WORLD NEWS & PROPHECY
Israel’s 9/11: What’s Behind Hamas’ Brutal Bloodbath? The entire world was shocked by the viciousness of a brutal assault on Israeli civilians on one of Israel’s holiest days of the year. What’s behind this latest bloody round of violence? You need to know!
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by Scott Ashley
s in any large city, it’s normal to hear sirens at any time of day in Jerusalem. But this was different. Instead of going away in a minute or two, these sirens continued to wail, disrupting the early Sabbathmorning peace. Opening the window of my hotel room to try to understand what the noise was about, I heard about a dozen muffled explosions in less than a minute. I’d seen enough news reports to immediately recognize what was going on—the sirens were warning Jerusalem residents of a wave of incoming missiles from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, and the explosions were Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system intercepting and blowing up those missiles before they could hit the city.
being butchered, raped and dismembered by fanatical Islamic Hamas terrorists from Gaza who had overrun large areas of southern Israel in a shockingly brutal attack. The victims included dozens of young children and infants, and at least one elderly wheelchair-bound woman. More than
A surreal experience My wife and I were in Jerusalem as part of a 178member group celebrating the biblical Feast of Tabernacles and the Holy Day immediately following. During the previous seven days we had visited many biblical sites and celebrated the coming millennial reign of Jesus Christ that this Feast represents. Now our group was directed to the basement-level meeting room/bomb shelter where we would hold our final church service. One of the hymns we sang, “O God of Every Nation,” was particularly poignant. Some of its lyrics plead for deliverance from “bombs that shower destruction through the night” and ask “that all may find release from fear of rattling saber and dread of war’s increase.” For the most part we were in a news blackout due to what has often rightly been described as “the fog of war.” Yet we knew conditions were serious, and most of our group hurriedly made plans to cross the border into neighboring Jordan and return home via flights through Amman rather than risk cancellations of our existing flights leaving from Israel’s only major airport. That turned out to be a wise decision, as only a handful were able to fly out that evening. Others ended up stranded in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem for several days with nowhere to go. Little did we know that over the course of the day, more than 1,300 Israeli men, women and children were
Hamas terrorists prepare to launch one of thousands of missiles into Israel. Many of the missiles are fabricated from water pipes that have been converted into weapons to kill Israeli civilians.
260 young adults were slaughtered at an open-air concert. More than 3,300 others were injured, many critically. A long history of violence This wasn’t my first brush with Middle East bloodshed. On a previous trip, Beyond Today writer and TV presenter Darris McNeely and I had spent time in Israel before crossing the border to fly out of Amman to return home. But on our last night in Amman, we were shaken out of our sleep by a hotel employee pounding on our room door and yelling: “Wake up! Get out! We must evacuate!” We were quickly rushed downstairs and out into the cold night air to a nearby vacant lot. There, as the hotel was being searched, we eventually learned that suicide bombers had detonated their explosive vests at three nearby hotels, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent people. Many of the victims had been gathered for a wedding celebration B Tm a g a z i n e . o r g
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November-December 2023
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