“Everyone is in Danger”: Christians in Gaza Fear Effects of Israel-Hamas war

One of the less-discussed effects of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, which erupted October 7, is the threat to, and possible elimination of, Christian communities in Gaza and throughout the Holy Land

By Christopher Hart-Moynihan

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa (the tallest man in the back) together with other heads of Christian communities in the Holy Land: Syriac, Coptic, Anglican, Ethiopian, and Greek and Armenian Orthodox.

Though their numbers are small, Palestinian Christians constitute one of the oldest communities of Christians in the entire world. Of course, the communities of the early Church were centered in the Holy Land, where the apostles were from and where Jesus Christ carried out his ministry.

In the first century A.D., groups of Christians formed churches and communities in populated urban centers in and around the Holy Land: places such as Jerusalem, Tyre, Sidon, and Antioch. These communities maintained their direct connection to Christ and the apostles while the Christian faith also spread far and wide across the Roman Empire, largely due to the efforts of St. Paul, St. Peter, and other evangelizers.

The rise of Arab Muslim political power across the Middle East in the 7th century A.D. led to centuries of a slow decline for the region’s Christians. For the last millennium, the status of Middle Eastern Christians has remained precarious, oscillating between second-class citizenship and outright persecution. And while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, now almost a century old, has often been fought along ethnic and ideological rather than religious lines, it has also had the effect of further weakening and diminishing the already embattled communities of Palestinian Christians.

Father Gabriel Romanelli

Since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas on October 7, 2023, both Catholic and Orthodox Church leaders in the Holy Land have tried to strike a balance between making political statements and supporting suffering Christians. On February 7, during a phone call with Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pope Francis expressed his “constant care” for the Holy Family Catholic Parish in Gaza — the only Catholic parish in the Gaza Strip, which has housed and sheltered hundreds of displaced people since the outbreak of the war. According to Vatican News, “The Holy Father has been in contact with the parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, and the associate pastor, Father Youssef Assad, almost daily to inquire about the situation.”

Father Youssef Assad

Previously, Francis had condemned the killing of two women sheltering at the parish by an IDF sniper on December 16, saying that only families, nuns, and the disabled were sheltering at the church, and the Latin Patriarchate released a statement decrying the killing as “without warning” and “in cold blood.” The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, for its part, labeled the bombing of its St. Porphyrius Church “a war crime that cannot be ignored” in an October 19 statement. Both Catholic and Orthodox religious leaders have also made repeated calls for a ceasefire that have continued to go unheeded.

Over the course of the now four-month-old war, various sources have also been tracking Christian or Christian-affiliated sites bombed during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. One of the most tragic such occurrences was the destruction of the Greek Orthodox St. Porphyrius Church in Gaza City — Gaza’s oldest church. The church was bombed on October 19, on the 13th day of the war, killing at least 18 people. Israeli armed forces subsequently released a statement that the church was not the target of the attack.

The Qatar-based news service Al Jazeera recently quoted several Christians from Gaza as saying that they think the current war will be the death blow for their community in the Holy Land. Mitri Raheb, an Evangelical Lutheran pastor and founder of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, said it was conceivable that the current conflict would spell the end of its long history in this strip of land. “This community is under threat of extinction,” Raheb said. “I’m not sure if it will survive the Israeli bombing, and even if it survives, I think many will want to emigrate.”

“We know that within this generation, Christianity will cease to exist in Gaza,” he added.

Gaza was a hub of Christian missionary activity from the 4th century, when it grew in prominence due to its position astride several of the major trade routes of late antiquity. Like other port cities of the eastern Mediterranean such as Antioch (near modern-day Antakya, Turkey), Berytus (modern-day Beirut, Lebanon), and Alexandria (in modern-day Egypt), Gaza was a gate between East and West. In these cities, religious and cultural currents from the Greco-Roman world to the west, the older Babylonian and Persian world to the east, and the (possibly) even more ancient Egyptian civilization to the south met, clashed, and often harmonized in unpredictable ways. Gaza itself was located on the coastal road, known as the Derech Hayam in the Bible and as the Via Maris by the Romans. The port was a major center of the incense and spice trade and during the Christian period, Gaza, with its connection to the earliest years of Christianity, contributed a great deal to the development of Byzantine spirituality and monasticism.

