Thoughts on the Developing Gaza Tragedy

As I write my sermon this Sunday, loosely titled "What doesn't make sense to me any more" (though it should be a bit more hopeful than that), I see a lot of material coming through the press about the Israeli attacks on Gaza. So far anyway, it looks like these are the basic facts of the situation as of Tuesday afternoon:

1. Some Gaza residents (presumably Hamas) fired a series of home made rockets into Israeli territory.
   
2. Within a day, the Israeli Defense Forces (the IDF) launched a series of air strikes on a variety of Gaza targets in highly populated areas.
3. Since the IDF air strikes, Gazan residents have increased the number and range of their homemade rockets into southern Israel.
4. A lot of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed including dozens of children as a result of air strikes. Several Israeli citizens have been killed in southern Israel as a result of home made rockets. The ratio of deaths appears to be somewhere between 40 and 100 to 1, depending on whether your sources of information are American or International.
5. Israel seems to be massing ground forces around the Israeli-Gaza border.
   

I've written my views on these events here.