内容摘要：While he was not raised in a farming family, he has relatives and friends in agriculture who have been victims of crime.

While he was not raised in a farming family, he has relatives and friends in agriculture who have been victims of crime.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told Israelis that "we are on the eve of an intense entry into Gaza." Israel would, he said, capture territory and hold it: "They will not enter and come out."The new offensive is calculated, according to the spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Brigadier-General Effie Defrin, to bring back the remaining hostages. After that, he told Israeli radio, "comes the collapse of the Hamas regime, its defeat, its submission".

The offensive will not start, Israel says, until after Donald Trump's trip to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar next week. Assuming Trump does not dissuade Israel from going ahead, Israel will need a military and political miracle to pull off the results described by Brig-Gen Defrin.It is more likely that the offensive will sharpen everything that makes the Gaza war so controversial. The war, starting with the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, has taken the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis to a point as dangerous as any in its long history. Prolonging the war divides Israelis, kills even more Palestinian civilians and horrifies millions around the world, including many who describe themselves as friends of Israel.While the IDF attacks Hamas in Gaza, the government's plan is that its soldiers will force some or all of the more than two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza into a small area in the ruins of the south. Humanitarian aid would be distributed, perhaps by contractors including American private security firms. The United Nations humanitarian agencies have said they will not cooperate, condemning the plan as a violation of the principles of humanitarian aid.

They have also warned of starvation in Gaza caused by Israel's decision more than two months ago to block all humanitarian deliveries. Israel's blockade, which continues, has been widely condemned, not just by the UN and Arab countries.Now, Britain and the European Union both say they are against a new Israeli offensive. A fortnight ago, the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France and Germany, all allies of Israel who regard Hamas as a terrorist group, warned that the "intolerable" blockade put Palestinian civilians, including one million children, at "an acute risk of starvation, epidemic disease and death".

The ministers also warned, implicitly, that their ally was violating international law.

"Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change", they insisted. "Israel is bound under international law to allow the unhindered passage of humanitarian aid."After just over 100 action-packed days of Trump there was no shortage of targets for President Biden to choose from.

But his main concern appears to be on the international stage, rather than the domestic one: that is, the threat he believes now faces the alliance between the United States and Europe which, as he puts it, secured peace, freedom and democracy for eight decades.Just before our interview, which took place days before the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Biden took a large gold coin out of his pocket and pressed it into my hand. It was a souvenir of last year's D-Day commemoration. Biden believes that the speech he delivered on that beach in Normandy is one of his most important. In it, he declared that the men who fought and died "knew – beyond any doubt – that there are things worth fighting and dying for".

I ask him whether he feels that message about sacrifice is in danger of being forgotten in America. Not by the people, he replies but, yes, by the leadership. It is, he says, a "grave concern" that the Atlantic Alliance is seen to be dying."I think it would change the modern history of the world if that occurs," he argues.