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Much has already been said about the October 7th Hamas attack in Israel. And about the military response against Hamas in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Today we want to focus on these civilians throughout the Gaza Strip who suffer the most and are in great need of prayer.
How to Pray for Gaza
The conflict in Gaza is a longstanding and deeply rooted issue, characterized by complex political, historical, and religious dimensions. The root causes of the conflict include territorial disputes and the struggle for self-determination. After the creation of the Israeli state in 1947-48, many thousands of Muslim and Christian Palestinians were driven from their homes and businesses into other towns and refugee camps.
One of these territories became the Gaza Strip. And it was quite open until the 1967 war, when Israel decided to further isolate and restrict movement, and began the erection of fences, walls and mine fields in and effort to restrict travel, trade and personal freedoms.
These past decades of harsh measures in the densely populated Gaza Strip has led to further job losses, economic suffering, radicalization of young people and the rise of Hamas. Meanwhile, decades of International efforts to broker peace and find solutions to the conflict have failed.
Yet, God is at work among both Muslim and Christian Palestinians. Stories of changed lives do filter out and, while many Palestinian believers have left in recent years, the small local church still bears witness to the story of Jesus.
How to Pray
- Pray for peace and an end to the current Israeli-Hamas war
- Ask God to bring peace to the region and an end to the blockade against Gaza and human rights violations.
- Pray for Palestinian Christians to be bold in their faith and share with their Muslim friends and neighbors
- Pray that many would find peace in Jesus at this difficult time.
There is a lot of confusion about the history of the Arabs of Gaza and the Galilee and Samaria that Jesus was familiar with. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the map of the Middle East was re-drawn and Britain gave a huge parcel of the Biblical lands (secret deals with Arab nations) to form modern day Jordan. The peoples of the vast Arab nations surrounding Israel have always been vehemently opposed to the reconstituted Jewish state, a tiny remnant of the land God gave Israel in perpetuity and have vowed to wipe it off the map.
Until 1948, there were no Palestinian Arabs, but all inhabitants Jews, Arabs and Druize were “Palestinians” in the ‘Mandate for Palestine’ (recalling the Roman name, Palestrina-Assyria, intending to erase the identity of Israel). The Arabs gave up on either the land being joined to Lebanon , or returning to their original, Arab homelands (though their states had recalled them, with the intention of finishing off the Jews and seizing the land for themselves) and instead, created a new identity for themselves to invoke a new sense of nationalism and an Arab “Palestine” a state that had never existed, became part of their collective imagination.
Gaza didn’t become part of Israel until 1973 after Egypt and Syria attacked Israel and Gaza was retained as a buffer zone. (Sinai was returned to Egypt in return for recognition of Israel’s right to exist.) After elections in 2004 and Israel’s withdrawal, Gaza has been under Palestinian/ Hamas’ control, so no occupation by Israel, yet the rocket volleyed Israeli civilians have continued.
Moreover, many of the Arabs that live within Israeli lands are the descendants of the migrant Arab workers Britain invited in (under international law, Balfour Agreement and Treaty of Locarno) supposedly setting up a homeland for persecuted Jews after 1917 but restricting Jewish immigration even during the holocaust and post-war to appease the Arabs settled there.