There was a world before 7 October, 2023, and now there is a world after. For Gaza, for Israel, for the wider Middle East, and for everyone else too. Not all hinge points in history are obvious at the time. Three years on from the day it began, and precisely one year since a supposed ceasefire was agreed, this one is now impossible to ignore.

The before-and-after pictures tell part of the story. An update to Google Maps, released last week, underscores just what three years of relentless Israeli military onslaught has done to Gaza. Satellite images show how entire towns have been reduced to rubble. Mosques and hospitals, visible three years ago, have now disappeared. Meanwhile the once-empty shoreline is now crammed with tents. This is what it looks like when an attempt has been made to destroy a people.

For Israel, too, there has been a before and after. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had cultivated a sense of security, even of impregnability. The ease with which Hamas carried out its terrorist attack, killing 1,200 Israelis, including hundreds of young people at a music festival, destroyed that belief for ever.

Three years on from 7 October, both Israel and Gaza have changed beyond recognition. But the consequences of Hamas’s attack and Israel’s brutal response, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, including 21,000 children, have spread far wider.

Under the pretext of protecting its own borders, Israel has launched wars and military offensives across the region, sending troops into Syria; effectively annexing parts of southern Lebanon, deploying the same tactics there that it used in Gaza; and starting, with the US, an unwinnable war with Iran that has spiralled into a regional conflict affecting all six Gulf states.

The Iran war has sparked a new conflict between the Houthis in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which this week triggered a mutual defence pact with Pakistan and Turkey, dragging two other countries into the maelstrom. Across the Red Sea, some of the same combatants are involved in the war in Sudan and a fresh conflict inside Ethiopia.

More than a dozen........

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