Displaying items by tag: Gaza

In Gaza, a significant number of Muslim men have recently converted to Christianity after reportedly seeing visions of Jesus in their dreams, an event described as miraculous by underground Christian communities in the area. This phenomenon was first reported online by Michael Licona, a Christian apologist and professor at Houston Christian University. The report by the underground Christian ministries detailed their efforts to aid hundreds of fathers who had lost their children in the war. These men were moved to safety, fed, clothed, and introduced to the Bible, which led to over 200 of them experiencing visions of Jesus in their dreams. Licona, while expressing his stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict, highlighted the importance of this event for Christians worldwide. He noted the small Christian population in Gaza, which is less than 1% and potentially as low as 1,000 individuals.

On 2 November Israeli soldiers advanced on war-torn Gaza City, meeting fierce resistance from Hamas militants, as hundreds of foreign nationals waited to cross the border into Egypt. Battles were reported to be raging in five different areas of the Strip. Footage has emerged of Hamas fighters using guerrilla-style tactics, emerging from underground tunnels to fire at Israeli tanks, then disappearing back into the tunnels. Benjamin Natanyahu has said, ‘We are at the height of the battle’, and claimed ‘impressive successes’: for up-to-date news, see Meanwhile, the Rafah border crossing into Egypt was opened on 1 November for the first time, allowing over 500 foreign nationals to leave: its foreign ministry has said Egypt would ultimately assist in evacuating about 7,000 foreigners, representing more than sixty nationalities. Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Egyptian official said that some ambulances carrying wounded Palestinians were also allowed to leave Gaza.

Following two nights of violence between police and ‘agitators’ at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, 34 rockets were launched into Israel’s civilian population from southern Lebanon terrorists. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said 25 of the projectiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome defence system. See Israel’s military then carried out air strikes on Hamas targets in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Gaza retaliated with dozens more rockets. IDF warplanes struck Hamas’ infrastructures in Lebanon and Gaza, including an underground shaft to construct weapons, three weapons workshops and an underground terrorist tunnel. Another 44 rockets from Gaza towards southern Israel were intercepted. See On Good Friday, two British-Israeli sisters were killed and their mother later died after being shot in the West Bank. The next day, an Italian tourist was killed and seven others injured in a Tel Aviv car-ramming. Benjamin Netanyahu has called up army and police reservists.

A tunnel used by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza has been discovered under one of the schools run by UNRWA. The school was one of two of the organisation’s facilities damaged during the 11-day conflict. But now officials at UNRWA have confirmed that a terror tunnel ran directly underneath the school. Also Israel’s bombing of Gaza’s Jala Tower caused international outrage as the office block housed media organisations Associated Press and Al-Jazeera. However, the building was also being used by Hamas’s military intelligence services to develop electronic jamming systems against the Iron Dome anti-missile defence system. Israel has defended its reasons for targeting the high-rise building, which it gave notice to evacuate, and as a good-will gesture has offered to rebuild the media offices.

Parents with Covid, unable to look after their children and living in Gaza, have problems bigger than childcare arrangements. One such couple sent their children to their grandparents' apartment, then two days later the worst violence in years erupted on their doorstep between Israel's military and Palestinian militant group Hamas. Rockets and mortars flew everywhere. The couple have no access to health services, despite their worrying symptoms, and they are struggling with the separation from their children as Israeli airstrikes pound nearby. Less than 2% of Gaza's population had received a dose of Covid-19 vaccine by the end of April, and thousands are evacuating to shelters, the above couple included. Medical staff and humanitarian agencies are worried the enclave could be hit by a third wave of Covid-19 as dozens of schools are transformed into shelters. The health ministry believes the wave has already started, with 30% of people being tested proving positive and over 100 in intensive care units.

