At 1pm on 7 October 2023, hours after Palestinian armed groups launched their daybreak attack, the high command of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) issued a stark order: up to 20 Gazan civilians could be killed in a single strike on even the lowest-ranking member of Hamas. With AI to speed up the targeting, that order began a punishing bombing campaign in a war that has killed some 74,000 Palestinians.
As a result, Israel won a crushing victory over Hamas, but lost public support around the world, including in the United States. For a country that has long relied on US backing, that could be the lasting and most important legacy of the Hamas assault on 7 October, which left some 1,200 people dead.
and magazine in Tel Aviv found that the rules actually allowed for 100 civilians to die if a senior member of Hamas was the target. A sinister-sounding AI named Lavender churned out tens of thousands of targets; human operators spent about 20 seconds approving each one.
Asos hack fears after ‘compromised’ alert – what we know
Thousands of Asos customers have been sent a phone alert saying the retailer has been hacked.
Here’s everything we know so far…
What happened?
Phone alert
Thousands of customers received a mobile app notification on Tuesday.
The notification, titled “Asos hacked”, directed users to a Telegram account.
Shares drop
Asos shares plummeted by more than 10 per cent on Tuesday as a result.
What did the message say?
The message read: “Dear Asos DPO and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance. Engage with us, or we will leak it.”
DPO refers to the data protection officer, the role in a company responsible for customer information safeguarding.
Snowflake is an online data platform used by a wide array of companies, but it is not yet known whether Asos – which is yet to comment on the incident – is one of those.
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The notification
Latest hacking incident
Asos, which owns brands including Topshop and Miss Selfridge, has 17 million customers globally. The UK is its largest market, making up 49 per cent of revenues in the first half of the latest financial year.
Snowflake has been the reported subject of a number of data breaches in recent years, including an attack on Ticketmaster which saw customer details stolen. It comes after a raft of UK retailers were targeted by cyber attackers over the past two years, including Marks & Spencer and Harrods.
Brits pick greatest ‘driving anthems’ of all time
British motorists have voted to decide on the best driving anthem of all time.
Here are the results…
New research
Drivers vote
A new poll of 2,000 UK drivers, commissioned by Isuzu UK, has unveiled British motorists’ favourite driving anthem.
The tunes
Bruce Springsteen, Miley Cyrus and Bon Jovi were among the artists attributed with providing the best highway tracks. But did they come out on top?
Top five driving anthems
- 1Hotel California – The Eagles. The 70s hit saw 27 per cent of those surveyed name the 1977 classic rock song as the ultimate driving anthem.
- 2Born in the USA – Bruce Springsteen. The 1984 hit just missed top spot, with 24 per cent.
- 3. The 2023 hit from the American pop star came in third with 22 per cent.
- 4Boys of Summer – Don Henley. Another from 1984, the song placed fourth with 21 per cent.
- 5Livin’ on a Prayer – Bon Jovi. The 1986 power ballad took 18 per cent of the votes.
What else are drivers saying?
Meanwhile, 40 per cent of drivers polled admitted to singing along to tunes in the car around seven times a week, despite a third (33 per cent) admitting they have startled passengers with their “enthusiastic” vocals.
Three in 10 (31 per cent) agreed that certain songs bring back fond childhood memories of family holidays and day trips.
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Who was ex-MP and ‘master storyteller’ Jeffrey Archer?
The bestselling author and former politician has died at the age of 86.
But who was Jeffrey Archer?
Archer passes away ‘suddenly’
Jeffrey Archer, renowned novelist and former Conservative MP, died “suddenly and peacefully at home between writing sessions” on Monday, his publisher HarperCollins said in a statement.
Alongside his political career, Archer was a wildly successful novelist, during his five-decade career and being made a in 1992.
Early life
Archer was born an only child in Weston-super-Mare on 15 April, 1940. After completing his education at Wellington School in Somerset, Archer attended the University of Oxford in October 1963.
He went for a one-year course, a diploma in education, but ended up staying for three years, just as though he were a typical undergraduate.
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Political career
- Archer was first elected MP for the Lincolnshire constituency of Louth in 1969.
