21 March 2024
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) invaded Israel on 7th October 2023. They raped, pillaged, and massacred over a thousand innocent people, and took hundreds as hostages back into their tunnels in Gaza. Around 130 hostages remain in captivity, it is not known how many are alive. All of these are demonstrably war crimes of the most heinous kind.
Since then, Israel has been launching an operation to destroy Hamas’s capabilities and liberate not only the hostages but also the Palestinian people from the totalitarian Hamas regime.
Now, almost six months into the war, Israel has managed to destroy large parts of Hamas, but this has come at massive cost of civilian lives and the destruction of large parts of Gaza. Moreover it is becoming questionable whether Israel will be able to destroy Hamas’ capabilities. Four battalions and the Hamas leadership are still in control of the last bastion, the city of Rafah, in the south on the Egyptian border. Israel wants to go into Rafah to wipe out Hamas there. But thousands of displaced Palestinians from northern parts of Gaza have sought shelter in Rafah.
An attack on Hamas tunnels in Rafah will inevitably cause huge destruction of buildings and infrastructure and cost thousands of lives. The UN warns of a massive humanitarian crisis. Various plans are being prepared to ensure provision of food, water, medicines, clothing and sanitation to the people in the south of Gaza. The US is planning to build a temporary maritime pier to facilitate large-scale aid delivery – a project not without risks, as former US Navy Commander David Levy reports (below).
The US, Israel’s most important ally, refuses to approve Israel’s plans to attack Rafah. This has caused a diplomatic crisis. Biden and Netanyahu are at loggerheads. Negotiations are taking place at the highest level in Washington and Jerusalem.
In parallel, there are also negotiations involving USA and Qatar for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages. So far, Hamas and Israel have been unable to agree.
At the same time as Hamas has lured Israel into a hopeless war on the ground, the Palestinians have launched a legal war against Israel in the international courts. South Africa brought proceedings against Israel in the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention. And the Palestinians are also claiming before the same court that the Jewish State of Israel is an illegitimate incursion on Palestinian right to self-determination in all of Palestine – i.e. “from the River to the Sea”.
It seems the Palestinians have been preparing for years to create this legal and military “perfect storm”. As military law expert John Spencer has stated, Hamas knew that Israeli Defense Forces would respond with force to its October 7 assault in southern Israel:
"They wanted Israel's counterattack, and then they wanted to hold in the tunnels and use the hostages just to buy time for the international community—namely, the United States—to stop the IDF in their operations.
"Their only goal is to survive. ... It's all about time. They want to survive Israel's attack against them, which gives them immense political power. If they survive in any way, they have strategically won the war."
As Caroline Glick observes, “Hamas didn't invent this strategy. This has been the Palestinians' strategy for defeating Israel since at least the 1982 war in Lebanon. In that war, the PLO relied on the United States to force Israel to permit the PLO to survive to fight another day by evacuating to Tunisia.”
Let us continue to lift this complex situation before the Lord. Humanly speaking there are no satisfactory solutions. We must pray for the people of Israel and the hostages still being held in Gaza, as well as the Palestinians in Gaza who are held hostage by their own regime Hamas. Pray also for the leaders of Israel and the USA at this time. Pray for supernatural intervention, that the Lord will change hearts and minds.
The Editorial Team - Israel & Christians Today
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