The West Asian War and its Biblical Implication

Tanuj Goswami

(tanujuri03@gmail.com)

The West Asian war has meanwhile passed more than six months and holds the centre stage that is fated to escalate to wider areas of the Middle East. The raging conflicts have opened up and created furor elsewhere beyond West Asia, unfolding deeper analysis on diverse aspects like terrorism, human catastrophes, non-state actors, rules of war, and above all, the role of the United Nations as the mediator for world peace and the co-existence of nations. The UN has unabashedly failed at this stage of the game to pull strings, at least to bring a semblance of a truce or cessation of hostilities.

Israel has to face multiple fronts of attacks at a time with no signs of de-escalation or ceasefire as yet. Marathon efforts for a truce brokered by the US administration, and some Arab nations failed to inch forward. The hard stand taken by both the Hamas leaders and the Israeli Cabinet has been a stumbling block; none-the-less, Israel’s vow to eliminate the last of the Hamas operatives is yet to be achieved.

Rafa, the border town near Egypt, shelters two of the Hamas battalions, as per an Israeli intelligence report, where they have been active enough and refused to surrender. Again Some Hamas operatives have regrouped and re-entered the devastated Southern Gaza region and started to challenge and fire on Israeli troops, causing causalities and more hostilities. Israel has meanwhile drawn up plans to start its final military operation there at Rafa despite strong US opposition not to undertake the mission, which is feared to be bloodier. However, the Israelis are firm in their stand to complete their unfinished job of crushing the Hamas for the security of Israel and to enable a civilian administration to reign over Palestine.

The whole of the Middle East is alarmed as the situation is critically grim, threatening the region to be a major flashpoint of death and destruction with the unrestrained application of precision-guided ballistic missiles, drones with high-intensity explosives, UAVs, and some modern weaponry never used at warfronts before.

However, Iran’s first direct lethal attack on Israeli soil is unprecedented both in terms of scale and precision, most of which were directed towards Israeli military bases, human settlements, air ports, power centres, water pumps, and vital public installations.

Luckily, Israel’s iron dome worked wonderfully beyond expectations in foiling the Iranian ballistic missiles and drone attacks. Though the attempts failed to hit the pinpointed places, their accuracy has caused quite a reverberation and worries in political and military circles in Israel. Israel possesses the most modern and unmatchable air defence supremacy that no one can deny. 

The crux of the conflict was a sudden, gruesome attack by the Hamas on innocent Jewish people in an Israeli-occupied border area that led to the brutal massacre of nearly 1200 men, women, elderly, and children and the kidnapping of 253 persons. The simultaneous and uninterrupted missile and drone assaults aimed at Israeli towns, cities, military bases, and vital installations were lethal enough to up the ante of any sensible person.

The IDF is forced to face the critical stage in the northern border with Hezbollah’s continuous missile attack on neighbouring cities of Israel, where nearly 200,000 people had to be evacuated, now living in hotels, government buildings, apartments, makeshift arrangements, etc. A beautiful, vibrant area of abundant fruits and vegetables is now abandoned and becoming a ‘ghost town’.

In the meantime, more than half of Hezbollah’s top leaders have been eliminated and destroyed by the Israeli air strikes deep inside Lebanon, along with their military hardware and huge stockpiles of ammunition supplied through Syria by Iran.

Further in Judea and Samaria of the West Bank in Israel, the Islamic terror groups working as Iranian proxies are up in arms and might erupt at any time as illegal arms sell and smuggling proliferate at Iran’s behest.

The Houthi terrorists Another Iranian proxy group in Yemen has been attacking foreign mercenary ships with ballistic missiles and drones, blocking the international trade route through the Red Sea and creating an adverse impact on world trade. The Houthis are demanding an immediate ceasefire by Israel and have protested its Gaza invasion vehemently. The joint counterattack on Houthis by the US, the UK, and some other nations has yet to result in the expected outcome.

Iran, a highly radicalised theocratic Shiite Muslim state, has long nurtured the abominable objective to annihilate and erase the Jewish State, an ally of the US, from the map of the Middle East.

Ironically, the venomous hatred and invasion of Jewish land and its people by assorted elements of the Middle East had a clear reference in the Book of Ezekiel, the author being Ezekiel himself, who was born in 623 BCE, an Israelite priest, a prophet, and the most venerated one in the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

The chapters 36 and 39 of Ezekiel mentioned a prophetic stage that is currently in play in Israel, as it is facing fierce attack from the northern sides. The gradual increase of an encircling group of arch enemies with extreme hostilities against a small but strong and resilient state called Israel—the land of God—will be resurrected and restored to its former glory.

Many Israeli leaders, military personnel, and common people retain their deep faith in Ezekiel’s prophetic writings that Israel will stay alive and all its enemies will be buried by the grace of God.

The massive tunnel networks in the Middle East dug to fight Israel and conceal arms, ammunition, and nuclear warheads for Israel’s annihilation will ultimately turn in reverse order, which is acutely metaphorical.