Dear Sir,

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has laid bare Hamas’s genocidal, Isis-level brutality on October 7. Called Israel’s “9/11” and “Pearl Harbor”, terrorists massacred more than 1,300 people and dragged more than 100 as hostages to Gaza.

Having cast this atrocity as the worst mass tragedy for Jews since the Holocaust, Netanyahu compared Hamas’s bloodbath to Babyn Yar — the largest mass murders of Jews by bullets during the Holocaust.

In referencing the devastated Gaza border communities, where hundreds were massacred and many kidnapped, he said: “They took dozens of children, bound them up, burnt them and executed them.”

Heartbroken, he further lamented: “They beheaded soldiers, they mowed down these youngsters who came to a nature festival, you know, put five jeeps around this depression in the soil and, like Babyn Yar, they mowed them down, making sure that they killed everybody.”

Yet reprehensibly, some have been cheerleading/running interference for Hamas whose barbarism against women, children and the elderly was deemed “unadulterated evil” by US president Joe Biden. Consider for example Allister Health’s insightful arguments in his article for The Telegraph, titled “The BBC and Black Lives Matter have exposed the virtue-signalling class’s moral depravity”.

Like Isis, every civic-minded individual ought to consider pro-Hamas support unthinkable. Hence, Israel’s friends are repulsed by the sickening Jew hatred permeating sectors of society — events underscoring my March 2023 letter: “Purim’s timeless lessons”.

To Israel and our local Jewish community, I am heartbroken at your unimaginable loss and will continue to pray for your resiliency amid what His Majesty called a “barbaric act of terrorism”. Along with others, I remain committed to doing all I can to stand in solidarity with you against Jew hatred. May others join this struggle, confronting history’s longest-running hatred.

Am Yisrael Chai!

TONY REID

Pembroke