Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians streamed across the Egypt/Gaza border on Wednesday. Hamas destroyed two thirds of the border wall that separates Egypt and Gaza. According to the Jerusalem Post:

UN personnel said they estimated the number of Palestinians who entered Egypt to be 350,000.Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced that he had ordered his troops to allow Palestinians to cross into Egypt because they were starving.Speaking at the Cairo International Book Fair, Mubarak told reporters that when Palestinians began breaking through the Gaza-Egypt border at Rafah by force, he told his men to let them in to buy food before escorting them out.

Later in the article, the Post discusses how Hamas tries to use incidents like this to get its way within Egypt:

Hamas appears to be applying pressure on Egypt, which has cooperated with Israel’s sanctions by keeping the Rafah border closed. By affecting public opinion in Egypt, scenes of privation in Gaza could force Egypt to ease the border closure, allowing the Hamas regime to relieve its isolation.An off-duty Hamas security officer who identified himself as Abdel Rahman, 29, said this was his first time out of Gaza. “I can smell the freedom,” he said. “We need no border after today.”

Other news sources added some interesting analysis of the situation. According to Stratfor:

In all likelihood, the border breach was coordinated on some level between Egypt and Hamas. In Egypt’s view, there was a need to illustrate the consequences of Israel leaving Gaza to rot, and to pressure Israel into negotiating a solution with Cairo to return the Palestinian territories to a state of relative normalcy.

Mubarak made little effort to stop people from crossing in and out of Egypt. “I told them to let them come in and eat and buy food and then return them later as long as they were not carrying weapons,” he told reporters. For the past few months, Egypt has been very uncooperative with Israel regarding the Gaza border. These recent events show just how quickly Egypt is becoming radicalized and growing in anti-Israelism. In fact, Egypt is growing ever closer to Iran—an incredibly worrying development in terms of Israel’s security.

There is another side to the situation that Reuters brings out in its analysis “Hamas Exposes Israeli Weakness in Gaza”:

Hamas has exposed Israel’s inability to rein in the Gaza Strip, proving it holds the power to blow open the border and turn a crippling Israeli blockade into a public relations nightmare for the Jewish state.Israel’s stated goal last week in tightening its cordon around Gaza … was to pressure Palestinian militants to halt rocket attacks that have sowed panic in southern Israel.But a global outcry forced Israel to ease the ban on fuel and aid shipments to the Islamist-run territory, and hours later Hamas militants blasted open the wall between Gaza and Egypt to let tens of thousands of Palestinians pour across.The lights are back on in Gaza City for now and Hamas’s leader-in-exile has vowed no let-up in the rocket salvoes.Danny Ayalon, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, said Israel had walked into a Hamas trap.”This was a resounding failure, a public relations disaster,” he said. “And we’ve lost deterrence for the next time.”

Israel’s surrender of the Gaza Strip to terrorists bent on the Jewish state’s destruction has been a disaster. In the short term, terror and violence will only get worse in this war-ravaged nation. To read more about the future of Israel and its capital, Jerusalem, read our booklet Jerusalem in Prophecy.