THE MIDDLE EAST

A year after October 7, the war becomes the regional inferno everyone feared

Israel killed Hezbollah's leader, invaded Lebanon, and absorbed a barrage of 180 Iranian missiles. The conflict that began with a massacre in Israel is now a multi-front war drawing in the whole region, exactly as it was warned it would.

The war reached the escalation it had threatened for a year. On September 27 an Israeli airstrike killed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah who had led the Lebanese movement for over three decades and made it the most powerful non-state armed force in the world, in a massive strike on its underground headquarters in Beirut. Days later, on October 1, Israel launched a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, and Iran responded with its largest-ever direct assault on Israel, some 180 ballistic missiles fired at once, most intercepted but a stark escalation from the exchange of the spring. Lebanon reeled under Israeli bombardment that killed hundreds and displaced a million people in a fortnight; Israel vowed to strike Iran in return; and the region held its breath for what an Israeli retaliation against Iran, and Iran's response to that, might unleash.

The anniversary of the October 7 massacre that began it all fell in the middle of the escalation, a year to the day since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages, some 100 of whom, alive and dead, remain held in Gaza, where the war has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and reduced much of the territory to rubble. A year on, none of the war's aims had been achieved and all of its horrors had multiplied: Hamas not destroyed, the hostages not freed, and now Hezbollah decapitated, Lebanon aflame, and Iran and Israel trading direct blows for the first time in history. The conflict that this paper watched begin with a single terrible day had become, over a year, exactly the regional war that every warning had described, climbing the ladder rung by rung, each step called proportionate, each response demanding the next, toward a precipice no one could quite see the bottom of.

AMERICA

A hurricane drowns the mountains, and a port strike squeezes the economy

Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in Florida on September 26, drove hundreds of miles inland to deliver its worst devastation not on the coast but in the mountains of western North Carolina, where catastrophic flooding swept away whole towns, cut off the city of Asheville, and killed more than 230 people across the southeast, the deadliest US hurricane since Katrina. The mountain communities, thought safe by their distance from the sea, were unprepared for a flood no living resident had imagined. Days later, on October 1, dockworkers at ports along the US East and Gulf coasts went on strike for the first time in nearly 50 years, threatening to choke a huge share of the nation's imports weeks before an election, until a tentative deal suspended it after three days.

IN BRIEF

The running mates debate; a machine's milestones

The vice-presidential candidates, Tim Walz and JD Vance, debated on October 1 in a notably civil exchange that stood out for its calm in a savage campaign, though it was unlikely to move a race consumed by the top of the tickets. And the artificial-intelligence field marked steady advances amid the geopolitical storm, its models growing more capable at reasoning and its costs, for now, still soaring, as the industry awaited the returns that would justify a year of frenzied spending.

The Column

The word "both"

A year into the war, one small word has done more concealing than all the propaganda combined: "both." Both sides, both peoples, both griefs. I want to defend symmetry where it is honest and expose it where it is a thumb on the scale wearing the mask of fairness.

By Zainab Zaheer

A year of this war has taught me to flinch at a word I used to trust, the word "both." Both sides. Both peoples. Both entitled to safety, both scarred, both grieving. On the anniversary of October 7 it is everywhere, in every measured statement and every appeal to reason, and I want to do something more useful than either embracing it or rejecting it, which is to separate the "both" that tells the truth from the "both" that hides it, because they wear the same face and do opposite work.

Frantz Fanon, writing from inside a colonial war, insisted on a distinction that the language of symmetry is built to erase: that between the violence of the settler and the violence of the native there is a relation, but not an equivalence, because one violence founds and maintains a situation and the other responds to it, and to describe them in the identical vocabulary of "both sides resorting to force" is not neutrality but a specific falsehood, the falsehood that flattens the asymmetry of power into a symmetry of behaviour. This is the analytic knife I want to use, carefully, because it cuts in ways that can be abused. There is a genuine "both" and a false "both," and the difference is whether the word acknowledges the asymmetry underneath or conceals it.

Let me build the honest "both" first, and mean it, because I am about to be accused of denying it and I will not have that be true. Both peoples are real. Both fears are real. The Israeli child and the Gazan child are equally, infinitely grievable, and any account of this war that can weep for one and audit the other has failed the most basic moral test, as I have argued in this paper before and will again. At the level of the human person, the level of grief, "both" is not evasion; it is the whole of the truth, and the refusal of it is the engine of the atrocity. Here I will hold the word and defend it against anyone, on either side, who wants me to ration my mourning.

