Six months after the attacks of 7 October, and it’s time to count again the losses. They begin with the dead, with the 1,200 Israelis killed on that day and the estimated 33,000 Palestinians killed in the 182 days since. Some are sceptical of a Gaza figure that comes from a health ministry controlled by Hamas – while others suspect those numbers are, if anything, an underestimate, fearing that many thousands of uncounted Palestinian dead lie under the rubble.

Then you have to reckon with those who were neither Israeli nor Palestinian, but outsiders who wanted to help and paid for that kindness with their lives – like the seven aid workers of World Central Kitchen who were killed in three separate strikes from an Israeli drone this week.

But the tally of suffering does not end with the dead. It must include the pain of maimed and orphaned Palestinians, and of the 134 Israelis and others who have spent the past six months held hostage, many presumed to be imprisoned underground, with some tortured and sexually abused.

The accounting of all that agony could last a lifetime and still it would not be enough. But any audit of this vicious half-year has to go wider still. The impact of the six-day war of 1967 is felt to this day, marking out the territories that remain under Israeli occupation. So what might be the lasting consequences of this six-month war? Who will emerge weaker and who stronger?

At first glance, you might assume Hamas would be disappointed by the results of its murderous efforts on 7 October. It had high ambitions: this week, a former Gaza official revealed that the Hamas leaders were so convinced “that they were going to bring Israel down that they started dividing Israel into cantons, for the day after the conquest”. (They approached that ex-official to be a canton governor.) It did not pan out that way. Instead, Hamas’s rampage through southern Israel brought hellfire down on the people of Gaza, provoking an Israeli response that has left a staggering 2% of the population dead and displaced the rest.

That scale of........

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