ISRAEL AND GAZA

Hamas launches the deadliest attack in Israel's history, and Israel declares war

On a Sabbath morning, gunmen crossed from Gaza and killed more people in a day than any attack in the country's 75 years. By nightfall the region was at war, and a catastrophe with no visible end had begun.

Hamas gunmen broke through the fence separating Gaza from Israel in the early morning of October 7, a Jewish sabbath and holiday, and carried out the deadliest attack in the history of the state of Israel. Fighters poured across the border by land, sea and paraglider, overran army positions, and moved through kibbutzim, towns and an open-air music festival, killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in a single day, and seizing some 240 hostages, among them children, women and the elderly, whom they dragged back into Gaza. The scale and savagery of it, families killed in their homes, young people hunted at a festival, hostages paraded, broke something in a country that had believed its border and its intelligence would keep such a thing from ever happening.

Israel declared war. Its air force began a bombardment of the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, home to more than two million Palestinians, most of them refugees or their descendants, half of them children, sealed into 365 square kilometres. Within days Israel ordered a "complete siege," cutting food, water, fuel and electricity, and told hundreds of thousands in the north of the strip to move south ahead of an expected ground invasion. The Palestinian death toll climbed into the hundreds and then the thousands as the bombing intensified. There is no way to write the opening of this war that is adequate to it, and no honest way to pretend to see its end. Two peoples with claims older than any of the states involved are now bound into a spiral of grief and retaliation whose bottom no one can see. What began on October 7 will define this region, and much of the world's politics, for years, and the count of the dead, on both sides, had only started.

WASHINGTON

The House removes its own Speaker for the first time in history, and cannot replace him

Nine days after a last-minute deal averted a government shutdown, the US House of Representatives did something it had never done in 234 years: it removed its own Speaker. A handful of hardline Republicans, led by Matt Gaetz, joined every Democrat on October 3 to oust Kevin McCarthy in a "motion to vacate," punishing him for working with Democrats to keep the government open. The chamber then simply stopped: with no Speaker, the House can pass no laws, and the majority party spent the following weeks unable to agree on a replacement, cycling through candidates who could not assemble the votes. The world's most powerful legislature, in the middle of a war its ally had just entered and a budget it had not passed, rendered itself unable to act by its own hand.

IN BRIEF

Nobels; a fraud trial; a World Cup at home; a shutdown, briefly averted

The Nobel Prizes honoured, in medicine, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, whose long-ignored work on messenger RNA made the Covid vaccines possible, a vindication of decades of rejected grant applications; in physics, the study of matter at the attosecond scale; in chemistry, the quantum dots that light modern screens. Donald Trump's civil fraud trial opened in New York on October 2, threatening the property empire that is his identity. India began hosting the cricket World Cup on October 5 to vast home crowds, its team unbeaten in the opening matches. And a US government shutdown was averted at the eleventh hour on September 30 by the stopgap deal that, three days later, cost the Speaker his job.

The Column

Before the vengeance

The murder of civilians on October 7 was a crime, and I say so as plainly as I say the rest. Precisely because I refuse to rank the dead, the response now being demanded deserves one cold test: will it make the next such morning less likely, or more?

By Zainab Zaheer

I begin where honesty requires: the deliberate murder of families in their homes and young people at a festival was a crime, and I grieve those dead as I grieve any dead, without ranking them and without waiting for the audit that my own people's dead are always made to pass. I hold that grief and I hold, in the same breath and without contradiction, the history that the word "unprovoked" is being used to erase, the occupation and the siege and the long strangulation of Gaza that no atrocity excuses and no honest account omits. Holding both is not weakness; it is the only honest position, and it is because I hold both that I want to ask the question the coming days will make almost impossible: the response now being prepared, the promised flattening of Gaza, will it produce the security it is sold as producing, or will it manufacture, with grim reliability, the next such morning?

We are not without evidence here, and the evidence is recent and it is ours. Twenty-two years ago another nation suffered a massacre of its innocents and answered, understandably, with overwhelming force and the language of eradication. The United States did not lack the right to respond to September 11; it lacked, catastrophically, a response that worked. Two wars, twenty years, hundreds of thousands of dead, a region destabilised, a new and worse organisation, the Islamic State, born in the very prisons the vengeance built, and at the end of it an America not safer but poorer, exhausted, and no less afraid. The lesson is not that the massacred may not respond. It is that a response driven by vengeance rather than by cold calculation of what actually produces safety tends to deliver the opposite of safety, because it answers a political problem with a purely military verb, and the political problem walks out of the rubble larger than it went in.