Manufacturing clothes was once a pillar of Gaza’s economy, with 900 factories employing 36,000 Palestinians. But the industry collapsed in 2007 when Hamas seized control of Gaza and Israel banned the export of clothing from Gaza to Israel or the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Ziad Qassem’s 25 years as a tailor seemed worthless in the cruel blockade: unemployed, debt piling up, worried how he would provide for his wife and five children. Coronavirus came to the rescue. Demand for masks and protective gear soared worldwide. Gaza garment factories are flooded with new orders from Israel, ordinarily seen by much of Gaza’s Palestinian population as the enemy. Israeli rights groups have called for the permanent easing of restrictions that govern entry in and out of the Gaza enclave, home to some two million people, so that the economy can function more normally even after the pandemic. See

Ministers pledged urgent action after it emerged that tens of millions of British foreign aid cash is funding schools in Gaza and the West Bank where textbooks on martyrdom and radical Islamism are used in school lessons. The money goes via a UN agency that some other nations have stopped financing because of concerns. The textbooks include a reading exercise for six-year-olds with the words 'martyr' and 'attack', poems for eight-year-olds include phrases such as 'sacrifice my blood' to 'eliminate the usurper from my country' and 'annihilate the remnants of the foreigners'. Teaching on Newton’s Second law for eleven-year-olds uses pictures of a boy with a slingshot targeting Israeli soldiers during the Palestinian uprising and nine-year-olds learn maths by adding the number of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings in textbooks illustrated with pictures of their funerals. Ten-year-olds learn that the most important thing is giving their life for 'sacrifice, fight, jihad, and struggle'.

‘I only spent one week in Mosul, but I’ll never forget what I saw. The scars of war there are not just destroyed buildings, closed hospitals, and empty streets; they are also adults and children in severe pain, injured first by war and then infected by bacteria that defy treatment by most available antibiotics. People wonder if they will ever walk, play football with their friends, or even lift a cup of tea again. I’ve been working as an epidemiologist with Médecins Sans Frontières for eight years, focussing on measles, malaria, cholera, malnutrition, and other major health crises. I witnessed children, severely underweight, needing immediate treatment to survive. We understand how to treat life-threatening situations, but now antibiotic-resistant infections are in Gaza, Aden, and Mosul. They are incredibly complex to manage and difficult to explain, and can take a huge psychological toll on patients. This is World Antibiotic Awareness Week, but one week is not enough.’

On 26 December the Knesset disbanded and called elections for 9 April. The same day, Mahmoud Abbas disbanded the Palestinian legislature, with a view to 2019 elections. Many say it is hard to see how new parliamentary elections can take place in the West Bank and Gaza at the same time. ‘When Abbas dissolves the Palestinian parliament and the Knesset dissolves itself in the same week, Hamas smells trouble’. There is concern that Israel will block Qatari financial aid and seek an excuse to suspend the cease-fire deal. The Zionist Union, a joint list of the Israeli Labour party and the Hatnuah party, has broken up ahead of the Knesset elections. At the same time the Labour party, which has dominated Israeli politics for the past thirty years, is declining in popularity: see https://worldisraelnews.com/zionist-union-party-dissolves-ahead-of-elections/ An Israeli defence source told Al-Monitor that Israel assumes Hamas is gearing up for another round of widespread violence. The relative calm could end at any moment.

On 14 October Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s advisor on religious and Islamic affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habash, declared on TV that ‘Islam’s religious war to destroy Israel’s “culture of Satan” has begun’; and ‘Jerusalem is the arena of conflict between us and the colonialist project (Israel)’. He described the fight as ‘a war between Islamic culture in all its splendour and the culture of Satan, oppression and aggression’. See On 17 October a predawn rocket attack from Gaza struck an Israeli home, and another rocket landed off the coast near Tel Aviv. ‘There are only two organisations in Gaza with this calibre of rocket - Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’, said the IDF. Later the Israeli military bombed twenty Gaza Strip areas including weapons factories, military bases and Hamas’s tunnel-building efforts.