Hamas’s attack on Israel since Saturday has shown to all the world what evil looks like.

This well-planned offensive—executed on a biblically mandated holy day that many Jews observe—was not a military operation. It was a multipronged terrorist attack against civilians, aimed to inflict as much arbitrary pain and torment as possible.

These crazed terrorists gunned down fleeing crowds, hunted down people in peaceful neighborhoods, ripped children from their parents’ arms, executed whole families, publicly raped and humiliated women, abducted hundreds of innocent people as hostages, and beheaded soldiers. Hamas threatened to begin broadcasting the executions of Israeli civilian hostages in response to any Israeli reprisals in Gaza.

Already they have killed over 900 Israelis. This in a nation with about 7 million Jews. Demographically, this is around 12 times worse than 9/11 was for America (fewer than 3,000 deaths in a nation of nearly 300 million).

There is much to be said about this catastrophe: about the intelligence failures that enabled Hamas to catch Israel unawares; about the role Iran played in the attack; about how the $6 billion the Biden administration just gave Iran undoubtedly aided this offensive; about the potential for this conflict to escalate into a broader war; about how it could lead to the fulfillment of major biblical prophecies. In the days and weeks ahead, the Trumpet will cover all these angles and more.

But for a moment we need to wrap our minds around the inhumanity and sheer evil being committed. The brutality, scale and coordination of this attack was shocking. And what we have seen so far could well be just the beginning.

Yet somehow there are great numbers of people—including, disgracefully, the regime media in America—with no moral compass, rushing to defend Hamas and to blame Israel.

Across the West’s big cities, people celebrated Hamas’s barbaric attack. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched through New York, London, Manchester, Edmonton, Berlin and many other cities. A kosher restaurant in London was attacked.

Several Harvard groups put out a statement saying that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for unfolding violence. Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison.” A professor at the London School of Economics tweeted, “Decolonization is not a metaphor. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

In truth, the Gaza Strip has been an incubator of terrorism ever since Israel unilaterally evacuated it in 2005. For two years, Hamas played coy and pretended to want peace. Reuters reported: “Hamas sought to convince Israel it cared more about ensuring that workers in Gaza, a narrow strip of land with more than 2 million residents, had access to jobs across the border and had no interest in starting a new war.” So the Israelis helped them, “believing that if they helped Gaza to prosper, there would be peace.” One spokesman told Reuters, “We believed that the fact that they were coming in to work and bringing money into Gaza would create a certain level of calm. We were wrong.”

We now know that as Hamas restrained its attacks for the last couple of years, lulling the Israelis into complacency, they were planning this past weekend’s attack, including construction of a mock Israeli settlement for practice.

Israel’s evacuation of Gaza has proved to be a disastrous experiment. Clearly, Israel cannot allow the status quo to remain; it must defend itself.

It has been said, accurately, that if Hamas stopped fighting, there would be peace—but that if Israel stopped fighting, it would cease to exist.

Yet the moment Israel struck back after Saturday’s invasion, the left-wing media were filled with commentary treating Hamas’s cruel targeting of innocents and Israel’s military response as morally equivalent. They spoke of Hamas as essentially being forced to defile and murder Jews because of Israel’s cruelty. As one man on msnbc said, given Israel’s provocations, “What other choice do [Hamas] have?”

cnn interviewed the head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, who called Israel’s response a “war crime.” “Don’t underestimate people’s desire for freedom, for ending the bondage and captivity,” he said. “Make sure that these supremacists in the Israeli government are not going to turn the whole thing upside down. … You know that [the Gazans] have under besiegement since 2007—the biggest open-air prison. This is what leads to [these] events.”

Amid all this coverage, there was at least one moment of clarity. Jonathan Greenblatt, ceo of the Anti-Defamation League, came onto msnbc to criticize the network’s coverage of the war. “I’ve got to ask, who’s writing the scripts?” he said. “The people who did this—they are not fighters … they are not militants …. They are terrorists. It is a barbarian who rapes and brutalizes women, who kills children in front of their parents and then brings them over to Gaza. … These were filmed gleefully by the barbarians who committed these grotesque crimes.”

As blood flows in Israel, perpetrated by hate-filled zealots intent on the extermination of Jews, we must recognize the presence of evil when we see it. The moral inversion on display in public discourse is a sign of deep spiritual sickness. As Proverbs 17:15 says, “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord.”

Pray for the people of Jerusalem. And keep watching this city, so central to end-time prophetic events.