KIBBUTZ NIRIM, Israel – Many world leaders insist Israel give up land so Arabs can form the state of Palestine. That is at the heart of the so-called “two-state solution.” However, Israel tried exchanging land for peace in 2005, when it forced some 9,000 Jewish residents out of communities in the Gaza Strip and Samaria.
Two years later, the Hamas terror group along with other jihadists took over the Gaza Strip, and the result has been years of sporadic rocket attacks and full-out conflict on several occasions.
Since 2005, nothing even close to peace has resulted. This week, CBN News joined a group of more than 100 Christian journalists on a visit to the area along Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip to see what Israeli citizens and soldiers face there.
Kibbutz Nirim is a peaceful-looking community on that border, yet it is always in danger of rocket or mortar shelling, which can come at any time.
When terrorists across the border in Gaza launch the surprise attacks, the citizens of Kibbutz Nirim face possible death in a matter of seconds. Adele Reamer is a resident who has lived in the community for decades.
“From the moment we hear the Red Alert, we have between zero to 10 seconds before we hear the explosion of the rocket,” she explained, “and that’s the amount of time we have to get to someplace safe.”
Raemaer showed the journalists where these attacks come from within Gaza, just a little more than a mile past a fence near the community. That’s the reason each home has a safe room inside, and outdoor shelters are spread around the nearby kibbutzim.
Michal Uziyahu, from the Eshkol Community Center, asked the journalists to imagine the trauma for the children, who sing of their terror during attacks.
“Let’s hurry up, hurry up, hurry up to the safe room,” Uziyahu sang, as the children would. “Let’s hurry up, hurry up because it’s dangerous outside. My heart is pounding – boom, boom, boom. My body’s shaking – doom, doom, doom.”
The rockets and mortars are the terror coming from above. There is another type of terror coming from below, when Israelis began to find dozens of tunnels Hamas had dug from Gaza extending to the areas beneath Israeli communities.
“There’s a whole web of tunnels under our feet,” Raemer explained. “Imagine being in New York and a terrorist popping up from a sewer all of a sudden and spraying people all around with machine gun fire.”
The Israeli military scrambles from a nearby base and forward posts to strike back against such attacks. They’ve built their own replicas of a Gazan tunnel and town to train in.
The journalists had an opportunity to enter one of the replicas closely modeling an actual tunnel built by the terrorists to reach into Israel. The Israelis have found tunnels that go for hundreds of yards, and sometimes Israeli soldiers have battled the terrorists inside the tunnels, with the tight quarters making the fight difficult.
Both Raemer and the commander of the local base, Brig-General Bentzi Gruber, who commands some 20,000 soldiers in the region, bemoan the fact that Hamas spent big money on such tunnels instead of on their own poverty-stricken citizens.
“How many billions of dollars did they sink underground?” Raemer exclaimed. “What a waste of money. What good could all that money have done in Gaza?”
Gruber said of Hamas, “Instead of building universities, they build nice tunnels.” General Gruber wanted to meet the Christian journalists to rebut charges that Israeli troops commit atrocities and war crimes, charges leveled by the news media and activists who appear much more sympathetic to the Palestinian attackers than the Israeli defenders.
The general called on the journalists to publish or broadcast only facts, not false charges. “You need a lot of courage, a lot of knowledge, to standup and say, ‘no, this is not the truth,’” he said.
Israeli citizens say they get angry at the hypocrisy of it all. Israeli tour guide Chefziba Hilger decried “the propaganda from the other side who (themselves) shoot civilians. “I mean, all the bombing, all the rockets we get from Gaza, they’re aimed all to civilians,” she said.
At the nearby military base, the Israeli Defense Forces have built an entire fake Gaza village so they can practice maneuvering and fighting inside of it. On the walls they put items that might resemble terrorist art.
While one might think the soldiers would charge through the doorways or windows, they don’t, due to concerns the easy entrances would be boobytrapped; instead, they just blow holes in the walls to get inside.
Much of what the Israeli military does in fighting the terror war involves jets, rockets, and artillery.
On a day, though, when the international media was gathered at the base near Gaza, General Gruber decided to show off a good old-fashioned tank. He charged the journalists with a tank, then hopped out and invited them to jump on-board.
Still, none of the show-and-tell was meant to detract from the sober message: the Jewish nation is never free of threat from enemies out to destroy them.
Raemer said of their Palestinian foes, “They have a saying: ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ And what this means, in other words, that ‘there will be no more Jews here. We will throw them into the sea.'”
Hilger noted, “So Israel must have a strong army. We’re surrounded with enemies all around us.”
Perhaps the chief difference between the US military and the Israeli military is the fact that the U.S. military has, for the past few years, fought far away from home – thousands of miles away. It can be difficult to know what they are fighting for. The Israeli military knows what they’re fighting for: their homes, and for their relatives’ lives, as well as Israel’s national existence.
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