Israel & Gaza: An Update from Skip Heitzig - Part A

They will say it is the bloodiest day in Israeli history in the modern state of Israel.

That's significant. It's not a skirmish. It's an all-out declaration of war. On this edition of Connect with Skip Heitig, we begin a week-long special series of Israel at War updates. The Hamas terror attacks against Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023 were just the beginning of a struggle unlike anything Israel has seen since the Holocaust. In this series of updates, Skip Heitig provides insight into the conflict in Israel as we are encouraged to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. On this broadcast, Skip provides biblical context for the Israel conflict in Gaza, and he is joined by author Joel Rosenberg from his home in Israel. Now, Part 1 of our Israel at War update. I was in Germany last Saturday in Essen, Germany in the afternoon evening in Germany with a group of pastors in a room, hundreds of pastors, and I got a text from my wife that said Israel is at war. Rockets were fired.

I looked and I thought, well, rockets get fired in Israel a lot, so I didn't know how alarmed to be, but then she plainly said Israel is at war, and then she gave me a call and followed up and told me what was going on with the news. You know what happened, and what happened happened on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. It was on a very significant day, as these things are wont to happen on. It was on the last day of that festival of Sukkot, Simchat Torah, where people are celebrating the law.

It was the final reading of the law. The people were supposed to be joyfully celebrating that. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War was launched by Arab neighbors who sought to take Israel completely off guard, and they did. Israel did not expect what happened 50 years ago, and as we discovered, Israel did not expect what happened the other day. They will say it is the bloodiest day in Israeli history in the modern state of Israel.

That's significant. It's not a skirmish. It's an all-out declaration of war. It's the bloodiest day in Israel's history in modern day Israel. It is equivalent in our country of 9 11 times 10.

If you look at the population of that country versus the population of this country, it is like 10 or 11, 9 11 happenings overnight. Now, why are we doing a special night devoted to this? Well, first of all, it's on all the news channels, and we're wondering what significance this has with those of us who believe in and trust in the revelation of Scripture. But also, because every now and then in life, you're given a moment where you have moral clarity like no other moment, when you are able to have a certain kind of perspicuity into a situation that you have not had up to that point. You are able to see pure evil, and such is that moment. The world has now seen the side of a terrorist organization, Hamas, like Hezbollah, like several others under different names.

They're able to see the face of these organizations, the kind of things that Israel told us they did and believed in, but the world wasn't so sure. Now we're sure. Now we're sure. Now we have the kind of clarity that we didn't have otherwise.

Now, what I have planned for this evening, I'm going to wrap it up with some added information and some biblical insight. A good friend of ours who lives in Jerusalem, he's New York Times best-selling author Joel Rosenberg, will be joining us from Jerusalem, and he also is the founder of the New England and All Israel News and All Arab News. These are news outlets that give you up-to-date occurrences of what's happening in the Middle East with his team on the ground. Also, he does on TBN every week what's called the Rosenberg Report. Joel, you immigrated with your family to Israel, and you have seen rockets being shot into Israel over the last several years, but this is different, wouldn't you say?

This is unlike anything I've ever seen before, Skip. I first came to Israel 35, 36 years ago to study at Tel Aviv University, and you're right, I've been coming back and forth ever since, starting the Joshua Fund, starting All Israel News, and of course, yeah, becoming a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen nine years ago. When we arrived in August of 2014, we arrived in the midst of a rocket war, and about 4,000 rockets were fired in a month at Israel, and people thought we were crazy to come here, but God had called us. Almost as many rockets have been fired in the last four days as were fired in the entire month of August 2014, okay?

So, that just gives you a sense of the scope. This is Israel's Pearl Harbor. This is our 9-11. It's the worst set of civilian murders and casualties here in Israel in the entire history of the state of Israel in this short period of time. In fact, this is the biggest murder of Jews since the Holocaust, okay, meaning in a four-day period.

We've never seen anything quite like this. Just one more point. Nine hundred Israelis have been murdered so far, and I'm talking about like Hamas. Most Americans don't know what Hamas is. They're a radical Islamist terrorist organization, but you have to think ISIS, okay? Hamas doesn't mean anything to most Americans. ISIS does, and what has happened in the last four days here, Hamas has chopped off the heads of babies, okay? They've shot children in front of their mothers. They've shot and murdered mothers in front of their children.

