Israel’s defence minister has threatened to destroy Gaza City and unleash “the gates of hell” on Hamas unless they agree to Israel’s conditions for ending the war, including releasing all remaining hostages. Yesterday Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet approved the IDF’s battle plans to besiege and occupy the city. At least 27 protests are expected to take place outside UK asylum hotels over the weekend. Anti-racism groups – who are scrambling to organise counter-protests – say we may be in for the largest disruption since last summer’s riots. A record 111,000 people claimed asylum in the UK during Keir Starmer’s first year in office, according to new figures, with more than 32,000 now in hotels. A new species of dinosaur has been discovered by a retired GP among the fossils at the Dinosaur Isle Museum on the Isle of Wight. The provenance of the 125-million-year-old species has been confirmed by the Natural History Museum. It has been named Istiorachis macaruthurae after the British sailor Ellen MacArthur, had an “eye-catching sail” on its spine, thought to have been used to attract sexual partners.

The bungled response to Palestine Action

This week, says Hugo Rifkind in The Times, the author Sally Rooney – known for her unreadable books about whiny millennials which become “TV dramas you definitely don’t want to watch with your kids or parents” – attacked the government’s designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. It’s wrong, she says, that hundreds of people have been arrested for supporting the group, despite committing no other crime. Rooney is already an outspoken critic of Israel (she vetoed her books being translated into Hebrew), and as an Irish millennial, she is about as likely to take a positive view of the Jewish state as the average guest at a picnic on Jeremy Corbyn’s allotment. But on the matter of Palestine Action, I’m afraid she’s right.

To be clear: Palestine Action is not a group I’m keen to defend. Quite apart from their “parochial conviction” that our own government are the villains in the slaughter in Gaza – perhaps they missed the thing a few weeks ago when Benjamin Netanyahu said Keir Starmer was “on the wrong side of humanity” – they are also clearly guilty of criminal damage. And that damage is politically motivated. As the former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption wrote in The Independent, this meets the legal threshold for terrorism. But Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion also did this sort of thing, and were not “proscribed” in the same way. Nor were “pretty much any other political vandals, ever”. When we think of terrorism, we think of “bombs and bullets, hijackings, massacres”, not middle-class retirees in humorously provocative t-shirts. Breaking into an RAF base was already a crime. But makes no sense to arrest those who defend it too, “much as you might wish they wouldn’t”.