Contrary to her combative image, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, is softly spoken and seems slightly anxious. The night before this interview, she appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, where the host shouted at her about the body count in Gaza. The embassy is wary of a rematch.

So I put her at ease by calling Piers “history’s greatest monster”, causing her to laugh and relax. The problem with coverage of Gaza is that emotions run so high, every discussion ends up feeling like an interrogation – and the Israelis push back with force. What outsiders often forget is that beneath the rhetorical fireworks lies a deep pain.

Speaking at her embassy, flanked by UK and Israeli flags, with a bust of Golda Meir (the fourth prime minister of Israel) watching in the corner, Hotovely tells me “everyone in Israel is traumatised” by the events of Oct 7 2023. On that date, Hamas – which controls Gaza – invaded southern Israel, murdering and kidnapping more than a thousand people.

“We, as Israelis, have been through terror attacks in our coffee shops, on our buses, on our streets, but never in the past did we feel like our houses were not safe.” This is their new “vulnerability: the feeling that you cannot protect your own children”.

But foreign governments – even allies like Britain – are concerned about the safety of Palestinian children too: used as human shields by Hamas, and some killed in Israeli airstrikes.

How do you fight a terror group that rejects all the accepted rules of war?

‘October 7 was a watershed moment’

Hotovely, 46, wears regal purple and leans forward as she speaks, injecting urgency into the conversation. Her parents, Gabriel and Roziko, migrated to Israel from the former USSR and raised Tzipi in Rehovot, an attractive city south of Tel Aviv. Conservative and religious, she studied and practised law before gaining attention as a pundit. In 2009, she was elected to the Knesset – its youngest deputy at the time – as a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, and went on to serve as minister for transport, science, foreign affairs and settlements. She lives with her husband, Or Alon, and their three daughters.

When she was appointed ambassador to London in 2020, some British Jews objected, labelling Hotovely too controversial for such a sensitive role. But perhaps that was the idea. Many states are shifting their diplomatic style from emollience to advocacy. Since October 7th, Hotovely has become a formidable presence in the media and on campuses , vigorously defending her government against accusations she often describes as “a blood libel” – against Jews as well as Israelis.

I begin by asking the mood of her citizens 19 months on from the Hamas pogrom. “I think that October 7th was a watershed moment… all across Israel. No one can say in Israel that he’s the same person after.” She sometimes finds “less sympathy among people around the world” – some governments still live in the mentality of “October 6th” – but Israelis have been shown “that if you have a jihadi, Islamist terrorist group that wants to destroy you on your doorstep, at the end of the day, it’ll end up in a massacre.” Think of it as living next-door to the “Third Reich”.

“Just this morning, we heard about […] a 15-day-old baby who died in a terror attack”: Israeli Ravid Haim, born by emergency C-section after his mother, Tzeela Fez, was shot and killed. Around 58 hostages remain in Hamas’s hands. To recover them, the Israeli army has launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” – aiming to seize control of the Gaza Strip, push the population south and cripple the enemy’s military.