They've burned houses with Jews trapped in them to kill them, and like it's just off the charts, demonic, satanic, and it's got everyone just in shock, grieving, of course angry, but I think grief is the number one emotion that people are dealing with right now, and now we have to get ready to really go on offense, but like rockets coming in. I was driving to the TBN studios here in Jerusalem yesterday, okay, and what happened? The sirens went off, and Lynn and I, my wife and I, and it happened to be that my oldest son, his wife, her brother, had been visiting with us. We went to Cairo together.

We toured them all original. They were supposed to leave on Saturday. Oh, now there's a thousand rockets in the air, so all the flights were canceled, but anyway, they're all in the car with me. What happened? We have to get out of the car, stop the car, turn the engine off, run, and take cover as those sirens go off, meaning there's a salvo of missiles coming to Jerusalem, and then boom, boom, boom, boom, 14 or 15 times as the Iron Dome system intercepted the rockets, but one of them actually landed in a mosque, an Arab Muslim mosque, but my kids have not, you know, Caleb, yeah, our oldest, he's experienced this, but his wife hadn't, her brother hadn't, so it's traumatizing.

It's not normal, and it's hard to explain to people, and it's hard to watch them have to go through it. Let me zero in a little bit on what you just said. You said this is like Israel's 9-11 and Pearl Harbor kind of wrapped together, and I've been following some of your feed. You are the head of All Israel News, an excellent source, and All Arab News, and I just would recommend that to any of our listeners and those who are watching this because you give daily updates on all this and all things going on in the Middle East, but you mentioned 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, and so to help our listeners understand, if we were to compare the size of the United States to the size of Israel, it would be like, it would be like 25,000 people instantly gone.

I mean, it would be like 9-11 on steroids, right? Yeah, because the United States is 330 million people. Israel is 10 million, so you're 33 times larger, so you're thinking of a headline I did yesterday. Today, we're over 900 Israelis murdered, so now we're at about 30,000 Americans. You just have to help people understand what would be the emotional impact in terms of the size of your population, 10 times worse than 9-11, right? 3,000 Americans were murdered by Al-Qaeda on 9-11, and we know how that changed America forever, right? And the emotional damage and the emotional toll, now imagine it's 10 times worse, and for the population size that we are, that's what we're experiencing right now, something on the magnitude of 10 times 9-11, and it's going to get worse from here. Your prime minister has declared formally a declaration of war, and so with that, what is the sense of the people there, the population in general? Are any of them optimistic about this? Of course, grieving, scared, are they resolved going forward?

Oh, absolutely resolved, there's no question. We're going to win this war, but it's going to be messy. We're probably going to have to invade Gaza.

This is an important point, Skip, to just bring up right up front. Israel does not occupy the Gaza Strip, right? They were accused of it, but it's not true. In 2005, our prime minister at that time decided to pull all Israeli soldiers and all Israeli civilians out of the Gaza Strip and just give the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians as a gift.

You can have it. We don't want it anymore. There's no actual reason for a terrorist to come across the border and tell us, oh, we're here to fight you because you're occupying our land.

We're not. People in the Gaza Strip, however, up to this point have been allowed to go into Israel, haven't they, from the border at checkpoints? Very few, only from medical issues. Because we withdrew in 2005, then they had democratic elections in 2006, but who took over? The Hamas terrorist organization. Ever since, Hamas has been firing, I don't know, we're up at 25,000 rockets, whatever it's been since 2006. Then we had to put a blockade on Gaza. The only people who could come in from Gaza to Israel would be people who need urgent medical attention, or the Joshua Fund, our ministry, has an annual conference to encourage and refresh all of the Palestinian pastors and their wives and ministers.

Some gods and Christians are able to get permits to come over to that conference, but it's very limited. West Bank Palestinians are able to apply for permits to come work in Israel, and tens of thousands of them do because they're good jobs and they can make quite a bit more money than in the West Bank. But no, Gazans cannot because they're controlled by a terrorist regime. So now let's kind of go into that. Here they are, they're contained, the Gaza area is contained, but they're getting some kind of replenishment of the weapons that they use from somewhere.

Talk about that. What countries behind this? Well, the main funder and supplier of arms and strategy and direction is Iran, the terrorist regime in Iran.

