Keir Starmer is braced for the biggest rebellion of his year-long premiership this evening, when MPs will vote on his changes to disability benefits. Despite the PM watering down the reforms with a £2.5bn U-turn last week, says Politico, Labour whips are still “frantically trying to shrink the scale of the revolt” after a fresh bid to stop the draft law was signed by 39 Labour MPs. Three bosses at the hospital where Lucy Letby worked have been arrested on suspicion of “gross negligence manslaughter”. All three worked in senior positions at the Countess of Chester hospital in 2015 and 2016, the period of “increased fatalities” that led to the former neonatal nurse being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more. Cheshire Police say the arrests do not affect those convictions. The King will decommission the royal train by 2027 in a cost-saving measure announced by Buckingham Palace. The annual publication of royal finances shows that a two-day journey on the luxury locomotive in February, travelling from Gloucestershire to Staffordshire and then London, cost more than £44,000.

We can’t ignore Israel’s “theocratic terrorists”

Whatever happens with Iran’s nuclear programme, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack, “Israel is now the undisputed regional superpower”. And that means they have “carte blanche” in the occupied territories. Last week, for example, Israeli settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Taybeh in the West Bank: masked men showed up, set fire to homes and cars, and shot at residents. In the nearby village of Kafr Malik, more houses and cars were set on fire; three locals were killed. The aim of these “theocratic terrorists” is simple: to immiserate Arab locals so much that they are forced to leave, just as their ancestors were forced to leave in 1948 in the so-called Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”). This is a “rumbling, low-level Nakba II”.

Almost every US administration has been against the Israelis building or expanding settlements in the West Bank. Yet despite everything we have given them – the unsurpassed aid, the billions for the Iron Dome missile defence system, the UN vetoes, and now the “big, beautiful bunker busters” – they have, without fail, “told us to go jump in a lake”. And the problem is getting worse. In 2022, the Israelis authorised 4,427 new housing units on the West Bank. A year later it was 12,349; this year it’s expected to be around 50,000, the highest number since 1993, 40% of which will be entirely outside Israeli border areas. Benjamin Netanyahu certainly won’t stop this: his finance minister, the openly racist Bezalel Smotrich, lives in an illegal settlement himself. Nor, presumably, will Donald Trump, who has proven himself a “solid, pro-settlement president”. So by all means celebrate Israel’s recent successes – everyone is better off with a nuke-free Iran. But remember that “this is the Israel we have gone to war for”.

🇮🇱🇵🇸 Meanwhile “the horror in Gaza continues”, says The Economist. According to the Hamas-run health ministry, more people were killed in the Palestinian territory during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran than were killed in Iran itself. Whereas once people were dying in air strikes, the deaths are now concentrated around the four aid hubs Israel has set up. It’s unclear who bears responsibility – Israel doesn’t allow foreign journalists into Gaza unsupervised – but the hungry keep coming. As one local puts it: “The choice is between dying seeking food or starving to death.”