top of Government over when to recognise a Palestinian state, saying 'we all want it to happen'.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting is among those to have signalled a desire for hastened action, calling for recognition 'while there's still a state of Palestine left to recognise', while Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the Government wants to recognise a Palestinian state 'in contribution to a peace process'.
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Leader Live
10 minutes ago
- Leader Live
I push Keir Starmer to be more extroverted in Scotland
Mr Sarwar said he speaks to the Prime Minister every two or three weeks, often calling at weekends when they both have more free time. The Scottish Labour leader also said he will not engage in any 'back room stitch-ups' with other parties if he becomes first minister following the Scottish election next year. At an Edinburgh Fringe event in front of a live audience, Mr Sarwar was interviewed by Catherine Salmond, editor of The Herald. He was pressed on his relationship with the UK Labour leader and whether Sir Keir was comfortable coming north of the border. He said: 'We're different personalities… I am much more probably conversational, out there, a bit of an extrovert. 'I think it's safe to say he's a bit more introverted in that sense.' Mr Sarwar said Sir Keir had become more relaxed and confident in the five years since becoming Labour leader. He said Sir Keir was more relaxed in Scotland than in other parts of the UK, adding: 'I think we've built up a rapport, probably because I am pushing to be a bit more of extroverted than perhaps he is in other parts.' He said he spoke to the Prime Minister around 'two or three times a month'. However he said the early part of Labour's response to the war in Gaza had been 'challenging' for his party, referring to an interview the Prime Minister gave where he said Israel had the 'right' to withhold power and water from Gaza in response to the October 7 attacks. 'I think the early part was challenging, he himself accepts that what he said in the LBC interview wasn't right,' Mr Sarwar said. Discussing the Middle East further, he said: 'I think we have to be doing much more to hold the Israeli government to account. 'To provide evidence that there is not any components that are being used in a proactive way in Gaza.' Looking ahead to the 2026 Scottish election, Mr Sarwar said he was putting his 'heart, soul energy, time' into winning. He said it would be a 'very close election' likely to result in a 'parliament of minorities'. Rather than doing deals such as the SNP-Green powersharing agreement, he said he would 'work progressively with the parliament' if he became first minister. He said: 'We are looking to form a minority Scottish Labour government that does no kind of back room stich-up but instead moves to govern based on what we promised.'
New Statesman
40 minutes ago
- New Statesman
The Comeback: the PM's desperate search for a media strategy
This is the stuff the PM really likes: a long meeting on a difficult problem, details, nitty gritty. Getting the team around a table and digesting a big chunk of policy. He was into his flow, understanding, commenting, ensuring notes were taken. He didn't want to be interrupted. But he noticed immediately the manner in which the special adviser was holding her phone, slightly away from her body, in her fingertips. That portended something. She was looking at the device as if it had been found to contain something toxic. Which in a manner of speaking, it had. Starmer leaned back. 'Yes?' It was an update from the press office. Keir did not want to be bothered by something happening in the media. The Spad looked up to the doorway, where the chief of staff had appeared. 'I've been asked to tell you –' but Keir raised a hand. 'Can this wait? We are close to a breakthrough here. If we negotiate this properly we might be able to get Britain buying electricity from France on most of the same terms that we used in 2019. A huge step forward. So whatever it is, it had better be pretty serious.' The Spad winced. 'I've been asked to tell you that Robert Jenrick – ' 'Oh, for goodness sake.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'I've been asked to tell you that Robert Jenrick has acquired a submarine.' I remember the silence that followed. You could have stirred it with a spoon. Starmer blinked several times. It had all seemed amusing enough at first. The shadow justice secretary had begun by chasing fare-dodgers through Underground stations. We had enjoyed the sight of him being told to fuck off by surly young men. Good luck with that, we said to ourselves. Jenrick ended that video by railing against 'weird Turkish barber shops' that were somehow 'chipping away at society'. Keir actually had a great response to that. He got his hair cut by a Turkish guy, a model citizen – we knew this because the security services do tend to check up on anyone who is planning to hold a blade near the Prime Minister's head. We had planned for Keir to tell the public that there was nothing weird about