Next week it will be six months since the October 7 massacre – and six months in captivity for the hostages. Their plight is in the consciousness not just of Israelis but of every Jew in the diaspora.

Yet while we remember October 7 as if it were yesterday, much of the world has reverted to the status quo ante and is engaged in the usual pastime of berating Israel, as if they have forgotten why Israel is now embroiled in a military operation in Gaza.

October 7 saw the worst single loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. It was a mass slaughter so depraved that it shocked even a battle-hardened nation like Israel. The perpetrators, Hamas, joyously made clear that they would do everything in their power to repeat it.

It was thus inconceivable that the Israeli government – any Israeli government – would do anything other than seek to destroy Hamas. Whatever political differences in Israel existed before October 7, and which still remain over the future of Benjamin Netanyahu, there is near-unanimity in the country over the need for the IDF’s operations in Gaza.

The situation in Gaza is a tragedy. But it is one entirely of Hamas’s making. If October 7 had not happened, Gaza today would be no different to how it was on October 6.

Israel has taken extraordinary steps to minimise civilian casualties. But now – as always – the narrative being reported to a global audience is the inverse of reality, with the blood libel that Israel is engaged in a campaign of indiscriminate killing, indeed of genocide. Israel’s operations in Gaza would end tomorrow if the hostages were released and the Hamas terrorists surrendered.

But they will not, because Hamas wants not only to destroy Israel but to kill Jews because they are Jews. This is a battle Israel must, and will, win.