Israel has kicked off its heaviest push yet into Gaza City—after weeks of “shaping operations”—while also striking in Yemen and reportedly backing Druze fighters in southern Syria. At the same time, a ceremony beneath Jerusalem’s Old City—attended by Secretary of State Marco Rubio—lit up a very different front: history, faith, and narrative. Here’s the fast tour through what matters and why.

 The war just shifted gears

Over the last week Israel hammered Gaza City with air and artillery, flattening high-rises Hamas used as observation posts and command nodes. That was prelude. As of last night, IDF Merkava columns pushed in en masse with heavy air cover—what looks like the start of the full ground thrust many assumed began weeks ago.

What’s different now:

• Tempo: From pin-point raids to multi-brigade advances.

• Purpose: Clear and hold, not just attrit.

• Civilians: Israel had urged evacuations for weeks; Hamas intimidated and manipulated many into staying as human shields.

 “Shaping” is over. The main act just walked onstage.

Israel also continues long-arm strikes into Yemen to blunt Houthi launches and interdiction attempts—reminding everyone this conflict has regional plumbing.

A northern wrinkle: Druze in southern Syria

Multiple reports say Israel is arming and paying several thousand Druze fighters in Syria’s Suwayda region. The likely aims:

• carve a buffer against jihadi networks and Iranian proxies,

• stabilize Druze communities adjacent to the Golan, and

• pressure Damascus while U.S. political heat rises on the Assad regime.

If true, it’s classic Israeli realpolitik: empower local actors who can both hold terrain and deny sanctuaries to the worst people in the neighborhood.

 Hostages, threats, and hard truth

President Trump warned Hamas that using hostages as above-ground shields would mean “all bets are off.” Hamas has played the human shield card from day one, and as fighting tightens around Gaza City, the danger to the captives sadly increases, whether underground or in tents. Two sober realities:

1. Hamas won’t voluntarily release all hostages;

2. “Pressure camps” outside the PM’s residence don’t move Hamas—they help Hamas by showing internal Israeli division.

A miracle remains possible. Absent that, rescue and relentless pressure are the only paths that have ever worked on terror kidnappers.

 The “G-word” and how headlines get made

When a UN panel labeled Israel’s conduct “genocide,” many outlets headlined it as fait accompli: “Israel committing genocide in Gaza,” and only later added the “UN inquiry says” clause. That ordering isn’t accidental; it’s framing. The same pattern appears with the phrase “occupied Palestinian territory”—baked into the body names themselves, bias pre-installed.

A few counters you won’t see on those front pages:

• Population reality: Gaza’s population grew for years; Israel has sent in food and medicine even while fighting.

• 2005 withdrawal: Israel pulled out of Gaza entirely for nearly two decades.

• Military necessity vs. malice: Collapsing tunnels and neutralizing rooftop fire isn’t the same as targeting civilians as civilians.

No one should be casual about civilian harm. But precision and intent matter—and so does honest language.

 Under the Old City: a tunnel, a text, and a statement

While rockets and headlines flew, another story unfolded under Jerusalem. Secretary of State Marco Rubio joined Israeli leaders to inaugurate a newly opened pilgrimage tunnel linking the City of David to the Western Wall—an archaeological artery that strengthens the historical case for an ancient Jewish Jerusalem.

The press called the event “extremist” because the City of David organization is settlement-friendly. Watch the speeches and you’ll hear… basic statements about history, law, and God’s promises. Whether you agree the temple stood on today’s Temple Mount or nearer the Gihon Springs, the archaeology keeps saying the quiet part out loud: the Jews didn’t arrive in 1948.

 Stones don’t tweet, but they do testify.

 The Gaza map keeps changing

The IDF’s own sequencing shows a slow squeeze: Rafah sealed and cleared, buffer zones bulldozed, then methodical bites northward. The carve-outs will likely remain. When a terror army embeds in apartments and alleys, the land you can live on shrinks until your militants stop using it as a launchpad. That’s cruel math—but it’s Hamas’s math.

 Quick answers to common questions

• “Why doesn’t Israel just take Gaza in weeks?”
  Booby-trapped stairwells, IED belts, tunnel networks, and hostages make speed the enemy of success.

• “Cut Gaza’s internet already.”
  It’s a live intelligence hose. Israel harvests signals and patterns from the traffic. Turning it off cuts both ways.

• “Two-state solution?”
  The UN votes it like a spell. History says every concession to Hamas is treated as proof of weakness, not a path to peace.

• “Arabs in Israel?”
  Roughly one in five Israeli citizens is Arab—voting, serving, studying, and running businesses inside Israel proper.

