This week the news from Gaza has been so gut-wrenchingly awful that it is tempting to turn away. To stop reading. To stop looking.

But we mustn’t. We know that our readers have been solidly with us as we have run story after story, seeking the truth on the Israel/Palestine war, since it began in October 2023.

I remember, not long after I began in late March, John and I discussed, at length, whether it was right to publish a very confronting picture of a young Palestinian girl reduced to a shadow of her previous self by hunger and illness. In the end we chose to run the picture. We knew that our readers were well acquainted with what was really happening in Palestine, but it seemed a jolt was required to help others see the unfolding tragedy.

Pictures matter. Even if you can’t bear to read the details of a genocide it is almost impossible not to see it in children’s faces and be stirred to act.

P&I author and reader Stephanie Dowrick alerted us to something important this week. The Daily Express, one of the UK’s more right-wing tabloids, ran a horrifying front page picture, with the headline “For pity’s sake stop this now. The suffering of little Muhammed shames us all.”

So something has shifted. Much too late, but it has.

We have heard again from Refaat Ibrahim, from the centre of Gaza. Over the months Refaat has been writing, direct from the place Israel bars journalists from entering ‘because it is too dangerous’, he has mostly left his personal circumstances out. Now he cannot. He leaves his tent each day to look for food for his family. Sometimes he can’t file because there is no power, or an internet blackout. He apologises when he is slow responding to emails. He makes me understand that Palestinians will not leave, even if there are no buildings left standing, and that they are a people of extraordinary resilience and grace.

One of Australia’s most important and enduring public intellectuals Robert Manne added his voice to discussion of the Segal report on antisemitism.

If implemented he said: “… it will not only strike the most serious blow against both freedom of speech and academic freedom in Australia in recent decades. It will also almost certainly strengthen rather than combat the post-October 7 growth of antisemitism in Australia.”

Manne added: “Hannah Arendt once confessed that the crimes and mistakes of her own people, the Jews, were more painful to her than the crimes and mistakes of others. That is how I feel. The former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, who is certainly no dove, recently wrote that the actions of Israel-in-Gaza caused him to feel “heart-broken and ashamed”. That is also precisely how I feel.”

This is the kind of leadership we need, the kind we seek in our pages daily.

Until next week.