Rockets Continue To Rain Down; Israel Prepares For Ground War

Despite Israel's pleas for the rocket fire to stop, they continue to rain down, not only from Gaza, but now from the north as well. Things continue to escalate in the region:

Rockets Continue To Rain Down

Thousands of Gazans fled the Beit Lahiya area late Sunday, having been warned by the IDF that military action was imminent as Israel tries to put a stop to massive Hamas rocket attacks. The Islamist terror group fired over 130 rockets at Israel on Sunday, hitting southern and central Israel. In Ashkelon, a teen was critically injured by shrapnel from a rocket. Palestinian reports say over 160 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes. The Times of Israel is liveblogging events as they unfold.

Jordan’s Abdullah warns of Gaza’s regional repercussions

Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Monday urged Israel to stop targeting civilians in its deadly offensive against the Gaza Strip, speaking in a telephone call with UN chief Ban Ki-moon.

“The king and Ban discussed developments in the Gaza Strip and the monarch warned against their repercussions for the entire region and its stability,” the palace said in a statement.

The king, whose country has a 1994 peace treaty with Israel, “stressed the need to stop targeting civilians and respect international laws,” it added.

Jordan’s government has described Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza in response to Hamas rocket fire as “barbaric” and “brutal.”

Ban on Sunday urged Israel to scrap plans for a ground offensive against the Hamas-held enclave, saying that “too many” Palestinian civilians had been killed.

Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood has demanded that the government close Israel’s embassy in Amman and expel the ambassador.

Rockets From Lebanon Explode In Galilee

Three rockets exploded in the western Galilee region on Sunday night.
The rockets hit open areas, causing no physical injuries or damages. Sirens were heard in the city of Nahariya and throughout the region before the explosion.
The IDF responded with artillery fire towards the area of Lebanon from which the rockets

Sirens sounded Saturday evening in Nahariya, Rosh Hanikra, Shlomi, Kabri and Hanita, along the border with Lebanon, as two rockets from Lebanon hit open regions, causing no physical injuries or damages.
The rockets were apparently fired from Lebanon by a Palestinian Arab Lebanese terror group. Israel responded with artillery fire targeting the firing points.
A Katyusha missile from Lebanon was also fired towards the Galilee on Friday morning. It, too, exploded in an open region and did not result in casualties.

West Bank Palestinian Killed In Clash With IDF

Palestinian was killed by Israeli military personnel near the southern West Bank city of Hebron early Monday morning.

Munir Ahmed Badarin, 22, was throwing rocks at an reservist IDF patrol near Al-Samua, and was shot by the patrol in its attempt to arrest him, Channel 2 reported.

Badarin suffered wounds in his abdomen and thigh and succumbed to his wounds at Yatta hospital south of Hebron, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reported.

IDF troops in the West Bank arrested 25 Palestinians overnight as part an ongoing campaign to hunt down the killers of Israeli teenagers Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, who were abducted and slain last month.

Iron Dome Intercepts 7 Rockets Over Ashkelon

A salvo of rockets was fired on Sunday night, just before midnight, towards southern Israel.
The Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepted seven rockets that were fired towards the city of Ashkelon and the Hof Ashkelon region.
An hour earlier, a rocket launched by Gaza terrorists exploded in the Eshkol Council region.


Also on Sunday, a salvo of rockets from Gaza was fired towards Jerusalem and the Binyamin/Samaria region to its north.
Rocket warning sirens went off in Ariel, Shilo and Eli in Samaria, as well as Psagot – for the first time in recent memory.
Hamas launched dozens of rockets at Israel over the Sabbath, striking the Judea region south of Jerusalem for the first time - but in areas under Palestinian Authority control. Arabs in Hevron gathered to celebrate the rocket attacks on their Jewish neighbors but instead faced a rocket strike on Hevron itself.
Meanwhile, the IDF’s Operation Protective Edge continues. Fearing for their lives, more than 17,000 people have taken shelter in installations of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets on border areas in northern Gaza on Saturday, calling on the citizens to evacuate their homes before noon Sunday as it prepared to bomb the area.
The IDF warned that those who do not obey their instructions

Gaza Shows (again) How The Underdog Can be Wrong

Sometimes the underdog is wrong. The ruthlessly brutal regimes of Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Idi Amin were all weaker than the forces that ultimately vanquished them.

