“Yeshua said to His disciples: ‘Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.'” (Luke 17:1–2)
Israeli children visit Palestinian village of Tuwani and participate in bilingual activities together during summer camp.
While many children in Israel and the West enjoy summer camp playing, creating art, and learning skills such as swimming and canoeing, in the Gaza Strip, children are enrolled in camps designed to rob them of their childhood innocence.
This summer, many of Gaza’s children will be participating in about 70 Hamas camp sessions at which they will learn to shoot anti-tank weapons and Kalashnikov rifles, dismantle guns blindfolded and enact kidnappings of Israelis.
Since the kidnapping of three Israeli teens on June 12, thousands of their Gazan peers, aged 12 to 17, have lined up to be militarized through intense obstacle courses, hanging over open flames and crawling under barbed wire in the heat of the Middle East even as illegal Gazan rocket fire into southern Israel is averaging two a day. (JPost)
“This young generation bears major responsibilities in the future and is supposed to be mentally and physically prepared for any military confrontation,” said summer-camp official Hamza Ahmad to Al-Monitor.
“The Zionist enemy took the land by force and it will only be taken back by force. This is what we teach these boys, who are the future generation, and who show a great desire to learn and train on weapons and military action techniques,” he added.
Hamas—voted into power in Gaza in 2007—has insisted for years that Gaza’s children attend Hamas- or Islamic Jihad-sponsored terrorist training camps.
While drawing in campers as young as five years old, Hamas uses other tactics to mold the minds of Palestinian children, including childhood television shows.
On its most recent children’s program aired June 20, Al-Aqsa TV (operated by Hamas) hosted this dialogue:
Child host: “Do a last imitation of the sound of our rockets… to encourage and excite our audience, our children friends.”
Adult guest makes sound of a missile.
Boy guest smiles when he recognizes the sound: “That’s the M-75.”
Adult guest: “The sound of a rocket when it’s launched from us, the M-75.”
Child host: “And when it reaches them [Israelis]?”
Adult guest shrugs, dismissing the importance of the sound of an M-75 in Israel: “I can’t hear it.” (PalWatch)
Just a few weeks ago, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas reconciled the PA administration’s seven-year rift with Hamas to form a unity government in Judea-Samaria (the West Bank).
The Hamas Charter of 1988 calls for the obliteration of Israel and justifies the killing of Jews in Israel and elsewhere. Considering Hamas merely “a Palestinian political group,” as many nations do, obscures the dangers of the group to Palestinian moderates and to the Israelis next door.
Article Seven of its charter states: “The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!” (The Jerusalem Fund)
The Hamas charter is ingrained with anti-Semitic language, including accusations that Jews are “the merchants of war” and a “Nazi-like enemy… (that) make war against people’s livelihood, plunder their moneys and threaten their honor.”
Yet Israel can find comfort in this—while its neighbors and much of the world are rejecting Israel, the Lord never will:
“I would no more reject My people than I would change My laws that govern night and day, earth and sky. I will never abandon the descendants of Jacob or David, My servant, or change the plan that David’s descendants will rule the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Instead, I will restore them to their land and have mercy on them.” (Jeremiah 33:25–26)