Mehmet, that they had nice chats and that he'd never once seen him chipping away at society. A media strategy was formed, but by the time it was signed off the moment had passed. We took the next Jenrick video more seriously. Some new equipment had clearly been bought and a security guard, perhaps two, could be seen loitering on the edges of the shots. Nevertheless, Jenrick showed what looked disconcertingly like real physical bravery as he jogged up to a van on a gloomy side street, and placed two bewildered fly-tipping builders under citizen's arrest. Again, many people found it laughable. The moment when he opens the van's rear doors and shouts 'Plasterboard!' was widely mocked. What the focus groups told us, however, was that we hadn't properly accounted for how much of pain in the arse it is for a responsible citizen to get rid of some spare plasterboard, and therefore how annoying it is to see someone just dumping it on the pavement behind Kwik-Fit. Out there, in the country, a new appetite was forming for a politician who was prepared to do things. The videos became more frequent. He hid in the bushes outside Birmingham council's offices and caught well-paid officials rocking up well past ten o'clock; he presented each with a letter, reminding them of their hours and duties. He went around a south London park with a fire extinguisher, trying to stop people smoking cannabis. He caught Gary Lineker speeding. Nevertheless, the submarine came as a complete surprise. And to be fair, that is literally what submarines are designed to do. But Keir's chief of staff neatly encapsulated what we were all thinking: 'Where the fuck did he get a submarine from?' It was not a big submarine. In the video, Jenrick explains to a camera inside the vehicle that it only has room for two people. It was yellow, with a smattering of Union Jack stickers. Even small submarines are not cheap, however. We later found out that the vessel was owned by a company registered in Thailand that was owned, through some clever offshore structure, by itself, but which shared an address with other companies that were linked to an expatriate Tory donor. Details. What mattered was what Jenrick was prepared to do with it. The sub was in the Channel, 15 feet below the surface. It's mostly a dull video: Jenrick, a camera very close to his face, is fiddling with switches and talking to someone, unseen behind him in the gloomy cockpit. Then there's a moment when the sub jolts and he looks genuinely frightened, his skin pale and shiny in the greenish light. 'Are we attached?' he asks, twice. The pilot says something behind him, and the engine gets a lot louder. There's another long period of switch-flicking and then they surface, and we see the boat. It could not have escaped the notice of the migrants on the inflatable boat that they were headed back to France. The shoreline, having grown distant, gradually came back into view. This would have caused confusion and dismay. Even so, it must have been a shock when the coffee-coloured waters bubbled, parted, and produced a small yellow turret from which Jenrick protruded. At that point, the angle in the video changes. It becomes clear he is being filmed from another boat, a speedy little craft which keeps its distance. The back of the sub froths and they move closer to the shore until they reach a buoy, floating on its own a few hundred feet out. Jenrick leans out of the hatch and grabs it. He fiddles with it for a minute, exchanging words with the other person in the sub, and then drops the buoy back into the sea. He waves one arm towards the beach and suddenly we see the cable that he has attached to the migrants' boat. It pulls taut and the inflatable surges towards the beach – pulled back to shore, Jenrick tells the camera, by a tractor waiting on the sand. The video then cuts to Jenrick on the beach, some time later. A small crowd of migrants and two bored-looking French police officers stare as he cuts a long strip of material from the side of the inflatable. And then he runs back into the sea, jumps into the little speedboat and stares into the salt spray as they turn for England. He sort of looks like Bear Grylls, one of the Spads remarked, if Bear Grylls was an estate agent with a penchant for mass deportation. Immediately the meeting became about how to react. The bloke from the Sun came in and told everyone to shut up. Keir seemed to like this. Control was being asserted. We started to talk about which laws Jenrick had probably broken, but the bloke from the Sun told us to shut up again. 'That's what he wants,' he said. 'He wanted TfL to tell him off for catching fare dodgers; it made them look like a bunch of useless twats. He wanted the police to question him about Lineker's Ferrari. He wants us, or better yet the French, to arrest him for policing our borders.' Another man, who had also previously worked on the Sun, told us: 'We have to fight fire with fire. We have to do something… Not that, obviously, but something. This is a symptom, you see. The public think we're not really doing anything –' 'Which is ridiculous,' the PM bristled. 