Israel escalated its “Operation Cast Lead” on Thursday with the killing of senior Hamas leader Nizar Rayan—the most senior Islamist killed by Israel since 2004. Rayan, his four wives and nine of his children were killed in an air strike that many Palestinians considered “a severe blow.”

Vowing to avenge his death, Hamas declared Friday a “day of wrath” against Israel and also threatened to resume suicide operations against the Jewish state. “After the last crime, all options are open to counter this aggression, including martyr operations against Zionist targets everywhere,” Hamas official Ismail Radwan said. Crowds of protesters amassed on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas fired several rockets into densely populated areas, and soldiers gathered along the Gaza border voicing their eagerness to fight. In East Jerusalem, dozens of youths threw stones at security forces.

The escalation of violence further supports what Stephen Flurry wrote in his column on Friday—that Hamas, not Israel, possesses the will to win this war.

Meanwhile, even as Israeli soldiers advanced into the Gaza Strip yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel is “not interested in conducting a long war.”

“Even as it pursued its bombing campaign, Israel kept the way open for intense efforts by leaders in the Middle East and Europe to arrange a cease-fire,” the Washington Times reported.

Is Hezbollah About to Join the Fight?

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned his people that Israel would likely have to bear a “heavy price” for its campaign against Hamas.

Then he made another remark that should deeply concern Israelis.

“We hope that the northern front will remain calm, but we are prepared for any possibility,” Barak said.

The idea that Hezbollah might come to the aid of Hamas by opening a second front has substance, says Stratfor. Plenty of evidence proves that Hamas and Hezbollah have vast connections beyond their quest to destroy Israel. Even now, according to a Stratfor source connected to Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored, highly trained terrorist group has 150 military advisers and fighters leading Hamas fighters against Israel Defense Forces in Gaza City.

“The fear,” the Jerusalem Post reported yesterday, “is that Hezbollah will take advantage of Israel’s preoccupation in Gaza to carry out a retaliatory attack.”

The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Saeed Jalili arrived in Syria yesterday to discuss the Gaza war. “Jalili said Iran and Hezbollah had reached an agreement under which the Lebanese group would launch rockets into Israel if the idf began a ground operation in Gaza,” the Post wrote (emphasis ours throughout).

Reports of Iranian officials meeting with Hezbollah to discuss conditions in Gaza and express solidarity with Hamas are not the slightest bit surprising. Tehran is Israel’s number-one enemy and greatest threat. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian proxies, instruments of Iran’s foreign policy and even its military policy. As Yossi Klein and Michael B. Oren wrote in today’s Los Angeles Times, “Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, is a proxy for the real enemy Israel is confronting: Iran.”

Iran is central to the current Gaza conflict—be it through its channeling weapons into Gaza via tunnels from Egypt, bankrolling Hamas, training Hamas terrorists, or providing political legitimacy to Hamas politicians.

Watch for evidence to emerge in the time ahead that the war with Hamas in Gaza and that with Hezbollah (should it occur) are being heavily influenced, if not planned and directed, by the mullahs in Iran.

More From the L.A. Times

Note these comments from the L.A. Times regarding Iran’s spreading influence in the region—a trend we have closely monitored for years:

The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s ended with Iranian troops occupying Iraqi territory. Iranian influence then spread to Saudi Arabia’s heavily Shiite and oil-rich Eastern province, and to Lebanon through Hezbollah. Since the fall of their long-standing enemy, Saddam Hussein, Iranians have deeply infiltrated Iraq. Syria has been drawn into Iran’s sphere, and even the Sunni sheikdoms of the gulf now defer to Iran, dispatching foreign ministers to Tehran and defying international sanctions against it. Iran has co-opted Hamas, a Sunni organization closely linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a jihad against the Jewish state. But Iran’s boldest achievement has been to thwart world pressure and approach the nuclear threshold. Once fortified with nuclear weapons, Iranian hegemony in the Middle East would be complete.All of which helps explain the public statements from moderate Arab leaders, such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, who have blamed the end of the tenuous Israel-Hamas cease-fire on Hamas. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit has even called on the Arab world to stop using the UN as a forum for blaming Israel alone for the fighting, surely a first. Those leaders understand what many in the West have yet to grasp: The Middle East conflict is no longer just about creating a Palestinian state but about preventing the region’s takeover by radical Islam.

That is what is really at stake in the war against Hamas. It is part of a broader, multifront offensive Iran is waging in the region. Read The King of the South to put that trend in its prophetic context.

