Video Transcript
We are all watching what’s going on in the war in Israel right now, and we’re horrified by everything that we’re seeing. The attacks on the Jewish people by the terrorist organization, Hamas, are terrible, they’re wrong, they’re unjust, and we need to condemn them. But many of us are asking, what about the people of Gaza? And it leads us to ask the question, what is Gaza? A lot of us hear this word, the Gaza Strip, and we actually don’t know the history of it, so I want to unpack it for you really quickly. The land of Gaza, or the area of Gaza is a small strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea on the western side of the land of Israel. It’s settled by 2 million Palestinians in an area of land that’s roughly twice the size of Washington, DC.
If we go back in our Bible, we actually see Gaza, which in Hebrew means strong or fortified, through the story of Samson. Samson went to Gaza and attacked the Philistines who settled there when they settled into the land of Israel and were Israel’s chief enemies in the history of the Jewish people. Fast forward now in 1948 when Israel declares its independence, the Palestinians living in that area fled the war between the Arab countries and the Jewish people, and they went into this coastal enclave called Gaza, or the Gaza Strip. From 1948 to 1967, the area was administrated by Egyptian control, and in 1967, the Egyptians attacked Israel in the six day war. The Israeli forces pushed back the Egyptians and took control of the Gaza Strip until 2005, when the Israeli forces and the Jewish communities of Gaza pulled out of there in order to try to get peace with the Palestinians. In 2006, the terrorist group, Hamas, had free elections in the Gaza Strip where they took over the rulership of the Gaza Strip and all of the Palestinians living there, and they began to put in their terrorist ideologies of liberating the land of Israel from the Jewish people. Since then, in 2006, in 2008, in 2012, in 2014, in 2021, and now in 2023, Hamas has consistently launched missiles and attacks at the Jewish people, and they have done so to the detriment of their own people, the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip under the rule of Hamas, are living there subjected to their terrorist ideologies, and we pray for them. We care about them because they are like pawns in Hamas’ scheme. So this area of the Gaza Strip is very densely populated and it’s very complicated. But the main thing is we want to pray for the people of Gaza. We want you to be aware of what’s going on in Gaza, the real story about what’s going on, so that they can be set free from these Hamas radical ideologies, and they can actually live in peace with their Israeli neighbors.