In Acts 26, Philip baptizes an “court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians” near Gaza, along “the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, in his History of Martyrs in Palestine, writes in the early 4th century of Christians from Gaza dying in the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian alongside their bishop, Sylvanus.

According to University of Tennessee Professor of Religious Studies Christine Shepardson, Gaza itself was “a center of Greek learning,” to which Christianity spread after flourishing in the nearby port city of Maiuma: “In the early fifth century, the small Christian community of Gaza found a zealous leader in Bishop Porphyry, whose forceful efforts to Christianize the city are commemorated by the [now-destroyed] historical church building dedicated to his memory today.”

The descendants of these early communities are still present in the Holy Land today: most are Eastern Orthodox, following the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III. There are also Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Armenian Orthodox communities present among the Christians of the Holy Land. Prof. Shepardson explains that, following the Council of Chalcedon in 451, a division of Christians of the Near East took place: “Many of Roman Palestine’s neighbors in Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia rejected this council because they believed the Son of God had a single nature, at once human and divine. They are called ‘miaphysite’ Christians, which in Greek means ‘one nature.’ Most Christians of Roman Palestine, however, accepted the council and remained in the imperial church of Rome and Constantinople that centuries later, in 1054, divided into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Miaphysites, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics today all have churches in the land that was Roman Palestine.”

While the Christian presence is dwindling in Gaza, equally worrisome is the exodus of the larger community in the West Bank.

According to censuses taken in 2007 and 2017, respectively, there were 3,000 Christians living in Gaza, while 47,000 were residing in the West Bank (there are likely less than 1,000 Christians living in Gaza at present).

In addition to these, there are also Christian communities within Israel itself as well as within the kingdom of Jordan. Some estimates put the total number of Christians under the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem at 150,000. According to Raheb’s research, “Attacks on clergy and churches [have] quadrupled this year compared to last year.”

Raheb sees a January 26 attack on an Armenian bar in the Christian quarter of Jerusalem’s old city by Israeli settlers, during which the settlers shouted “Death to Arabs… Death to Christians,” and an attack several days later on Armenians leaving a memorial service in the Armenian Quarter during which settlers climbed the walls of the Armenian convent while trying to lower its flag (which displays a cross), along with several other prominent events, as indicators of a broader trend.

Perhaps the starkest statement on the circumstances Christians in the Holy Land are facing was made by a 31-year-old Christian from Gaza who spoke to Al Jazeera in the aftermath of the bombing of St. Porphyrius, a man who identified himself only as Fadi.

“This message is to Biden, the president of the United States,” Fadi said. “The Christian community in Gaza is being targeted. No one is safe and everyone is in danger. Everyone should move to stop this.”

For nearly 2,000 years…

The Christians left in Palestine and Israel are few in number but they belong to several different churches. The Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch both have a presence in the Holy Land, as well as the Roman Catholic Church.

Eusebius, writing in the early 300s, was not the only ancient source to take note of the Christian religious presence in Gaza. Toward the end of the 300s, a western Christian nun named Egeria wrote a journal of her travels to Christian sites in Egypt, Mount Sinai, Roman Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia. She described stopping to see the places of biblical events and receiving the blessing of Christian monks living in each region.

After 1948, when the state of Israel was established and 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in what they came to call the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” more Palestinian Christians joined the community on the coastal enclave.

Estimates have indicated that the number of Christians in Gaza dropped in recent years from the 3,000 registered in 2007, when Hamas assumed complete control of the strip, triggering Israel’s blockade and accelerating the departure of Christians from the poverty-stricken enclave. Now the community fears extinction.