But for decades the Palestinians have mastered the art of persuading everyone that because they die in greater numbers and have inferior arms, they are more deserving of sympathy and support in their conflict with Israel. Here’s why they’re wrong:

Yet most observers are oblivious to these key considerations, and simplistically look at comparative casualty figures before reflexively concluding that Israel is wrong. This cartoon aptly captures how Palestinians manipulate world opinion like a mischievous schoolboy misleading his teachers about who caused school spats.

Consider the UN. On July 3, Israel gave Hamas 48 hours to stop firing rockets, even though 40 rockets had already been fired at Israel in the previous 24 hours. The Palestinian attacks continued until Israel finally took action on July 8. By the end of July 10, over 350 rockets had been fired at Israel, the Israeli Air Force had carried out almost 900 airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, resulting in at least 90 Palestinians killed (according to Palestinian reports), and a UN Security Council emergency session to address the hostilities. So when Israel launches a justified military operation against Palestinians, it takes just three days and 90 Palestinian dead for the UN Security Council to convene an emergency session about the issue. Note that there was no emergency session to address the scores of unprovoked rocket attacks that forced Israel to respond in the first place.

But in neighboring Syria, it took about 1,650 civilian deaths and 141 days (from March 15 to August 3, 2011) for the United Nations Security Council, in a non-binding statement, to make any pronouncement at all on the Syrian war (which has killed over 4,000 people per month on average). Are Syrian lives less valuable than Palestinian lives? Incredibly, when the Palestinians are killed by Syrians or other Palestinians, this too is hardly noticed or addressed. It is only when Israelis are killing Palestinians – even if that killing is justified, accidental, or actually caused by Hamas’ use of human shields – that the diplomatic obsession with Palestinian security reaches a fever pitch.

No matter how much restraint Israel may exercise, Palestinian propagandists and their pliant media sympathizers will vilify Israel. Abbas has already called Israel’s Operation Protective Edge a “genocide” (as if it wouldn’t be far easier and faster for Israel to raze the entire Gaza Strip instead of using pin-point strikes preceded by warnings telling residents to evacuate terrorist hideouts and weapons caches targeted for destruction). And yet somehow Abbas’ hyperbole – which cheapens the real genocide in neighboring Syria and elsewhere – in no way diminishes his credibility with the media and diplomats. He is still presumed to be some kind of honest partner for peace, even though – rather than disavow his government’s partnership with the terrorists responsible for the current conflict – he attempts to score propaganda points on their behalf.

Even more outrageous, US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki admitted that the Obama administration is willing to continue funding a Palestinian government with ties to a terrorist group – something that violates US law, betrays Israel, and harms US interests by supporting terrorism, increasing regional instability, and signaling to other radical groups that terrorism sometimes pays.

In the end, Israel must simply defeat the evil to its south, regardless of the double standards that will be hurled at it. To that end, and to help Gazans realize that its time to overthrow the Islamist thugocracy strangling their society, Israel should stop supplying power and water to Gaza. What rule of international law says that a state must provide resources to a neighbor trying to kill its citizens?

Articles: Surreal In The Middle East: Hamas' Human Shields

Hamas terrorists continued firing rockets indiscriminately at Israel for the sixth day, and Israel continued its efforts to counter with its anti-missile Iron Dome shield, along with coordinated systematic surgical air strikes directed against select Hamas terrorist sites.  Yet most of the international media’s focus of the conflict continues to be one-sided, aimed at limited Palestinian civilian casualties and critical of Israel’s defense actions to protect it civilian population.  As with previous assaults and conflicts orchestrated by an array of regional Islamic terrorist groups against Israel, not much attention is being paid to the way Hamas uses its own Palestinian citizens as human shields, or its deliberate and intentioned strikes on Israeli civilian neighborhoods and population centers.

