Unfortunately I am yet again not surprised by the biased, anti-Israel letters in last week’s Echo. It is almost exactly one year since this terrible war started, anyone with basic knowledge can pick apart every single point, but the word count won’t allow it.
Yes Duncan Shipley-Smith, as I have said time and time again, all lives matter and I have always believed in the self-determination of the Palestinians, but do you believe in the self-determination of Jews to continue having their own state, especially since it is the only Jewish country in the world living in their ancestral homeland, when there are currently 57 Islamic countries and 157 Christian countries?
You use one of the usual slogans: that ‘the struggle for freedom in Palestine did not begin on October 7, the Nakba is ongoing’. The Arabs have been massacring the Jews in Israel and the greater region of Palestine for many hundreds of years since Islam invaded and occupied the region, so why do you stop at 1948?
As for Gareth Smith, on October 8, one day after the savage, murderous attack by Hamas on Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon fired deadly rockets into Israel in an unprovoked attack and have fired between 5,000 to 8,000 rockets into Israel since then. Hezbollah, against rulings by the UN, has fortified southern Lebanon, digging an underground terror road network under southern Lebanon and into Israel, much larger than even the Gazan underground terror network. Lebanese civilians are rightfully terrified of Hezbollah and give Western countries as much intel as they can.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