'Only yesterday I launched a new commission to look into rural broadband. It will report back by 2029 at the latest,' he added, with evident satisfaction. A senior comms guy raised a hand and was nodded at. 'What if. And to be clear, this is purely blue-sky stuff, no bad ideas, no judgement, this is just something I am going to run up the flagpole and then immediately take back down again. What if Keir hit someone?' The silence was back, but now it teemed with possibilities. 'I'm just saying. It worked for Prescott. He punched a Welsh farmer and essentially became a national treasure. Eric Cantona kicked a hooligan. Highlight of his career. Done right, it can show character.' 'Macron's punchable,' chipped in a policy assistant. 'I'd punch Macron.' 'He's, ah, he's 47,' said someone else. Briefly, silently, we acknowledged who would win that fight. 'Orbán's the same age, and not in the best of shape. And he's horrible.' 'I am not,' the PM said with an icy clarity, 'going to punch anyone, least of all the president of another country. It would be a diplomatic disaster and a national humiliation.' 'What about Matt Hancock? The constituency of voters who would like to punch Hancock must be almost universal.' 'No.' 'Could he headbutt James Corden?' Everyone, even Keir, appeared to enjoy the idea. 'Or – he could shove Prince Andrew?' In the end we decided to start small. Just Keir, walking along a street in his constituency, holding the phone as if making a video call, because apparently that is how everyone makes videos now. He had wanted to talk about the things he likes about Britain – including, obviously, football. Fortunately we were joined by a new senior press strategist, just arrived from the Sun, who insisted we all shut up. 'No one cares,' he told us, 'if a politician is happy. New trade deal? No one cares. GDP up a fraction? No one cares. They want you to be clear about the problems that exist, and solve them.' The problem that Keir was going to be clear about was found in a building in his constituency. Hundreds of shell companies were registered there, and many of them were used, we knew, for tax evasion. (Helpfully, one or two were linked to Tory donors; we would leak this later if the video did well.) The plan was for Keir to walk the streets, chatting into the camera about how annoying it was that some people didn't pay their fair share, and then get him to bang on the door, demand to know from the people inside what was going on and tell the public he was (a) bloody annoyed and (b) personally going to do something about it. It was going OK. He was talking into the phone, a bit of a lecture but basically fine, and then we all heard it: the plaintive chirping of a hire bike being stolen. Keir looked up from the screen, lips pursing furiously. He made eye contact with the bloke from the Sun, who nodded frantically, then strode towards the thieves. 'Oi,' he said. We cringed. But then: 'OI!!' Our hearts leapt. Best of all, he was still filming, capturing his angry-dad act from a low angle. 'Leave that alone. You can't just take things without paying for them!' They offered him a choice between fucking off and getting punched. Still, it was positive that they hadn't defaulted to the second option immediately. But then they recognised him. 'Oh! You're that guy, right? Who is he?' One asked the other. They were laughing now, and one, instinctively, produced his own phone and began filming. 'I'm the Prime Minister. And I'm telling you to stop stealing that bike.' This they found hilarious. And then Keir made his move, standing directly in front of the soon-to-be-stolen bike. In a moment he was shoved aside by the two young men, who rode off up the street, their vehicles clicking and bleating in protest. Keir sighed heavily. But wait, they were coming back! Had they seen an opportunity for discourse, for change, for – no. As they rode past, one of them threw his takeaway cup of drink. The other had somehow, in the space of less than a minute, procured a sandwich, which he also threw. They wheeled off, cackling like seagulls. Egg mayonnaise and warm Coke dripped from the PM's Charles Tyrwhitt suit. We began urgently to discuss how this could be used to illustrate the National Policing Guarantee, but the bike thieves did not waste time on a media strategy. They posted their video online within minutes. By the afternoon it was leading every news website. The Eggening, as it came to be known, did nothing for the PM's popularity. The culprits were arrested, but this led people to gripe that antisocial behaviour was only punished when it was directed at the Prime Minister. I heard Keir observe ruefully that he should have learned from Miliband – or the ghost of Harold Wilson, for that matter – that Labour leaders must keep their distance from sandwiches. The humiliation lasted for weeks. Even Badenoch was able to land a few sandwich puns at PMQs. Meanwhile Jenrick was racking up the views. He'd been tipped off that a fossil-fuel protester was planning to disrupt the darts. He apprehended the guy before he could do anything, marching him out to an applauding crowd. He got a handshake from Luke Littler, for crying out loud. In No 10 there was a huge shouting match. Four or five former Sun employees were yelling at various Spads, strategists and ministers. 