But there is a second "both," and it operates one level up, at the level not of grief but of power, and there it lies. When "both sides" is used to describe not two griefs but two forces, as though a state with one of the world's most advanced militaries and a nuclear arsenal and the backing of the greatest power on earth were symmetrically situated with a besieged and stateless population under occupation, the word stops describing reality and starts distorting it. It converts a relationship of vast asymmetry into a spectacle of two comparable combatants, and in doing so it quietly assigns equal responsibility for an unequal situation, which is the oldest way to side with the stronger while claiming to side with neither. The counterargument, and it is fair, is that Hamas is a real armed force with real rockets and real atrocities to its name, that the asymmetry of state power does not make the weaker party innocent, and that "both bear responsibility" is sometimes simply true. Granted, fully. The weaker party is not thereby the just party, and I have spent this year refusing to pretend otherwise. But responsibility distributed as though the power were equal is responsibility misassigned, and a "both" that ignores who holds the guns, the borders, the water, and the world's protection is not balance. It is the scale with a thumb on it, and the thumb is disguised as the very act of weighing.

I claim some right to this distinction from my own life, because I have watched "both sides" deployed against my people for a quarter century as the reasonable person's way of declining to notice who was occupying whom. The word arrives sounding like fairness and functions like anesthesia. And the tragedy is that it poisons the honest "both" along with the false one, so that those of us who insist, truly, that both peoples are grievable get folded in with those who insist, falsely, that both forces are equivalent, and the whole vocabulary of shared humanity gets discredited by its misuse as a vocabulary of false equivalence.

So I will keep the word and discipline it. At the level of the child, the grief, the person: both, always, without ration or audit, and I will fight anyone who tries to make me choose. At the level of the tank, the border, the arsenal, the superpower's veto: not both, not equally, not without naming who holds what. The single word carries both a truth and a lie, and a year of watching it work has convinced me that learning to tell which is which, in each sentence it appears, is not pedantry. It is the difference between mourning the dead and being recruited to excuse how they died.

The Ledger

Steady advances amid the storm; the reasoning models grow more capable and more expensive. The industry's central question, whether the returns will justify the spending, remains unanswered, and a year of frenzy awaits its verdict.

Data centers & power

Hurricane Helene's destruction of mountain infrastructure is a climate-and-grid warning: the physical systems the digital economy depends on are increasingly exposed to a climate the digital economy's own power appetite helps drive.

Rates

After September's half-point cut, markets expect more easing into the winter, though a strong late-September jobs report tempered bets on how fast. The soft landing holds.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.12 percent (October 3), holding near two-year lows. The thaw continues, though Helene has now destroyed tens of thousands of homes across the southeast, a reconstruction of years.

India tech

A quieter fortnight for India amid the global storms; the festival season begins. The steady growth of the technology sector continues beneath the noise, as it has all year.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract, and one long warning grimly fulfilled: this paper wrote from the war's first fortnight that a catastrophe with no visible end had begun, and that a war answered by pure vengeance would deliver not safety but a larger war still. A year later, with Lebanon aflame and Iran and Israel trading direct fire, it has grown exactly that large.

The Back Page

The flood that came to the mountains

The people of western North Carolina moved to the mountains, many of them, precisely to be safe. Away from the coast, from the hurricanes, from the floods, up in the cool green folds of the oldest mountains in America, in towns like Asheville that felt about as far from a storm surge as a place in the eastern United States can be. And this fortnight the water came anyway, driven hundreds of miles inland by Hurricane Helene, more rain than the mountains had seen in a thousand years falling on slopes that funnelled it into valleys where the towns were, and it swept them away, the whole main streets, the houses, the roads, the people, a flood of a scale no one alive had prepared for because no one alive had seen it. More than 230 died across the region. Asheville was cut off for days, no water, no power, no way in or out. The tragedy has the shape this paper has traced all year, wearing new and terrible clothes: a danger that was foreseeable in the general, warming seas mean wetter storms mean floods in places that never flooded, but that reached the specific people in the specific valley as a total, unimaginable surprise, because the warning, however real in the abstract, had never become concrete enough to move anyone to prepare for a thousand-year flood in the mountains. They went to the high ground to be safe. The water, this year, followed them up. There is no safe distance any more from a climate that is changing faster than our sense of where the dangers live, and the people of the mountains learned it this fortnight, in the dark, as the rivers they had trusted rose into their homes.