The dilemma facing Gaza’s Christians

On a steamy August morning in 2019, I went to Sunday mass in Gaza City’s Church of the Holy Family. It’s a simple stone building, built in 1974, and shares a compound with a school attended by 500 children, not all of them Catholic. Today, in war time, it is a refuge for hundreds of displaced Gazans whose homes have been destroyed since the Hamas-Israel war began. 

As a Catholic who wrote a book about the Christians of the Middle East, and the danger they face of being eradicated, the mass was emotional for me. I have always been struck by the devotion Middle Eastern Christians, the most ancient of people, have to their faith. 

Hamas have been accused of making border crossings from Gaza increasingly difficult for Christians

Life before the war was already painful for Gaza’s Christians, whose roots to the country stretch back more than 2,000 years to the original followers of Christ. This is not the first Israeli war against Hamas they have experienced: the conflicts of 2008, 2012 and 2014 damaged infrastructure and shattered hope for any kind of peaceful existence. But the war of the last fourteen months, which has killed an estimated 46,000 people in Gaza, has made their daily routines unlivable. It is impossible for many to imagine leaving, even if they could.

Of the 47,000 Palestinian Christians that resided in Palestine before October 7, 98 percent lived in the West Bank, but a tiny fraction still live in the Gaza Strip, the poorest — and most desperate — part of Palestine.

The first man to preach in what is now the Gaza Strip was Philip, student of Paul the Apostle. Later, the religion would continue its spread in the region among Messianic Jews, Romans, and Greeks. 

In the fifth century, Gazan Christians were lead by Saint Porphyrius, the bishop of Gaza who led the conversion of the pagans — and their subsequent persecutions. His tomb now lies in the northeastern corner of the Church of St. Porphyrius, which is Greek Orthodox, also in Gaza City. The church has been attacked by Israeli forces numerous times in this war. Nevertheless, around 400 families still take refuge there. 

Ramez al-Souri was inside the compound on October 19, 2023 and lost his three small sons that day. “It was a direct targeting of the Church without discrimination between children, women and the elderly,” Ramez said. “There is no life now in Gaza after losing my children.”

For three decades, and most recently in 2019 and 2021, I spent my time with Gaza’s Christians speaking to priests, teachers, doctors, humanitarian aid workers, lawyers and students. Their stories revealed what it was like to live torn between Hamas and Israel’s repressive policies and blockade.

Blockaded by Israel, they could not go to Bethlehem, their spiritual home, for Christmas or Easter because the Israeli authorities (and sometimes Hamas) made it impossible for them to get permits. Since 1993, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have not been able to enter East Jerusalem without a permit, which is nearly impossible to obtain. 

Despite those massive obstacles, there was tremendous resilience and determination to remain rooted to their ancestral land. In Palestine, followers of Christ call themselves “living stones” in reference to a verse from Peter:

You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 

It reflects the fact that the Christians of Israel and Palestine are living artifacts from the time of Jesus. They are proof of a 2,000-year-long Christian history in the Holy Land that continues.

But the future facing Gazan Christians is now far from certain. Before October 7, two thirds of the population was under twenty-five, most of them highly educated. Despite the poverty, Gaza had one of the highest education rates in the Middle East, but many young people were unable to find work largely due to Israel and Egypt’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. A twenty-four-year old Christian I met after Mass that Sunday in 2019 outlined the main challenge facing young people: emigrate or die, describing the 60 percent unemployment rate among Gaza’s youth.

Today, in war time, general unemployment is closer to 80 percent, and many of the youth have been killed by Israeli air strikes. The universities and libraries are in rubble.

Their struggles are becoming ever more urgent: how to get water, food and electricity. The already tiny Christian community in Gaza is rapidly diminishing, with estimates of between 800 and 1,100 people left alive. Last summer, during a meeting with a delegation from Churches for Middle East Peace, (CMEP) Varsen Aghabekian Shahin, the Palestinian State minister for foreign affairs, said that since October 7, Israel has killed 3 percent of them. 

Hamas has been accused of making border crossings from Gaza increasingly difficult for Christians through invasive searches, and for pressuring Christians married to Muslims to convert to Islam. In the West Bank, it’s no easier. Mobs of extremist and often violent Jewish settlers, fueled by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansion policies, have attacked Christian homes and churches. The Christians of the Holy Land, despite their roots and tenacious faith, seem impossibly doomed.

At Holy Family Church, throughout November 2023, emergency committees were set up by parishioners to organize batteries, medical supplies, water, food and communication. Some families took their chances and fled to the South, towards Rafah, but many began gathering in the compound when their own houses were destroyed by bombs.

They believed that sheltering in a church would spare them. They were wrong. They crammed into the church with very little food and only one hour of electricity a day. On December 16, 2023, an Israeli tank fired at a Holy Family compound building where disabled residents were sheltering.  

On July 7, there was another IDF attack on the church, and four more worshippers died. The IDF claimed Hamas was manufacturing weapons in the compound. Meanwhile, others have died from lack of medical treatment. 

Gaza’s history is rich: on the road to Rafah from Gaza City, near the Neiserat refugee camp, lies Tell Umm El-’Amr, the Byzantine-era monastery of St. Hilarion, an ascetic monk who lived in Gaza and spent most of his life in prayer in the quiet and solitude of the desert.  

The monastery’s remains span more than four centuries, from the late Roman Empire to the Umayyad period. Once, five churches stood here, as well as baths, a crypt, a sanctuary. Now, it is a pile of scorched rocks, abandoned after an earthquake in the seventh century and only rediscovered by archaeologists in 1999, shortly before the second Palestinian intifada erupted. It is in dire need of preservation, being added to the World Monuments’ Fund’s watchlist in 2010. Now those rocks have also survived four Israeli wars against Hamas. Like nearly everything else in Gaza, it has been touched by this war. 

St. Hilarion was born in 291 CE. I wondered what his life must have been like, but I also thought of two gentle and elegant sisters, Margaret and Helen, whom I met one day in Gaza at mass at St. Porphryius, and spent time with. Like most Christians, the sisters’ ancestors had lived in Gaza for centuries, and they refused to emigrate. Before I left, they gave me presents: rosary beads, a statue of Our Lady, and a small bottle of holy water. Today, I can’t locate the sisters; I wonder if they are alive or dead. They will die in Gaza, if they haven’t already — that is certain — but their descendants might not.