Hamas sees the use of human shields as a win-win, since if the tactic deters an Israeli response, its fighters and weapons will be safe, and if Israel does respond, the civilian casualties can be internationally exploited for propaganda purposes.  Despite this doctrine and logic, few in the mainstream media find it necessary to be critical and report on Hamas’s efforts both to encourage Palestinians to unknowingly serve as human shields and to directly and deliberately target Israeli areas of population – many of which, by the way, consist of  Jews, Muslims, and Christians.

Historically, by way of its charter, we should also be aware that Hamas is an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood.  That, of course, will not be what you hear from left-of-center media and sympathetic foreign policy experts and organizations, who are busily drafting and refining their narratives on Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in an effort to portray them as moderate political groups who have renounced violence and are really nothing for us to be very concerned about.  Unfortunately, the stubborn fact is that Hamas is the most prominent of the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branches, whose operations long predated Hamas and brought Hamas, aka the Islamic Resistance Movement, into being.  Hamas is identified as a “wing of the Muslim Brotherhood,” according to the Hamas Charter, which also calls for the “murder” of Jews, the “obliteration” of Israel, and Israel's replacement with an Islamist theocracy otherwise known as a caliphate.

But having decided to escalate another round of violence by launching hundreds of rockets into Israel, Hamas is still hoping to use the presence of its own Palestinian civilians living and in some cases placed intentionally around legitimate military targets, with the specific intent to be used as propaganda weapons against the Jewish state.

As Israel has stepped up its efforts to spare civilians casualties, even as it seeks pinpoint tactics to silence the Hamas terrorist fire, Hamas has also increased its efforts to ensure that as many inhabitants of Gaza as possible are hurt in the fighting.  To do so, Hamas leaders have called on

Palestinians, particularly women and children, to ignore Israel’s pre-attack warnings to evacuate their homes and neighborhoods.  Hamas leaders and even Islamic clerics have gone as far as to tell their people not to listen to the Israeli announcements, because the Israelis are after all lying.

Hal Lindsey: Assault On A Miracle

An Israeli ground invasion of Gaza seems imminent. If that happens, how will the world respond? Support for Israel has diminished a great deal in the last few years, especially among US and EU leaders. Liberal churches, media, and academia continue their fight against Israel despite the nation’s record of human rights and respect for human dignity.

Why? Because Israel embarrasses them. Israel is what they say does not exist — a miracle.

Since its official establishment in 1948, modern Israel has existed under duress. Its strength has waxed, waned, then waxed again repeatedly. It began as a miracle and continues as an ongoing miracle. So, to those who don’t believe in miracles, Israel makes no sense. They repeatedly try to “help” in ways that can only hurt.

Round after round of peace talks fail, yet the nation persists. Wave after wave of violence strikes at it, yet Israel survives. More than that, Israel prospers. Even Israelis struggle to understand. How could this happen?

The answer is simple. God keeps His Word.

God made certain unconditional covenants with Abraham and his descendents through his son Isaac and grandson Jacob. These covenants promised that God would make them His nation forever, and that a very specific piece of real estate was given to them forever. Although God predicted that they would stray from Him so that He would have to discipline them, He nevertheless swore that He would bring them back and fulfill all His promises to them. He also promised that though He would discipline them Himself, He would judge everyone who persecuted them. He also promised that He would bless all who would bless them. And that even if they would be under His discipline, He would curse all who mistreated them.

What the unbelieving people of the world fail to understand is that God has consistently fulfilled these covenant-promises all through history. Especially in these last days before His Son returns to fulfill His promise to give the believing remnant of Israel a Kingdom over which they will co-rule with Him.

All of this is being set up before our eyes. The world needs to take heed that there is only one people to which God, the creator and possessor of this planet, has ever given a title deed to a specific piece of real estate. And that is the Israelites.

Prophecy indicates that the last Great War will be fought because of the world’s efforts to take away His peoples’ land and its Holy City.

Expect that over the next few years, the whole world will become intent upon taking away the nation of Israel’s Divinely promised land – especially its holy city, Jerusalem. Satan is trying everything to keep God’s promise from being fulfilled.

But God’s Word can never be broken, and the nations of this fallen world will be destroyed trying to make it fail. Thank the LORD that His promises guarantee our salvation through faith in Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Maranatha!

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