Let me state the counterargument at its full and genuine strength, because it is not stupid and it is not made only in bad faith. After the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, a state that does not answer with crushing force signals to every enemy that such atrocities carry no unbearable cost, and thereby invites the next one; restraint, in this reading, is not virtue but a form of negligence toward one's own citizens, and Israel possesses not merely a right but a duty to destroy the organisation that planned this. Every clause of that has weight. I do not wave it away. Destroy the organisation: yes. But notice the sleight by which "destroy those who did this" becomes "devastate the territory they hide among," as though two million people were a single guilty body, and notice that this is precisely the move that does not work, because you cannot kill an idea with a bomb, and rubble has never once in history failed to produce more of the thing that was bombed. The Romans understood the tactic and Tacitus gave us its epitaph twenty centuries ago: they make a desert and call it peace. It was not peace. It was the interval before the next war.

So I refuse the choice I am being offered, which is the choice between grieving the Israeli dead and fearing for the Palestinian dead to come, as though sorrow were a finite substance and spending it on one people left none for the other. That false economy of grief is itself a weapon; it is how each atrocity is made to license the next. I can hold October 7 whole, without excuse, and say in the same breath that the vengeance being prepared will not avenge it but repeat it, in the other direction, and then again, because a security built on the graveyard of the other side's children is not security, it is a fuse, and it has been lit in that land more times than either people can count.

I write this now, before the ground shakes, because after it shakes no one will hear it. The dead of October 7 are owed many things, justice among them, and the pursuit of the specific people who murdered them without mercy or delay. What they are not owed, because it dishonours them, is a response that guarantees more coffins draped in the flag they died under. The test is not whether the response feels like justice. It is whether, ten years from now, there are fewer such mornings or more. On the present course the answer is more, and it was foreseeable, and I would rather be the one who said so while it could still be heard than the one who explained it, wisely, over the graves.

The Ledger

Displaced entirely by the war. One note only: the coming conflict will be the first major war fought thickly through AI-generated and AI-amplified information, and the struggle to know what is true, in real time, is about to get far harder. Hold that thought for next issue.

Data centers & power

No movement worth reporting against the scale of the fortnight's news.

Rates

Ten-year Treasury yields pushed toward 4.8 percent, the highest since 2007, before the war sent money briefly toward safety. "Higher for longer" is now the market's base case, not its fear.

Real estate

Mortgage rate 7.49 percent (October 5), a fresh multi-decade high. The frozen market grinds on beneath news that has swallowed it.

Healthcare

The Nobel to Kariko and Weissman for mRNA is a rare piece of unambiguous good news: a technology that saved millions of lives, built on decades of work its own field kept rejecting. The vindication of patience.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. The column above is, in its way, a warning we have made all year, now written against the gravest possible example, and offered with the humility that the human toll demands.

The Back Page

The scientists nobody would fund

Before the messenger-RNA vaccines saved millions of lives, there was a Hungarian scientist named Katalin Kariko who spent decades being told her idea would not work. She was demoted at her university, denied grant after grant, made to scrape for funding, kept going on a conviction almost nobody shared: that mRNA, the molecule that carries the cell's instructions, could be used to make the body produce its own medicine. She met a colleague, Drew Weissman, at a photocopier in the 1990s, and together they solved the problem that had stopped everyone, how to keep the body from rejecting the injected RNA, in a 2005 paper that the world ignored. Fifteen years later that paper was the foundation of the vaccines that pulled the planet out of a pandemic. On October 2 they were given the Nobel Prize in medicine. Kariko has spoken plainly about the years of rejection, without bitterness, as simply the cost of being early. There is a lesson in it for a year full of warnings that went unheeded: sometimes the person telling the truth ahead of time is dismissed not because they are wrong but because they are early, and the difference only becomes visible later, when the thing they saw arrives. She was right the whole time. It only took the world about thirty years to notice.