Signs of the times – “Gaza – once more a flashpoint”

In recent weeks news reports have covered the renewed hostilities in Gaza, an area that has been a tinderbox for many years.

Israel seized the Gaza Strip from Egypt during the Six-Day War also called June War or Third Arab-Israeli War, brief war that took place June 5–10, 1967, and was the third of the Arab-Israeli wars. Israel’s decisive victory included the capture of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Old City of Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights; the status of these territories subsequently became a major point of contention in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israel occupied the area until 2005, when, under a unilateral disengagement plan all Israeli settlements were dismantled, Israeli settlers forcibly evicted, and troops removed. The Palestinian parliamentary elections the next year were won by the militant group Hamas (acronym of Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmiyyah, English Islamic Resistance Movement) which seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas in 2007. In the years following Israel has fought three wars against Hamas and has been plagued by rocket fire and tunnel building into Israel. The Egyptians and Israelis have maintained a blockade of the Strip and this, along with war, international isolation and the continued failure of peace efforts, has destroyed the economy of the region.

The Palestinian militant actions keep escalating over and over again bringing the world pictures of unnecessary violence on both parts, killing lots of people, mostly Palestinians. Beginning on Friday, 30 March 2018, the Palestinian Land Day, was taken to agitate the Israelis, getting tens of thousands of Palestinians participating in a protest called the Great March of Return in the Gaza Strip near the Israeli border. The Gaza residents planned to sit there, in a flimsily built tent-city, until Nakba day, on 15 May. That day marks the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe” – when the marchers, their parents or their grandparents, fled or were forced to flee their homes upon the creation of the state of Israel.

Land Day protests: Israeli police officers use pepper spray an injured Palestinian protester — Israeli border police officers use pepper spray as they detain an injured Palestinian protester outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem – Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters

On our television screens we can see enough non-believing Jews who do not mind showing their joy in killing others. The whole world can be a witness of what God hates and how lovers of God should not behave.

Once more in both camps would sound voices they have got a victory and got the others down. Israel shall once again boast that it has demolished so many tunnels and rocket sites, destroyed such and such an amount of munitions, and killed so many militants.

The assertion will be that the physical infrastructure of what the Israelis call terrorism and Hamas calls resistance has been so wasted that a resumption of attacks on Israel will not be possible for a considerable time to come, perhaps for ever.

writes the editor of the Guardian.

According to the Prophet Isaiah, one of the events to take place at the time of Christ’s return is that a regathered and repentant Israel will