Brandon Holthaus
There is a reason I continually tell people who study Bible prophecy to keep their eyes on Israel. It is not because every conflict involving Israel fulfills a prophecy, nor because we should take every newspaper headline and try to force it into a Bible verse. It is because God has already told us where history is going. When we understand that prophetic framework, we can look at what is happening in the Middle East and recognize when the geopolitical environment begins moving toward the conditions Scripture says will eventually exist.
That is why several developments taking place right now have my attention. Israel is facing pressure from two very different directions. Across the Muslim world, significant military relationships are developing, including a new defense agreement involving Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. At the same time, Israel is facing increasing diplomatic pressure over Gaza, Hamas, Israeli military withdrawals, Palestinian governance, and ultimately the continuing push for a Palestinian state.
Israel is dealing with growing security concerns from the Islamic world while simultaneously being asked by the international community to make decisions that could affect its ability to defend itself. When these developments are placed alongside Psalm 83, Ezekiel 38–39, Isaiah 28, Joel 3, and Zechariah 12, I believe some important prophetic trends deserve our attention.
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan have entered into a new mutual-defense agreement signed in Mecca. What makes this agreement particularly noteworthy is the combined military, economic, religious, and strategic influence represented by these countries.
Turkey possesses one of the region’s most formidable conventional militaries and has developed an increasingly sophisticated defense industry capable of producing drones, missiles, armored vehicles, and other advanced military technology. Saudi Arabia possesses tremendous wealth and considerable influence throughout the Islamic world, especially because of its relationship to Mecca and Medina. Pakistan introduces an entirely different strategic factor because it possesses nuclear weapons.
When a nuclear-armed nation enters a new mutual-defense relationship, its nuclear status cannot simply be ignored when evaluating the potential strategic significance of that relationship.
What happened following the agreement should be especially concerning to Israel. Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif publicly challenged Israel’s legitimacy and called for Muslim countries to unite militarily against the Jewish state. Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stated:
“No matter which way you look at it, there is no parameter to continue to bear these people… Israel is not only Turkey’s problem, and it is not only President Erdogan’s problem. These people have become a burden that humanity can no longer bear. The human conscience cannot bear it, political systems cannot sustain it, and economic systems cannot sustain it either. Everyone must step forward, take a diplomatic position, and impose the necessary sanctions on these people.”
Regarding Saudi Arabia, according to Peter Mandaville’s research. The problem with Saudi Arabia is that for more than half a century it has spent billions of dollars funding and sponsoring Islamic religious activities around the world, helping export radical Wahhabism to Muslim communities on almost every continent. Through mosques, Islamic schools, charities, scholarships, universities, religious literature, and organizations, Saudi money helped build an international infrastructure capable of spreading this radical ideology of Islam.
Wahhabism has contributed to religious intolerance of Christianity and Judaism and its ideological relationship to the Salafi-jihadist worldview later associated with groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. Wahhabism and the World: Understanding Saudi Arabia’s Global Influence on Islam.
Wahhabism also includes strong anti-Zionism, antisemitic themes, along with opposition to Western society. These countries view Israel as an enemy around which greater Muslim military cooperation should occur.
Prophetically, my concern isn’t simply what these governments say their agreement is designed to accomplish today. I’m interested in what kind of military relationships are being established across the Islamic world and where those relationships could lead as the Middle East continues to change.
Saudi Arabia presently has important strategic relationships with the United States and has previously explored normalization with Israel. Egypt, which has reportedly been discussed as a possible future participant, has maintained a peace treaty with Israel for decades. Turkey remains a member of NATO. Those realities matter. But the Middle East has repeatedly demonstrated how quickly political relationships can be transformed by war, revolution, regime change, religious movements, changing national interests, or flat-out lying, endorsed by Islamic “Taqiyya” (lying) and “Hudna” (false peace treaties).
For students of Bible prophecy, this is one reason Ezekiel 38 and 39 remain on the front burner. Ezekiel describes a massive military invasion of Israel in the latter days involving a coalition of nations. Persia—modern Iran—is specifically identified. I believe Russia occupies the dominant northern position associated with Gog and Magog, and areas associated with modern Turkey also figure prominently within the coalition.