- In 1985, Margaret Thatcher appointed him deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.
- The same year, Archer also set up his own PR firm, Archer Enterprises, and in 1992 was created a life peer.
- At the turn of the century, he was the Tory candidate to be mayor of London; then scandal struck.
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Time in jail
- Archer’s political career was paused in 2001 when he was jailed for four years for perjury and perverting the course of justice.
- A jury found he lied in a libel action he had brought against newspaper, in which he was awarded £500,000 in damages.
- Archer was released early in 2003 and returned to the House of Lords until he retired in 2024.
Archer the novelist
- Archer wrote his first novel, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, in 1974, after almost going bankrupt.
- An instant bestseller, it sparked a prolific career as an author which ultimately made him a millionaire.
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It has been one of the great privileges of my publishing life to have been Jeffrey Archer’s editor. He was the master storyteller and an editor’s dream – phenomenally hard-working, utterly committed to completing draft after draft to get every word as perfect as possible, and a true champion of the ‘team’ nature of great publishing
kate elton, harpercollins uk chief executive
Final act
Everybody would like to run their last 100 metres at the Olympics and win the gold medal, but there’s always a time. I think the clever thing in life is when to get out
Archer declared in an interview just last week that he “shall not be retiring”. His final novel, a Second World War-era historical fiction was published Tuesday, hours after his death was announced.
Badenoch pays tribute
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said she was “incredibly saddened” to hear of Archer’s passing. “He had sent me a lovely message just this morning and was always a great source of encouragement to me personally,” she added.
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UK POLITICS
Tories pledge ‘Britannia Shield’ – how would it work?
The Conservatives have pledged to invest £10bn in a British missile defence system which has drawn comparisons to Israel’s elaborate “Iron Dome”.
Here’s how it could work, and how much the experts think it might really cost.
What is the ‘Britannia Shield’?
Air defence system
The Tories have promised to build a new UK air defence system if voted into power.
How will it work?
The “Britannia Shield” would provide systems to detect and stop incoming threats using interceptor missiles.
British ‘Iron Dome’?
But Kemi Badenoch has pushed back on comparisons to Israel’s Iron Dome system.
We are not building the Iron Dome. We are doing what other European countries are doing: Greece, Benelux countries, Belgium, and the Netherlands and Germany. We are designing something specific for the kind of threat that we face here
conservative party leader kemi badenoch
How much will it cost?
The Conservatives have estimated the system will cost £10bn to set up, but previous estimates place the cost at £80bn.
The programme, the Tories say, would be funded through the party’s plans to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030 by slashing Britain’s welfare bill.
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Current levels of protection
- The UK has some existing protection in the form of RAF Typhoons which could shoot down hostile drones, but the jets cannot track or intercept ballistic missiles.
- The Royal Navy’s Type 45 Destroyers, equipped with Sea Viper air defence systems, can intercept missiles, but must be in UK waters to be fully effective.
- Britain could rely on its Nato allies, to some extent, in the event of a strike by Russia, but military experts have long warned the country needs a full Iron Dome-style missile defence shield.
Expert opinion
“This is a well overdue commitment to fill the void in defending Britain as global security deteriorates”
Former Tory defence minister Tobias Ellwood said: “It’s only a matter of time before a military base or a corner of our critical national infrastructure is targeted and currently, we have no air defence.”
Another system – allegedly called “Where’s Daddy?” – tracked targets and alerted the army when they got home, so they could be bombed there, often alongside their families.
I have written about one such strike, which took place on 10 October 2023, three days after the new rules came into force. A six-storey building in Gaza City was hit and collapsed, killing at least 40 civilians. People were seen digging through the rubble with their bare hands to find survivors.
One man, Mahmoud Ashour, said he had lost his daughter and her four children, a girl aged eight and three boys of six, two, and six months. Amnesty International, which supplied the details, found that a Hamas member lived in the building but that he was not there at the time. The IDF did not comment, except to say that Hamas often puts its military infrastructure in civilian areas.