So that's a problem. One of the ways the Iranians get their supplies of weapons in is by disaggregating them and hiding them in shipments of humanitarian relief goods or whatever, or that they're dual use things like a lot of the missiles or rockets are actually built in metal shops in Gaza. But they're not that sophisticated, so you can just keep building thousands and thousands and thousands of them based on just scrap metal or metal that you're bringing in to reconstruct damaged buildings, get siphoned off by Hamas and used to build terror tunnels, weapons and so forth.

But yes, and then whole weapons are swiveled in sometimes. We thought we were doing a good job at sealing it off. But clearly, Iran and Hamas has blindsided us by being far better prepared than Israeli intelligence realized. And that's a colossal failure, a staggering failure of Israeli intelligence. And there will be a political price to pay for those in power if they don't win this war so successfully that everybody focuses on the victory rather than this horrific early set of defeats. So I think the political future of Prime Minister Netanyahu is very much in doubt. He was unpopular before the war began, but his sort of saving grace was he was always considered Mr. Security. And now that is on the whole in the side of his brand, he was the one who made peace with four Arab countries, the Abraham Accords.

I was the one that kept us out of major wars in the region and protected us. And he has done a good job, but something went wrong. Any guesses as to what went wrong or why is it? Was it the diversion with the Supreme Court issue? Was it the focus on intelligence versus low-level attack like this?

What was it? Well, from the Israeli side, there are going to literally be investigations to figure out how is this possible, not just that we didn't understand that it was coming. Why was that border so lightly guarded?

There were so few combat soldiers on the bases nearby or even were patrolling. It's astonishing to us. None of us can understand it. So we'll have to figure that out. In a general sense, Skip, I would say that the Israeli leadership may have been lulled into a false sense of security because of all the peace treaties and the focus on making peace with the Saudi kingdom, which seemed until now like it could be just weeks or months away.

Now we'll have to see. But it's possible that people just thought, hey, things are getting better. And in one way they were getting better. But you can't let monsters out of the cage.

Otherwise they're going to roam the countryside and kill. And that's what happened. The Israeli leadership, the political, military, and intelligence levels all failed to stay focused on how dangerous Hamas really is and how ISIS like they really are.

And it's not just grief, it's that sense of astonishment that we were so badly let down. Now, the question is why did Hamas do it? Hamas doesn't do anything on its own. It's all the direction comes from Iran.

Okay. So why does Iran want to pick a fight with us now? Because they want to blow up the peace process. They are terrified. The Iranian regime is terrified of the idea of an Israeli- Saudi peace treaty because that would essentially be the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict as we've known it.

Right. And so what has been the Iranian strategy here? The Iranian leadership strategy is tell Hamas to go into Israel and this massive attack, then lure Israel into a ground war inside Gaza, which is going to be incredibly messy.

It's urban warfare, street to street, house to house, apartment to apartment, booby trap, land mines. There are going to be high Israeli casualties. And there's going to be high Palestinian casualties. And what does Iran want at the leadership level? What does the Supreme leader of Iran want? He doesn't, he, as of course he wants dead Jews, but what he really wants is dead Palestinians. Now you say, well, why would the Supreme leader of Iran want dead Palestinians? Because he wants television images of collateral damage of women or children and young men who are killed by Israel as Israel tried to hit Hamas terrorists for hiding behind the human shields of the 2 million Palestinians, civilians, and behind our Israeli hostages that they have.

Right. So that's, that's this cowardly demonic way. So if we try to go get them, no matter how hard we try, and we will try very, very hard, not to kill civilians, but it will happen. And when it happens, this will make the Supreme leader of Iran very, very happy because CNN, MSNBC, all the networks, New York times, BBC, Al Jazeera, everybody else will start to make us as Israelis look like monsters, that we're not defending ourselves from monsters, but now we are the monsters and the Iranian leadership hopes will cause the Arab Muslims to back away from Israel rather than gravitate towards us. And that should, I mean, obviously, ultimately Iran wants us to get annihilated. It's the Iranian leaders that are on the record to keep saying we want to wipe Israel off the map.

So of course they want to kill us all, but to get there, they need to isolate us. And what they're terrified of is the whole Muslim world being against us right now, more and more of the Muslim world is for Israel. And that's what they're trying to blow up right now. Joel, it's been said that Israel will use bombs to protect its people, where Hamas will use people to protect its bombs.