'We have to do something,' bellowed the director of communications. 'We have to get people's attention.' And then it all changed, thanks to Rachel. She definitely didn't mean to do it. It was accepted by the public, and police investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, that it was an accident. And yet… I remember a pollster who summed it up, a few months later, as: 'Clearly an accident. But not necessarily a mistake.' The state visit had been delayed by the stock-market crash; even Trump's team didn't think it was a great idea for him to be seen banqueting with royalty while America's portfolios burned. And so he arrived in November, during the shooting season. It went badly almost from the start. Trump was rude to the Princess of Wales. He addressed the Commons, flanked by sniggering Reform MPs, but the event descended into furious confrontation when Secret Service agents dragged Ed Davey out of the chamber for heckling him. It was agreed that a shoot could work well for both leaders. The gun lobbyists behind Trump thought it could bring some Roosevelt energy to the presidency. In the UK, the sort of people who talked about 'Strong Labour' got hot under the collar at the idea of Keir with a firearm. But of course the PM is a pescatarian, and you can't shoot a haddock – not if you want to maintain your political integrity – so we settled for clay pigeons. The King – who is well versed in field sports, and has been shooting since he was 11 – had agreed to be paired with the president, but Trump didn't want to be shown up. He asked to be paired with the person he assumed would be the worst shot – and the only woman in the shooting party. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Trump was possessed by a ructious temper, as he had been for the whole trip. That mood was now at its peak. He was jibing Reeves, physically prodding her. Whenever she called 'pull!' and one of the orange discs whirred into the air, he would yell 'choke!' so close that his spittle landed on her cheek. She took it incredibly well, smiling icily and picking off the pigeons. This infuriated Trump. Then came the moment that would be replayed endlessly on screens across the globe. She raises the gun to her shoulder and calls 'pull'. Two bright orange clay pigeons rise into the autumn sky. She squeezes the trigger and one of them becomes a cloud of dusty fragments. As she is moving the barrels carefully to follow the other target, he punches her in the shoulder. American TV anchors tried to cast this as a 'jostle' or a 'chuck', but it's clearly a punch, delivered with enough force that she stumbles. What happens next happens in a fraction of a second. She is a natural shot, but she is not experienced in handling a gun; she lets go with her left hand, and the heavy 12-bore – one of the King's own Purdeys – is now supported only by her right hand, which is also on the trigger. The muscles of her arm struggle to compensate, her hand squeezes. She becomes the second person to shoot Donald Trump. And for a second time, he gets lucky. The pellets are of a light gauge and mostly miss him. But not all: one flies into his hand, two into his stomach, one clips his jaw. It is not enough to cause any serious injury, but it hurts. He sits down in shock. Keir stepped towards him, assessed the damage, and put his hand on Reeves' shoulder. 'Well,' he said, as the president whimpered on the floor. 'You've certainly done something. And I think it's fair to say it'll get people's attention.' Obviously it was a diplomatic nightmare, but it's not as if the Trump administration was pleasant to work with before that. The markets weren't happy, but as we had found before, what they were really unhappy about was the idea of Reeves being sacked. The White House was furious but Keir had no choice, he had to say that her position was secure. Nobody mucks about with the bond market. And in the months that followed, she made the incident her own. For once, no one minded that her apologies sounded robotic and insincere, because no one felt particularly sorry that she'd shot him. My favourite line from her during that time was: 'I did not shoot him to death' (Today programme, 4 March 2026). She found a way to express deep official regret for the accident, while allowing the public to understand that a (light) shooting of Donald Trump had been, for many people, a rather cathartic thing to witness. As the economic and political situation in America became more troubling, it took on a greater significance. A year before the election, on a wall in east London I saw a huge mural: Reeves in cowboy hat and bandolier, her gun held aloft. ¡Viva La Reevolucion! I stopped for a while to look at that, and I thought: You never know. [See also: The Sydney Sweeney vibe shift is futile] Related
Economist
41 minutes ago
- Economist
The long-term effects of hunger in Gaza