One more bit of news this weekend on this story:

Iraq to Iran: Please Help

Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, spent this weekend in Iran meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He claims his country’s relationship with Iran is developing in a number of ways. Agence France-Presse reports,

“The exchange of high ranking visits between the two country’s officials shows that the bilateral relations are developing in different areas,” Maliki said ….In the meeting, Ahmadinejad prioritized “regional cooperation to establish security in the region,” state television website reported.”Our Islamic and humane duty requires that we always stand by the Iraqi nation,” he was quoted as saying.The Iranian president also said that the two countries can “rapidly boost relations and bilateral trade with the wisdom and will of their leaders.”

Ministers of commerce, power and transportation from the two countries discussed increasing cooperation and trade. Maliki urged the Iranians to increase their investment in his country.

America’s role in Iraq has always been understood as temporary. Eventually the U.S. will leave—and recent developments suggest it will be quite soon. Iran, on the other hand, is a neighbor Iraq must come to grips with. In many ways, the acquiescence of Iraq to greater Iranian influence became an inevitability the day the U.S. removed Saddam Hussein from power.

Read our articles “Is Iraq About to Fall to Iran?” and “When America Leaves Iraq …” to see what we have said about how Iran’s growing influence fulfills a crucial biblical prophecy.

Remembering Samuel Huntington

Just before Israel’s invasion of Gaza, on December 24, one of the greatest international relations experts died. The theories of Samuel Huntington, the man who popularized the phrase “clash of civilizations,” are especially relevant as Israel battles the radical Islamic group Hamas.

The Western elite believe that people everywhere just want Western-style living and freedoms. “The great majority of Palestinian people, they just want a better life,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once said. “This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that’s what people are going to do.”

This view, argued Huntington, is completely wrong. He said that cultural identity is more important than economic status. He predicted that power would organize along cultural lines. “The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic,” Huntington wrote. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”

Mark Steyn puts Huntington’s theories in the context of the Gaza war. He too argues that Dr. Rice is wrong.

Of course, there are plenty of Palestinians like the ones the secretary of state described: You meet them living as doctors and lawyers in Los Angeles and Montreal and Geneva … but not, on the whole, in Gaza. In Gaza, they don’t vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it’s to get Junior into the Saudi-funded, Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity. In 2007, as part of their attempt to recover Gaza from Hamas, Fatah seized 1,000 Qassam rockets at the university, as well as seven Iranian military trainers.At a certain unspoken level, we understand that the Huntington thesis is right, and the Rice view is wishful thinking. After all, when French President Sarkozy and other European critics bemoan Israel’s “disproportionate” response, what really are they saying? That they expect better from the despised Jews than from Hamas. That they regard Israel as a Western society bound by civilized norms, whereas any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of “desperation.”

Steyn gives the example of Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman who “received considerate and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, returned to that same hospital packed with explosives in order to blow herself up and kill the doctors and nurses who restored her to health,” as he wrote. “Well, what do you expect? It’s ‘desperation’ born of ‘poverty’ and ‘occupation.’ If it was, it would be easy to fix. But what if it’s not? What if it’s about something more primal than land borders and economic aid?”

As Israel marches into Gaza, even the women are promising to blow themselves up, to kill the Jewish “apes and pigs.” To believe that what is motivating them is a desire for a Western standard of living is ridiculous. This is a full-on clash of civilizations.

Huntington said, “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural”—and so we see this happening. More specifically, these conflicts are shaping up along religious fault lines. Israel is battling the great king of radical Islam. A Catholic cultural bloc is rising in Europe. As these two powers rise, they move toward a massive conflict between them. For more information, see our article “The Last Crusade.”

Vatican Vs. White House

The relationship between the Vatican and the United States is bound to be tested in the time ahead. The Washington Post reports on a set of controversial issues sure to create some friction when the new American president comes to town. President-elect Barack Obama’s “support for abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research has drawn denunciations from a number of church leaders,” it said.

Of most urgent concern to the church is clearly the Freedom of Choice Act, a proposed bill that would overturn a host of restrictions on abortion. Critics say the proposal would eliminate so-called conscience exemptions for publicly funded health-care facilities, thus forcing Catholic hospitals to provide abortions or shut their doors.

The Post suggests that the pope is presently subcontracting the job of pressuring Obama on these issues to American Catholic leaders, so he can be seen to be “above the fray.” Thus, the strongest denunciations seem to be coming from within America’s borders. The Post quoted Cardinal James Francis Stafford, former archbishop of Denver, who

said that Obama’s statements on abortion reflect “an agenda and vision that are aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.” (Stafford, who as head of a Vatican court is one of the highest-ranking Americans at the Holy See, noted that he spoke only on his own behalf.)

Based on biblical prophecy, we do expect a split to occur between European, Vatican-led Catholicism and that in the United States. The Vatican, beating back secularism on the Continent, holds a dim view of the kind of liberalism taking hold in the U.S. As we wrote after a round of priest scandals in the U.S. in 2002,

Already hated within many circles in Europe, America becomes victim of its own vices, which all the world can too readily see through the corrupting influence of American music, cinema and television. America’s case is not helped at all by the Supreme Court decision to strike down major sections of the 1996 Child Pornography Act.

