(JNS) While humanitarian aid drops from the sky, hundreds of trucks carrying the same supplies sit idle at the Gaza border. The failure is not logistical; it is political and moral. Efforts to divide the Gaza Strip into humanitarian zones have collapsed.
The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is nonfunctional. The United Nations is absent. UNRWA, rather than assist, has reportedly blocked aid entry for fear of upsetting Hamas.
Why? Because Hamas insists on controlling all food distribution. Aid must go through its hands, not for the benefit of civilians, but as a tool of coercion and power. Humanitarian aid becomes a weapon—a currency to purchase allegiance and suppress dissent. This is not a side effect of war; it is the core strategy of Hamas’s rule.
Israel, together with leaders such as United States President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is signaling a strategic inflection point. Trump has called for tighter restrictions on Hamas, whose intransigence has sabotaged every ceasefire framework.
Yet for Israel, the dilemma cuts deeper. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the fate of some 250 hostages taken by Hamas has shaped every military and diplomatic move. Hamas has openly threatened to execute hostages the moment negotiations fail.
When Israel withdrew its delegation following yet another Hamas rejection, the terror group’s leaders, enjoying luxury accommodations in Doha, feigned shock. “We were ready to talk,” they claimed, so long as talks handed them total control of Gaza.
This is the paradox: Hamas demands victory as a condition for peace. And if denied, it promises murder.
From day one, Israel has fought this war with one hand tied behind its back—restrained by moral obligation to its hostages and hampered by Hamas’s calculated manipulation of international sympathy. The terror group has poured vast resources into tunnels and bunkers, while building a human shield of civilians, whom it uses as both cover and bargaining chips.
And the world? Much of it is not watching. It is reacting—misled by fiction, devoid of context.
It took weeks to debunk viral falsehoods: The “bombed church” was untouched; a child said to have died from starvation was later confirmed to have suffered from a chronic illness; the infamous hospital explosion on Oct. 17, 2023,—immediately blamed on Israel—was, in fact, a result of a misfired Palestinian rocket. Yet outlets such as Reuterscontinue to run the same discredited headlines.
In this war, misinformation is as lethal as missiles.
This is the battlefield of global opinion, the “eighth front” of the war: one waged not with tanks but with hashtags, NGOs, and headlines. It is a war Hamas has long prepared for, backed by ideological allies and legacy media eager to frame Israel as the aggressor and Gaza as the eternal victim.
Even now, Hamas rejects negotiations, threatening hostages as leverage. And the international community remains functionally complicit. Each refusal to hold Hamas accountable becomes a vote of confidence in its tactics.
Meanwhile, Israel is forced to choose: defend itself or placate global outrage. It tries, still, to do both. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated this week, Israel will continue to pursue every path, including negotiations, to secure the release of the hostages. But time and again, it is made abundantly clear: Every food shipment lands in Hamas’s hands, not the people’s.
And yet, across Europe and North America, anti-Israel protests grow bolder. In Vienna, Israeli musicians were thrown out of a restaurant for speaking Hebrew. Cellist Amit Peled responded with dignity: “I will continue to speak Hebrew and play Hatikvah.” In Italy, effigies of Netanyahu were hanged by self-styled revolutionaries. Israeli students were kicked off a flight for singing national songs.
Back in Israel, young men—raised in peace, trained for restraint—are dying in battle. On one day alone, three more IDF soldiers were buried:
Sgt. Inon Nuriel Vana, 20. His mother apologized for not hugging him enough.
Capt. Amir Saad, 22, a proud Israeli Druze, killed in action in southern Gaza.
Sgt. Maj. (res.) Betzalel Yehoshua Mosbacher, 32, a father of two young girls, succumbed to grave wounds after fighting heroically for weeks.
Others were seriously wounded, ambushed by terrorists who emerged from tunnels, murdered and disappeared below ground, dragging hostages with them.
This is the reality. Israel does not fight by choice. It fights to survive. And it fights in a world that prefers myths to facts, villains to heroes, silence to truth.
There will be time to assess how and when this war ends. But for now, one thing is clear: The battle for the hostages is also the battle for the soul of the world.
Amein! So true! I have often wondered why so many want to believe a lie. If we, as believers, are guided by the Spirit of TRUTH, it is an impossibility. Conclusion: those wanting to believe untruth don’t want to listen to the Spirit of TRUTH.
John 14:16-17
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.”