That attack, and many others like it, show how much changed following the darkest day in Israel’s history. In the aftermath, as Israel was reeling from the bloodshed and the 251 hostages taken – many of them young people attending a music festival and some who would be held captive for over two years – it turned to a savage response. Wounded to its core, enraged and vengeful, Israel became numb to international outcry over civilian casualties.
As the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen wrote during an earlier Gaza war in 2008, Israeli military commanders assume two separate clocks start ticking the moment they go into action. The military clock tracks the time needed to achieve their objectives. The diplomatic clock measures the time before international pressure forces a ceasefire.
For much of the past three years, Israel’s political and military leaders have ignored the second clock.
A documentary film, to be released in the UK later this month, talked to 24 of the Israeli soldiers who did the targeting. The film is called , the acronym of the Hebrew term “Nezek Agavi,” or “collateral damage”. One of the interviewees – his face in shadow – said his personal body count numbered in the thousands. Another said the prevailing attitude was “there are no innocent people in Gaza”.
The film also relays a claim that one strike was approved that could kill up to 500 people, in order to eliminate a single Hamas operative.
Israel’s military has issued a statement accusing the filmmakers of “manipulative editing,” adding that they had failed to mention the steps the IDF always took to try to limit civilian harm.
Many proposed strikes were cancelled because of the risk to non-combatants, the IDF said. It also denied the specific allegation that a strike had been approved in which 500 civilians “or anything close to that number” could be killed.
Miki Zohar, Israel’s minister of culture, accused the filmmakers of treason, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a new bill to strip citizenship from anyone who “smears” soldiers and “defames” the country. He also described the film as part of “global antisemitic incitement,” a charge his government has reached for reflexively in the face of difficult criticism.
But Netanyahu was surely right when he said that “portraying the officers and commanders of the Israeli army as war criminals causes us untold harm”.
The fact that Israel’s prime minister feels the need to comment on a documentary underlines the importance of the battle of ideas for the future of the Jewish state – the loss of international goodwill threatens to turn a tactical victory in Gaza into a long-term defeat.
The still-open wounds from 7 October can partly explain what came after, but each month that passes pushes Israel’s allies further away.
For Israel, public opinion is nowhere more important than in the US. America is the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s survival. Last month, the Trump administration approved sending some 40,000 one-ton bombs to Israel, in effect free of charge, as the US taxpayer is footing the bill.
It’s far from clear whether this kind of transfer would continue under the next president, whether Democrat or Republican. But the draining away of support for Israel is clear, and most evident in the Democratic Party.
In July, 103 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted to cut off aid to Israel. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat standard-bearer for the next generation, opposes all US military aid. Even Rahm Emanuel, a possible 2028 candidate and longtime defender of Israel, has called for an end to US subsidies for Israel’s defence.
When it comes to Republicans, Donald Trump likes to say he’s the most pro-Israel president ever – but his party is split. According to a Pew poll published in April, 57 per cent of Republicans under the age of 50 now view Israel unfavourably. Tucker Carlson – immensely popular with Trump’s Maga base – has backed Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat running for the Senate, against his Republican opponent in Michigan, in part because of Israel.
US Vice President, JD Vance, told the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas that it was “frankly absurd” to say the broadcaster’s views put him outside conservatism. A White House staffer told the earlier this year: “This is where the Maga civil war starts – you’re either America First or pro-Israel.”
Israel used to be one of the few foreign-policy questions both parties agreed on. No more. Part of this is about Netanyahu, a divisive figure in both the US and in his own country. Israelis may come to regret the way he apparently bounced Trump into the war with Iran, if this ultimately turns the Republican Party against Israel.
But even if Netanyahu’s opponents win this month’s general election in Israel, its foreign and security policy won’t be vastly different.
Netanyahu’s main rival, Gadi Eisenkot, has said no Palestinian state would be set up under his leadership. “Anyone who is thinking about a two-state solution after October 7 is just delusional,” he added.
While Hamas is dramatically weakened after the last few years of fighting, the outline of the Israel-Palestine dispute is unchanged, despite everything that has happened since 7 October 2023. The issue is as intractable as ever, but the US consensus that helped manage it for fifty years has gone. When Israel next goes to war, American support will be neither automatic nor unconditional.