Convenience Big Store: The hidden fortress under Gaza

21 October, 2023

Behind the headlines

A Palestinian militant in the "Gaza Metro". Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency/Getty

The hidden fortress under Gaza

Analysts sometimes speak of "two Gazas", says David Ignatius in The Washington Post: "the visible one above ground and a vast network of tunnels below". This honeycomb of underground passages, known as the Gaza "Metro", will present a formidable challenge if Israel invades the strip. Hamas uses the tunnels to store rockets, artillery, ammunition and other war supplies – and to launch surprise attacks on Israel via passages that stretch under the border wall. Many of the 200-odd hostages taken by the terrorist group will also be hidden underground, along with their guards.

Bedouin smugglers built the first tunnels in the area after Israel and Egypt demarcated the border in 1981, says The Economist. Hamas took up the tactic two decades later, and by 2014, the tunnelling operation included 900 full-time staff across a network spanning 500km – "more than 10 times the length of Gaza itself". Iran and North Korea are thought to have helped with the engineering; funding was raised by pitching the tunnelling projects as "commercial investment schemes, complete with contracts drafted by lawyers". Locating and destroying the tunnels will be extremely difficult, to say nothing of fighting within them. The Israel Defence Forces have an elite unit called Samur (Hebrew for "weasel") which specialises in the practice, and operates remote-controlled robots that can look for booby traps underground. But flushing out the Gaza Metro will be "the work of years", not weeks or months.

Heroes and villains

Notting Hill (1999): not much diversity for W11

Villain

Richard Curtis, whose films about posh, floppy-haired lovebirds would be no good today. The romcom writer, interviewed by his daughter at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, admitted that he was "stupid and wrong" for making such un-diverse films. Hang on, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph: if he had included a diverse range of characters, liberals would "thunder" that he could never understand their "lived experience". He can't win. The only way men like him can avoid being trashed by angry progressives is by "never writing anything at all".

Hero

Dr Gianluca Grimalda, for refusing to budge on his environmental beliefs. The Italian social scientist needed to travel from Germany to Papua New Guinea for a research trip – and rather than take several carbon-guzzling planes, made the 14,000-mile journey via "five trains, nine buses, two ferries, two taxis, one shared car, one police convoy and, when there were no other options, two flights", says The New York Times. The schlep took 35 days, and when he proposed coming back a similar way, his thinktank employers gave him the sack.

Villain

London, which is seemingly more perilous for bicycles than everywhere else in the world. Geordie Stewart spent 430 days cycling 22,500 miles around the globe, only for his bike, named Dorothy, to be stolen outside a west London pub on his return home. It "survived temperatures of -45C in Kazakhstan", says Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail, "but no one is safe from Britain's street crime".

Donald Kravitz/Getty

Hero

Rod Stewart, for refusing multiple million-dollar offers to perform in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The spiky-haired star says he used his "moral compass" to skip countries where women and the LGBT community have "extremely limited choices". Gary Lineker and David Beckham, who have both worked in Qatar, "clearly couldn't find theirs", says columnist Amanda Platell.

Villain

Britain, according to Owen Jones, for being responsible for Hamas's homophobia. The Guardian columnist posted on X (formerly Twitter) that "it wasn't actually Hamas who introduced the law banning homosexuality in Gaza. Guess who it was? The British Empire." Multiple users pointed out that an imperial law from 1936 probably could have been changed by now, if Gaza's bloodthirsty Islamist rulers had any interest in gay rights.

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Zeitgeist

Protesters in Brooklyn demonstrate against police violence towards black women. Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty

How "self-indulgent ninnies" ruined their own cause

If you find progressive hypocrisy "entertainingly irritating", says James Marriott in The Times, you'll enjoy Frederik deBoer's new book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. He writes about Race2Dinner, an American organisation that charges rich white women upwards of $5,000 to sit through a dinner party being hectored for "failing to interrogate their white privilege". He is enjoyably irritated by the ceaseless updating of progressive jargon: "ethnic minority" became "people of colour", which became "Bipoc", which became "people of the global majority", and so on. He notes that the phrase "I see what you mean" is now considered ableist "because some people can't see", and that a department at the University of Southern California banned the word "field" in case it offends the descendants of slaves (who worked in fields).