Ezekiel describes nations such as the ancient area of “Libya” (i.e., the area of Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco) and “Put” (i.e., the area of Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia) separated geographically but ultimately united in an invasion of Israel because of Islamic hatred of Israel.
I am not identifying the agreement signed in Mecca as the Gog-Magog coalition. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan cannot simply be added to Ezekiel’s list just because they appear in today’s headlines. We must allow the biblical text to determine our interpretation rather than altering Scripture to accommodate current events. What interests me is the broader geopolitical movement unfolding around Israel.
Russia and Iran have developed significant strategic cooperation. Iran remains committed to Israel’s destruction. Turkey’s relationship with Israel has deteriorated considerably. Turkey wants a Neo-Ottoman empire with no Israel.
Military relationships throughout the Muslim world continue to devolve. Now we have a nuclear-armed Muslim nation participating in another regional defense framework while its defense minister openly advocates greater Islamic military unity against Israel. None of that fulfills Ezekiel 38 on its own, but it certainly gives prophecy students something to watch for as the table gets set.
Before Ezekiel’s larger invasion, I believe Scripture also gives us reason to anticipate a conflict involving Israel’s immediate neighborhood. Psalm 83 describes a conspiracy among the Arab peoples surrounding Israel who say, “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more.” I understand Psalm 83 as describing a regional war distinct from the later Gog-Magog invasion. The peoples identified in Psalm 83 are geographically bordering Israel, and their objective is unmistakable: they want Israel eliminated as a nation.
That same basic objective remains embedded in Hamas’s ideology. This is why the current dispute over Gaza cannot simply be reduced to the location of Israeli troops or the mechanics of another ceasefire. The fundamental question is whether Hamas will cease to exist as an effective military threat. Israel has insisted that it will not make the kind of withdrawal envisioned by the current international roadmap until Hamas is genuinely disarmed.
The disagreement is therefore not merely about whether Hamas should eventually disarm. It is about when disarmament occurs, what qualifies as genuine disarmament, who verifies it, what happens to the weapons, and how much territory Israel relinquishes before the threat has been removed.
This distinction becomes clearer when comparing President Trump’s original framework with the newer Board of Peace roadmap. Trump’s earlier proposal called for military and terrorist infrastructure, including tunnels and weapons-production facilities, to be destroyed and prevented from being rebuilt. Israeli officials have objected that the newer roadmap allows for a gradual process involving the decommissioning and storage of weapons while Israeli forces withdraw in phases.
Under that framework, a new Palestinian governing authority could ultimately control weapons inside Gaza rather than requiring all weapons to be permanently removed from the territory. The new roadmap also connects Gaza’s future with a political process that could lead toward Palestinian statehood, which is not allowed by the Bible.
Israel’s skepticism did not develop in a vacuum. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Instead of producing lasting peace, Hamas eventually seized control and spent years developing an enormous terrorist infrastructure consisting of tunnels, rockets, weapons-production facilities, command centers, and armed fighters. That process ultimately contributed to the environment from which the October 7 massacre was launched. From Israel’s perspective, withdrawing first and depending upon international mechanisms to solve the security problem afterward is a risk it is no longer willing to take.
There are additional questions surrounding what Hamas would consider disarmament. Reports have raised the possibility of an internationally financed program that would pay Palestinians, potentially including Hamas members, to surrender weapons and participate in rehabilitation programs. Yet Hamas’s own history demonstrates why Israel questions whether financial incentives can overcome ideological commitments.
Former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh acknowledged years ago that Hamas rejected a massive economic-development package because accepting it would have required the organization to dismantle its military infrastructure and surrender its weapons. According to the reporting, the proposed economic package was worth approximately $15 billion and included an airport, seaport, industrial development, and other major investments. Hamas refused those opportunities rather than surrender its military capabilities.
More recent reports cited in the material I reviewed allege that Hamas has distributed rifles to individual operatives as personal weapons. If those reports are accurate, that creates an obvious problem for any disarmament process. An organization could surrender certain categories of weapons while preserving a substantial armed network through weapons held by individual members. October 7 demonstrated that Hamas does not need tanks, fighter aircraft, or a conventional military to inflict devastating casualties. Small arms, grenades, explosives, and lightly armed terrorist units were enough. This is why Israel is insisting that disarmament must mean the actual elimination of Hamas’s ability to wage another war rather than simply reorganizing where its weapons are stored.
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