What to watch next

1. Gaza City blocks: Expect grinding, building-to-building clearing with casualty spikes when tunnel nodes are found.

2. Northern front: More rocket trades with Hezbollah; keep an eye on Mount Hermon / Golan movements.

3. Damascus diplomacy: If Druze gains hold, watch for Assad-Israel rumblings about territory swaps and tacit understandings.

4. Jerusalem narrative: The tunnel opening is just the start—archaeology will keep undermining convenient modern myths.

Bottom line

• The kinetic phase in Gaza City has truly begun.

• The information war remains as vicious as the street fight.

• Under the streets, stones keep speaking—about covenant, continuity, and belonging.

• And for families of hostages and soldiers, the stakes aren’t theoretical; they’re mortal.

Pray for the captives. Pray for wisdom in Israel’s war cabinet. Pray for justice without vengeance, strength without cruelty, and an end state that keeps evil from regenerating.

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• If you want more deep dives, documentaries, and field reporting, you can support the work at chuckholton.com—and check out details for our Armenia tour next June (history, mountains, and yes, a little “safety third” adventure).

Wars rage in Israel and Ukraine; Russian drones probe NATO airspace; headlines churn. But there’s a deeper story we need to face right now: the assassination of Charlie Kirk—and the spiritual, cultural, and parental reckoning it’s triggering across America. It’s about what this moment is doing in our hearts, our homes, and our churches. And yes—it’s about how God can take what the enemy meant for evil and turn it toward good.

The Rot Beneath the Headlines

“I won’t repeat the shooter’s name. These homicidal narcissists don’t need more publicity.”

Authorities are probing whether extremist groups may have encouraged or helped the killer. I’ve covered Antifa and similar outfits for years; the appetite for political violence has been cultivated, trained, normalized. Even now, you can find groups posturing with rifles outside drag shows for kids—provocation wrapped in moral preening.

I’m a staunch Second Amendment guy. Disarming the law-abiding isn’t the answer. The answer is more sane, trained, moral citizens willing to protect their communities—and the courage to reject the false safety of making everyone more vulnerable.

As my friend Tim Miller said yesterday: “Stand up. Train up. Get prayed up.”

Parenting in an Age That Manufactures Meaninglessness

If we want to understand how a 22-year-old throws away his life to silence a speaker who advocates marriage, family, and the difference between men and women, we have to talk about the culture that formed him—and the homes that allowed it.

Three forces keep showing up:

1) Early, unsupervised screens

A computer in the bedroom at age 10 is not just “gaming.” It’s a portal. The stats on teen pornography exposure are brutal, and early exposure warps identity, intimacy, and moral imagination.

2) Addictive, isolating gaming

The WHO recognizes “gaming disorder” for a reason. Heavy gaming correlates with depression, anxiety, and disrupted sleep. Many of the most popular titles (think GTA) normalize virtual felonies and hyper-sexualized violence. They siphon off a young man’s God-given drive to build, conquer, and take real risks in the real world.

“We used to call it playing outside. Now the ‘adventure’ is a couch, a console, and an algorithm designed to keep you hooked.”

On a somber September 11—I went live to talk about something I wish I didn’t have to: the war we once fought “over there” is increasingly here, testing our communities, our churches, and our national character.

Two themes framed the conversation:

1. The date itself. Twenty-four years after 9/11, we remember the 3,000 lives taken and the millions changed forever. Terror reshaped policy, travel, and how we see risk. The ripple effects were enormous—wars abroad, costs at home, and a reshaped culture.

2. A country at a crossroads. When a prominent conservative Christian figure can be gunned down on an American campus in broad daylight (details still developing as authorities investigate), that should sober all of us. Half the nation mourns; too many on social media mock or celebrate. Whatever your politics, that’s a moral red flag.

Political violence isn’t hypothetical anymore. If we don’t face it and prepare—practically and spiritually—the chaos corroding our civilization will accelerate.

What’s really being attacked

The late Charlie Kirk often articulated the deeper conflict succinctly: a spiritual battle in which radical ideologies—Marxism and Islamism among them—seek to erode the American way of life that sprang from a Judeo-Christian worldview: family, local community, ordered liberty, public virtue, and the conviction that all people bear the image of God.

Why does that worldview cause such hatred? Consider five core claims of Christianity that run directly against the grain of anger-politics and power-religion:

1. The primacy of love.
   “Love the Lord your God… and your neighbor as yourself.” Love, forgiveness, reconciliation—even of enemies—cuts against our culture’s appetite for vengeance and perpetual outrage.

2. Inherent human dignity.
   Every person is made in God’s image (Gen. 1:27). That truth resists all dehumanization—of political opponents, of the unborn, of the elderly, of the foreigner. Tyrants and opportunists hate it because you can’t easily control people you’re required to treat as image-bearers.