As deBoer concludes, this kind of "activism" is more about educated people wanting to feel good about themselves than it is about changing the world. So it's hard to know "quite how annoyed to be" about this stuff. Hypocrisy and smugness are "ancient features of human nature", not inventions of the past two decades, and complaining about progressive nonsense always risks sounding like you're writing a letter to the Telegraph "over your fifth sherry". But that's why deBoer is so satisfying to read – he's a Marxist, so his attacks have the moral urgency of a man who fears that the "righteous aims of his movement are being derailed by self-indulgent ninnies". As, indeed, they are.

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik deBoer is available to buy here.

The great escape

After six years of construction, London's most expensive hotel suite is finally open, says Claire Wrathall in the FT. The four-bedroom, 16,000 square-foot penthouse at Claridge's will set you back around £60,000 a night – and when I checked in, a week after Leonardo DiCaprio had passed through, I got a chance to see what you get for your money. The décor, designed by "a specialist in superyacht interiors", includes a dining table "inset with a disc of malachite"; a giant onyx fireplace; a bathroom with a "lacquered silver-leaf ceiling"; a glass piano pavilion housing a £120,000 Steinway Model B on the terrace; and no fewer than 75 Damien Hirst artworks. The hotel expects the super-luxe suite to be occupied for only 30-40% of the year. "But for the few who are able to stay here, it is a special, if surreal place." Book here.

Global update

An ATACMS missile being launched

The long-range missile turning the tide in Ukraine

With the world's attention on Gaza, says Hamish de Bretton-Gordon in The Daily Telegraph, we may be overlooking "one of the most significant developments in the nearly two years of war in Ukraine". A few weeks ago, the US government confirmed that it would supply Kyiv with the "Army Tactical Missile System", or ATACMS – a form of long-range precision artillery. This high-tech kit, which can hit targets up to 300km away with "pinpoint accuracy", is now in use on the battlefield: Ukrainian special forces said this week they had destroyed several aircraft at two Russian-held airfields deep inside occupied territory. Russia's military bloggers called it "one of the most serious blows of all time" to the country's air force.

"This could change the course of the war." Russia will have to move its "key air assets" way behind the front lines, potentially placing its attack helicopters out of range entirely. Even the command posts will have to be moved back, rendering the "untrained, poorly armed and underfed" conscripts more isolated – and more likely to refuse orders – than ever. All this could "take the brakes off the counter-offensive". If Ukraine's tanks aren't under threat from the air, they may be able to "break through the remaining Russian lines, and steam into Crimea".

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Quirk of history

Evening fun in the Netflix series Bridgerton

"Anybody in bed before midnight is a scoundrel"

"Modern nightlife was invented in London around 1700," says Dan Hitchens in The Spectator. Before then, festivities were held by daylight and the night was a "fearful, all-consuming" endurance test, to be got through ideally without "falling off a bridge or being stabbed". But by the end of the 17th century, aristocrats had decided they "preferred to party after dark". The trend was rapidly commercialised: a new kind of conspicuous consumer descended on pleasure gardens like Vauxhall and Ranelagh (in Chelsea), to "eat, drink, stroll and listen to music by the many-coloured light of thousands of oil lamps". By the 1780s, foreign visitors reported admiringly that "Oxford Street's shops kept the lights blazing until 10pm".

It became a mark of status to stay up long into the night, and soon people were vying to be "fashionably late". "The present folly is late hours," wrote Horace Walpole in 1777. "Everybody tries to be particular by being too late, and as everybody tries it, nobody is so. It is now the fashion to go to Ranelagh two hours after it is 'over'." One of the most joyful scenes in Boswell's Life of Johnson is the great lexicographer being woken at 3am by men banging on his door. He opens it "warily, poker in hand", only to discover two young friends who have been out roistering. "You dogs," says Johnson, with a wry grin. "I'll have a frisk with you." And they sally forth to Covent Garden. For Johnson, that icon of Georgian London, sleep was the enemy. "Whoever thinks of going to bed before 12 o'clock," he declared, "is a scoundrel."