FOR two weeks, the world has claimed it is working to end the widespread hunger in Gaza. The UN is pleading with Israel to allow more lorries of aid into the territory. Arab and Western states are airdropping food. On August 5th Donald Trump said America would take a larger role in distributing aid, though he was vague about the details. 'I know Israel is going to help us with that in terms of distribution, and also money,' he said. Yet on the ground, Gazans say little has changed. There is not enough food entering Gaza, nor is there law and order to allow its distribution. Airdrops are hard to reach. Convoys are looted soon after they cross the border. Finding food often requires making a risky trip to an aid centre, where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in recent months, or paying exorbitant sums on the black market. This is a calamity in its own right, one that will have long-term consequences for many Gazans, particularly children. But it is also a glimpse of Gaza's future. Even after the war ends, it will remain at the mercy of others for years to come. Wedged between Israel and Egypt, the tiny territory was never self-sufficient. Its neighbours imposed an embargo after Hamas, a militant group, took power in 2007. The economy withered. Half of the workforce in the strip was unemployed and more than 60% of the population relied on some form of foreign aid to survive. The UN doled out cash assistance, ran a network of clinics that offered 3.5m consultations a year and operated schools that educated some 300,000 children. Still, Gaza could meet at least some basic needs by itself. Two-fifths of its territory was farmland that supplied enough dairy, poultry, eggs and fruits and vegetables to meet most local demand. Small factories produced everything from packaged food to furniture. The Hamas-run government was inept, but it provided law and order. After nearly two years of war, almost none of that remains. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says that Gaza's 2m people need 62,000 tonnes of food a month. That is a bare-bones calculation: it would provide enough staple foods but no meat, fruits and vegetables or other perishables. By its own tally, Israel has allowed far less in. It imposed a total siege on the territory from March 2nd until May 19th, with no food permitted to enter. Then Israel allowed the UN to resume limited aid deliveries to northern Gaza. It also helped establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy outfit that distributes food at four points in southern and central Gaza. In more than two months of operation, it has handed out less than 0.7 meals per Gazan per day—and that assumes each box of aid, stocked with a hotch-potch of dried and canned goods, really provides as many meals as the GHF claims it does. All told, Israel permitted 98,674 tonnes of food aid to cross the border in the five months through July, an average of 19,734 tonnes a month—just 32% of what the WFP says is necessary. Although the volume of aid has increased in recent days, it is still insufficient. 'We're trying to get 80 to 100 trucks in, every single day,' says Valerie Guarnieri of the WFP. 'It's not a high bar, but a realistic bar of what we can achieve.' On August 4th, though, Israel allowed only 41 of the agency's lorries to enter a staging area on the Gaza border, and it let drivers collect just 29 of them. Getting into Gaza is only the first challenge. Distribution is a nightmare. Since May 19th the UN has collected 2,604 lorryloads of aid from Gaza's borders. Just 300 reached their intended destination. The rest were intercepted en route, either by desperate civilians or by armed men. Aid workers are nonchalant about civilians raiding aid lorries, which they euphemistically call 'self-distribution': they reckon the food still reaches people who need it. 'There's a real crescendo of desperation,' says Ms Guarnieri. 'People have no confidence food is going to come the next day.' But the roaring black market suggests that much of it is stolen. Gaza's chamber of commerce publishes a regular survey of food prices (see chart). A 25kg sack of flour, which cost 35 shekels ($10) before the war, went for 625 shekels on August 5th. A kilo of tomatoes fetched 100 shekels, 50 times its pre-war value. Such prices are far beyond the reach of most Gazans. Those with a bit of money often haggle for tiny quantities: a shopper might bring home a single potato for his family, for example. Israel's ostensible goal in throttling the supply of aid was to prevent Hamas from pilfering any of it. Earlier this month the group released a propaganda video of Evyatar David, an Israeli hostage still held in Gaza. He was emaciated, and spent much of the video recounting how little he had to eat: a few lentils or beans one day, nothing the next. At one point a militant handed Mr David a can of beans from behind the camera. Many viewers noted that the captor's hand looked rather chubby. As much of Gaza starves, Hamas, it seems, is still managing to feed its fighters. The consequences of Israel's policy instead fall hardest on children—sometimes even before birth. 