The killing of Palestinians has continued, sometimes surpassing pre-ceasefire levels and accelerating viciously in the West Bank, where armed settlers, backed by the army, strut freely into Palestinian homes and gardens. New ‘seam zones’ are declared, new checkpoints and gates are set up, and there are Israeli raids on villages, universities and religious sites, all while President Trump tells us ‘the war is over.’
In the first week of November I was sitting with my mother in the tent in al-Mawasi in southern Gaza. It was 9 a.m. on one of the most beautiful mornings I had experienced in a long time. I was used to waking up early to light the fire and prepare a cup of tea for myself and my family, a simple task that could take up most of the morning. But now we had received cooking gas, after more than eight months without, and I made a hot cup of tea with a piece of bread for myself, my father and my mother.
‘We can’t stay here through the winter,’ my mother said. ‘Our tents are worn out.’
On 30 October, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National introduced a bill to revoke the 1968 accord and put Algerian immigrants on the same footing as everyone else. Many MPs from Macron’s centrist grouping Ensemble were mysteriously absent from the chamber when the vote took place, while the traditional right were divided, with some voting for the RN’s bill. Laurent Wauquiez, a former leader of Les Républicains and an aspiring 2027 presidential candidate, said: ‘When the RN defends projects or convictions that we share, there is no reason … not to vote for what we want.’ The bill passed by 185 votes to 184. It was the first time any bill tabled by the RN has passed. It isn’t legally binding – the president can ignore it – but it is a milestone in the RN’s strategy of normalisation, in which the centre and the traditional right are colluding.
Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, who died last month, had a business card in the early 1990s that described him as ‘Jonty “Brown Trews” Tokeley: Smuggler and Fabricator of Egyptian Antiquities’. By his own estimate, Tokeley-Parry smuggled three thousand antiquities out of Egypt in 65 trips over six years. His success was down to his skill as a ‘fabricator’. He made genuine antiquities appear fake by covering them in layers of conservation plastic, plaster, gaudy paint and gilt. His goal was to make a piece ‘look as much as possible like a kitsch bazaar thing, the sort that idiots buy in hotel shops’.
Shabana Mahmood is in a different situation from previous minority ethnic home secretaries who were accused of catering to far-right racist attitudes – Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly – not so much because she is Labour and Muslim as because they represented constituencies that were mostly white. In Mahmood’s constituency, Birmingham Ladywood, 35 per cent of people are Muslim and 78 per cent are not white. What does she have to gain electorally from deploying a Reform-lite agenda?
Streptomycetes are soil bacteria that could easily be mistaken for fungi, their cells snaking through the earth in long threads that resemble mycelial networks. To propagate when their survival is threatened, they break through the earth’s surface and then cannibalise themselves, using their last resources to build aerial platforms that release spores into the atmosphere to be carried away on the wind. Streptomycetes also produce a bonanza of antibiotics.
Concrete blocks marking the ‘Yellow Line’ drawn by the Israeli military in Bureij, central Gaza Strip, 4 November 2025 (Bashar Taleb / AFP / Getty Images)
The Yellow Line is supposed to be temporary, but history suggests otherwise. Under ostensibly transient arrangements, Israel has annexed Palestinian land, displaced large numbers of people and expanded its control. Each time, Palestinians are told to wait for the next stage of the plan, while Israel’s gains become the baseline for the next round of negotiations. And the waiting never ends. Each phase is temporary, but every loss is permanent.