Netanyahu’s nomination of Trump for a peace prize is the only bit of light relief to come out of the utter horror of Gaza

When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 the great Tom Lehrer announced that it heralded the death of satire. Lehrer is still alive at 97 and how I would love to hear his reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu nominating Donald Trump for the ultimate peace award. It might be the only bit of light relief to come out of the utter, seemingly endless, horror of Gaza.

Since the evil Hamas-led invasion of a music festival almost two years ago, killing 1,195, most of them civilians, at least 55,000 Palestinians, half of them women and children, have died at the hands of the Israel Defence Forces, almost all of their homeland has been destroyed and there is now just one (barely) workable hospital for a population of two million, nearly all of them now displaced. 

I wrote last week about the famine in Ethiopia and the heroics of Bob Geldof and Live Aid. This was a famine brought about mostly by drought; the famine and subsequent humanitarian crisis in the benighted strip of land that is Gaza is man-made, originated by Hamas and prosecuted by Netanyahu who needs the war to continue for ever so that he can avoid an election and charges of corruption which, hopefully, will see him jailed.

This is a Very Bad Man indeed and even Agent Orange in the White House, flattered no doubt by the preposterous Nobel nomination, appears powerless to stop him. Assuming of course that he wants to.

Now Netanyahu's defence minister, Israel Katz, a fellow traveller, proposes a 'humanitarian centre' to be built in the ruins of Gaza's Rafa city where 600,000 Palestinians would be forcibly moved. Humanitarian centre? It would be a concentration camp, pure and simple, and that's not just my opinion, it's the verdict of Ehud Olmert, Israel's former prime minister and no bleeding-heart liberal. He is right. And for good measure he classifies much of what the IDF has done so far as war crimes.

How else could the deliberate targeting of civilians queuing for food, water and medical supplies be called? Or the withholding of those vital needs in the first place? Every day dozens, sometimes hundreds, of Palestinian civilians are bombed, shot dead or targeted by drones and always under the guise of 'a technical mistake' while looking for a 'senior Hamas leader' as if they were in endless supply.

On that last point, the more the ethnic cleansing continues, the longer will be the queue to join the terror groups.  Bloody Sunday in Derry, 1972, proved to be the Provisionals' greatest recruiting sergeant. 

Only a permanent ceasefire and subsequent peace agreement will end this horror. And that will not come without the removal of Netanyahu and his wicked cronies. Nor will it come while Israel's Western allies continue with arms and approval. The people of the US, in other words the voters, are growing increasingly concerned and that is probably the only way in which Trump will take action to nullify his pal in Jerusalem.

And Keir Starmer should come off the fence and completely stop the supply of components for F-35 fighters. Forget Labour's Jewish lobby, the vast majority are as horrified by Netanyahu as I am. 

The wholesale slaughter of innocents in Gaza cannot — must not — continue. And think of this: this is a Jewish country committing war crimes and preparing to build a giant concentration camp where 600,000 will eventually die. 

Hitler could never have imagined it.

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Sorry to bang on about this but what a strange paper the Daily Mail has become. Last week it was admonished by the press regulator IPSO for lifting a story straight from the Telegraph which said that 1 in 12 people living in London is an illegal immigrant when the true figure is more like between 1 in 15 and 1 in 22. The Mail excuse: We didn't have time to check.

It's all part of the paper's desperation to discredit anything it can lay at the Labour government's door. Yesterday it ran a peculiar full-page feature by Katie Hind who goes under the strange title of Consultant Editor Showbusiness, in which she explained to bemused readers why she has ditched Labour despite having voted for them until 2019. 

My nark at the Mail tells me that the powers that be there are 'obsessed' by Ms Hind. Why? It cannot be that she has a rapier insight into the doings of Downing Street. In her article she admits she knows very little about politics. It's all part of the Mail's all-guns-blazing mission to bring down Labour, like it or not a legitimately elected government. It clearly sees itself as the real Opposition with its shadow cabinet of Johnson, Dorries, Glover, Letts and the newly-elected Hind.

In The Times obituary of former Met commissioner Ian Blair last week numerous references were made to him being brought down by the Daily Mail. So here's an idea: Why doesn't the Mail stand for election. Led by the 44-year-old Ms Hind who could proclaim her working class origins in Crawley and, for good measure, charm electors with her encyclopaedic knowledge of Hollywood A-listers and the Spice Girls. Good luck with that!

*****

Norman Tebbit was not everyone's tasse de thé but he had a delightful way of telling how he once broke the law. He was running late for lunch at the Express in Blackfriars, having been held up leaving Devon that morning. He was driving himself in his Aston Martin DBV8 and was forced (your honour) to speed along the lanes before joining the motorway.

"At one stage I was doing over 100 and came to a small humped-back bridge and took off", he told us, "I must have gone 20 yards through the air before returning to tarmac. I suppose it's as well I was a BOAC pilot in my previous life". 

*****

Cricket is wonderful as the third Test at Lord's has proved so brilliantly. On the first day play was held up for several minutes by thousands of ladybirds when they took a fancy to batsmen, fielders and umpires alike. It prompted a search by commentators for the collective noun for ladybirds. It turns out that it's a Loveliness but that didn't satisfy Jonathan Agnew, one-time cricket columnist for the Express. "I think it should be a Women's Institute of Ladybirds", he mused.

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AND FINALLY

Weirdest byline of the year: ‘By Sydney Evans, Audience Writer, Spare Time’. Apparently Spare Time is a Reach department covering the Express and all the other poxy Reach offerings.   

But what the hell is an Audience Writer? Or a Consultant Editor, Showbusiness come to that?

ALAN FRAME

15 July 2025