'One in three pregnancies are now high-risk. One in five babies that we've seen are born premature or underweight,' says Leila Baker of the UN's family-planning agency. Compare that with before the war, when 8% of Gazan babies were born underweight (at less than 2.5kg). There were 222 stillbirths between January and June, a ten-fold increase from levels seen before the war. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed outfit that tracks hunger, said last month that 20,000 children were hospitalised for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July. Even before they reach that point, their immune systems crumble. Moderately malnourished children catch infections far more easily than well-fed ones, and become more seriously ill when they do, rapidly losing body weight. The body takes a 'big hit' when food intake falls to just 70-80% of normal, says Marko Kerac, a paediatrician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who has treated children in famine-stricken places. Most children in Gaza are eating a lot less than that. In July the World Health Organisation reported an outbreak of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that may have links to hunger. Gaza's health ministry says cases are multiplying, including among children. Give us our daily bread Nor is calorie intake the only concern. Although flour and salt in Gaza are fortified with some vitamins and minerals, such as iodine, they are consumed in limited amounts—especially now, since many bakeries have been closed for months, owing to a lack of flour and fuel. In February, during the ceasefire, Israel allowed 15,000 tonnes of fruits and vegetables and 11,000 tonnes of meat and fish into Gaza. Since March it has allowed just 136 tonnes of meat. All of this means there is widespread deficiency of essential nutrients that help children's brains develop. Every child in Gaza, in other words, will remain at lifelong risk of poor health because of today's malnutrition. There is consistent evidence for this from studies of populations that have lived through famine: during the second world war, the 1960s famine in China and, more recently, places like Ethiopia. Children who have suffered acute malnourishment have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic diseases as adults. They are also at risk of worse cognitive development. A flood of aid cannot undo the damage, but it can prevent it from getting worse. It will have to be sustained. The devastation wrought by Israel's war has left Gazans with no alternative but to rely on aid. In February the UN estimated that the war had caused $30bn in physical damage and $19bn in economic disruption, including lost labour, forgone income and increased costs. Reconstruction would require $53bn. At this point, that is little more than a guess. The real cost is impossible to calculate. But it will be enormous. The first task will be simply clearing the rubble. A UN assessment in April, based on satellite imagery, estimated that there were 53m tonnes of rubble strewn across Gaza—30 times as much debris as was removed from Manhattan after the September 11th attacks. Clearing it could be the work of decades. The seven-week war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, the longest and deadliest before the current one, produced 2.5m tonnes of debris. It took two years to remove. Rebuilding a productive economy will be no less difficult. Take agriculture. The UN's agriculture agency says that 80% of Gaza's farmland and 84% of its greenhouses have been damaged in the war. Livestock have been all but wiped out. A satellite assessment last summer found that 68% of Gaza's roads had been damaged (that figure is no doubt higher today). The two main north-south roads—one along the coast, the other farther inland—are both impassable in places. Even if farmers can start planting crops for small harvests after the war, it will be hard to bring their produce to market. The picture is equally bleak in other sectors: schools, hospitals and factories have all been largely reduced to rubble. The Geneva Conventions are clear that civilians have the right to flee a war zone. Exercising that right in Gaza is fraught: Palestinians have a well-grounded fear that Israel will never allow them to return. Powerful members of Binyamin Netanyahu's government do not hide their desire to ethnically cleanse the territory and rebuild the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. Still, the dire conditions have led some people to think the unthinkable: a survey conducted in May by a leading Palestinian pollster found that 43% of Gazans are willing to emigrate at the end of the war. Mr Netanyahu may not follow through on his talk of reoccupying Gaza, which he hinted at in media leaks earlier this month. His far-right allies may not fulfil their dream of rebuilding the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. In a sense, though, the ideologues in his cabinet have already achieved their goal. Israel's conduct of the war has left Gazans with a grim choice: leave the territory, or remain in a place rendered all but uninhabitable. ■