Read the whole article to see how prophecy shows that this contempt for America within the halls of the Vatican is going to increase, and how it will eventually end.

Russia Shuts Off the Gas Again

For the second time in three years, the Kremlin has stopped pumping natural gas to Ukraine. Though Russia and Ukraine have promised that gas supplies to Europe will not be interrupted—and European states are fully stocked and better prepared to handle a drop in supplies—this crisis once again exposes Europe’s reliance on Russian energy and the Kremlin’s leverage over its Western neighbors.

Eighty percent of EU gas imports from Russia arrive via the pipelines dissecting Ukraine. The fear in European states is that with no gas coming from Russia, Ukraine will soon be forced to siphon gas headed for Western Europe to keep its pipelines pressurized and its homes warm. Last week Ukraine’s state energy firm Naftogaz warned that, should it get to the point where it has “no gas in its pipes, it would have to divert a daily volume of 21 million cubic meters bound for Europe to maintain pressure in the network.”

Russia threatening European energy supplies is a recurring theme of Russo-European relations. To learn more about the impact it will have on both Russia and Europe, read “Russia, Germany and Energy Politics” or “Russia: Triggering Europe to Unite.”

Russia’s Presidential Term Extended

Last Tuesday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a constitutional amendment extending Russia’s presidential term from four years to six. The change is the country’s first significant amendment to the post-Soviet constitution since 1993, and “many suspect [it] is intended to benefit his predecessor—and possible successor—Prime Minister Vladimir Putin,” wrote the Washington Post.

Medvedev gave final approval to the measure after a hurried legislative drive that lasted less than two months, ignoring complaints by the opposition that parliament is legally required to wait a year before ratifying any change to the constitution.

Putin immediately endorsed the plan, though he previously claimed to be opposed to it.

The chairman of one of the main democratic opposition parties, Sergei Mitrokhin, said, “Unfortunately, it is impossible for us to appeal to a constitutional court. We can only say that this process reduces both the legitimacy of this amendment and the legitimacy of the next president.”

After serving two terms as president, Putin stepped aside this year because he was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term. He engineered the election of his protege, Medvedev, who then appointed him prime minister. With Russia facing its worst economic crisis in a decade, though, analysts say Putin may have concluded he would be better shielded from rising public discontent if Medvedev resigned and allowed him to return to the presidency for a new six-year term.

In November 2007, we forecasted that Putin would either change the constitution to extend the presidential term or assume the position of prime minister. Now it appears he has done both.

In November of this year we wrote,

Putin has marshaled the return of Russia to great-power status, and he is not about to become hands-off. Under Vladimir Putin’s leadership—whatever his title—we are witnessing a historic transformation take place before our eyes.Bible prophecy shows that Russia’s resurgence will be a catalyst for the emergence of a unified European superstate—and subsequently contribute to an enormously destructive world war.

Elsewhere on the Web

While Israeli military planners and troops are implementing offensive strategies in Gaza, another ground invasion is taking place in New England. Homosexuals are mobilizing a specific, methodical plan of attack to make homosexual “marriage” legal, first establishing a beachhead in New England—spreading out from Connecticut and Massachusetts, then advancing on the nation as a whole. “We can make New England a marriage-equality zone by strategically combining existing legal, electoral and on-the-ground know-how to fast-track marriage in every New England state,” Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders Executive Director Lee Swislow said in this Washington Times report. “By 2012, we not only can have marriage equality throughout New England, we can have a road map for the rest of the country.”

The European Union sent a diplomatic delegation to the Middle East today. It is always worth keeping your eyes on how Europe handles its business in that region because of its role in prophecy. Read “The Counterfeit Peacemaker” for more.

And Finally …

Want to know just how hard Israel works at keeping Palestinian civilian casualties to a minimum? The Associated Press recently reported that “thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.”

That’s right. The Israel Defense Forces are notifying the occupants of buildings it plans to bomb to give them time to flee. Haaretz reports,

The idf has made frequent use of what is known as “knocking on the roof”: Militants are warned by phone when a residential building used to store arms will be bombed, and told to vacate the premises together with their neighbors. The weapons caches are hit only after the residents leave.Hamas has tried placing civilians on the roofs of such buildings when the phone call warning comes in. In these cases, the idf fired antitank missiles near the building, and in a few cases the residents left.

Read columnist Charles Krauthammer’s piece from Friday about this reality.

Remarkable that the international community still chooses to side with Hamas and condemn Israel for using “disproportionate and excessive” force.