Their strategy is different. So not that an incursion has happened into Gaza, is the thought that it's just going to be a slight incursion or is it going to be a total takeover of Gaza? There hasn't been an Israeli ground operation inside Gaza, I don't think since 2014, I think it was called Operation Protective Edge. And then Israel just decided, you know what, it's not worth it. It's not worth any of our soldiers getting killed. Why don't we just keep building out the Iron Dome system?

Because for that point, it was, quote, just rocket coming at us. And if we can shoot 95% of them down, then that keeps us from having to go invade Gaza. But this has changed the calculus, the magnitude of Israelis that have been killed. And it's just and the way they've been killed, babies heads chopped off and so forth.

It has created total unity. You mentioned earlier, why now did the Hamas go? They saw Israelis very divided because of our internal debates over judicial reform, Supreme Court reform and so forth.

So they thought we were weakened. But Hamas has just done in four days what nobody else could do in the last year, which is unify Israel. Is there a scenario where Israel could completely take over the Gaza strip and it become now a part of Israel and just eliminate Gaza as a Palestinian territory? I don't think so. Technically, Gaza is part of Judah. Go back to the scriptures.

You can see that. But the conclusion was made by then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in 2005, that it's not something Israel wants. Now, in the Millennium Kingdom, yes, it will be part of Israel. But at the moment, there's total unanimity that nobody here in Israel wants to control the lives of the Palestinians.

And I would say, to use an American country, Western song is sort of like, I don't want her, you can have her, she's too fat for me. Meaning, it's just too much of a headache to be in charge. So what I think would happen is, Israel would apparently have to invade, it will be very bloody, very bad. It could be very long. And I think the world would very much turn against us.

And that would be a problem. But if it was successful, the way Israel, United States went into Afghanistan or into Iraq, messy and long, hopefully not that long. But if you could actually win, decisively, then the question would be, how could you help set up a moderate Palestinian leadership that would be like, look, we are ready to live at peace with Israel, and we want international aid to build a Palestinian paradise.

I mean, skip, I want all of your listeners and your congregation to realize, when Israel pulled out in 2005, the Palestinians had every opportunity to make a Palestinian paradise in Gaza. It's on the Mediterranean, which is gorgeous. They have natural gas right off their shores. They could have huge tourism, they could build beautiful hotels and resorts.

They have so much money. If they started drilling for this natural gas, they could export it to Europe, they could export it to Jordan and Egypt. It could be a paradise.

I wrote about it in my first political thriller, the last, yeah, 20, whatever it was, 23 years ago. And it could be amazing. And maybe that's where we're heading, but it can't be led by an ISIS regime. And so, unfortunately, it's going to fall on Israel because nobody else is going to do it to go clean out this hornet's nest. And I have many of my friends who are under 40, these young men, they have been called up and they are getting ready to go into the biggest war, I think, in the history of Israel. You've been listening to Skip Heitig with an important message that is part one of an Israel at War special series, which will occupy our schedule for this week. We will present part two of this Israel and Gaza update on our next edition of Connect with Skip Heitig. For this week of important messages, we have assembled this resource package by Pastor Skip. When events on earth become increasingly confusing and disturbing, we need to understand what the Bible says about the days we live in and what's ahead. The Book of Revelation speaks strongly about both of these issues, but many are reluctant to consider the Bible's final book. As part of this special Israel at War series, we're offering Skip Heitig's book, You Can Understand the Book of Revelation. The signs that we're dealing with are signs of that future period, the tribulation period, seven-year period, whereas the rapture is a sign-less event. In other words, it can happen at any time, but future events often cast their shadows before them. You can understand the Book of Revelation, and you need to.

Only God can accurately predict the future. We aren't told everything, but we need to understand what is revealed. Also included in this package is Skip's booklet, Are We Living in the Last Days? Get this booklet and the book, You Can Understand the Book of Revelation, when you make a donation of $50 or more to support Connect with Skip. Your gift will go toward the financial costs of this teaching program. Request your package online at connectwithskip.com or by calling 1-800-922-1888. That's 1-800-922-1888. Join us next time on Connect with Skip Heitig, when we will continue our Israel at War special series. So the Bible predicts, as it has been in the past, the Bible predicts so in the future that the focal point of history will center on the Jewish people, the State of Israel, the city of Jerusalem. Connect with Skip Heitig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.