Sami el-Yousef, a layman in charge of the general administration of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem (PLJ), is well acquainted with the “vulnerable but courageous” devout Catholics of the Gaza Strip, where the impact of more than a year of Israeli bombardment “has been devastating, to say the least.”
UN and World Bank reports point to almost 45,000 dead (70 percent of them women and children) and more than 100,000 injured; at least 100 percent of the 2.3 million inhabitants living in poverty and 90 percent displaced; more than 1.8 million facing extreme hunger; the destruction of 85 percent of schools and more than 30 hospitals.
Israel’s conduct of the war “is consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” including “the massacre of civilians and the use of hunger as a weapon,” a special United Nations commission has attested. This assessment followed another by Human Rights Watch, which described the mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza as “part of a deliberate and systematic campaign that amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
“The situation is catastrophic from any angle,” emphasizes the executive director of the PLJ’s administrative sector. Regarding the Christian community, he reveals that it is now “reduced to around 650 people, with around 100 Catholics and the rest Greek Orthodox. At the start of the war, there were 1,017. Approximately 25-30 percent of Christians emigrated when the borders with Egypt were open.”
The Christian community has taken refuge in two temples, in particular the Holy Family Catholic Church, which “has done more than it can to meet basic needs on a daily basis,” says Yousef. The Catholics of Gaza, “took up leadership positions, directing their institutions in the fields of education, health and social services, which benefited hundreds of thousands of inhabitants every year.”
Christians, says Yousef, “have always been able to practice their faith freely,” whether in the parish of the Holy Family or in the Greek-Orthodox church of St. Porphyrios-the third oldest in the world (dating back to 425 AD)-neither of which have been spared by Israel, despite being sanctuaries of refuge.
“UNSPEAKABLE DESTRUCTION”
The “unspeakable destruction” in Gaza has not interrupted the daily celebration of Mass, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, or the various pastoral activities at the Holy Family Church, which reassures Sami el-Yousef.
At the moment, there are three Catholic priests living in the parish. There are also two religious congregations: the Sisters of the Institute of the Incarnate Word and the Missionaries of Charity (of Mother Teresa). The latter runs two homes for disabled people. A third organization supports children suffering from epidermolysis bullosa, a rare and incurable genetic condition caused by inbreeding (marriages between blood relatives are common in Palestine). Caritas also helps the sick and the poorest, not just Christians. The Catholic community also runs three elementary schools, mostly attended by Muslims.
FRANCIS AND GABRIEL
These are projects at risk after the Israeli army handed out evacuation orders to Caritas and the St. Thomas Aquinas Centre for Youth formation in November. “We don’t want to leave our parish,” Fr. Gabriel Romanelli, an Argentinian missionary and parish priest of Holy Family in the Gaza Strip, told L’Osservatore Romano.
“The community has been notified that our area is a red zone. Our families don’t want to leave. Why should we? None of us are involved in the conflict. What will our Christians in the south do, crammed in with two million other displaced people living in tents?”
It is to ensure that “the faithful are not alone or forgotten,” emphasizes Yousef, that “every day at 8pm” Pope Francis calls Romanelli, his compatriot, with whom he speaks in Porteño, the dialect of Buenos Aires, where they were both born. “Although brief, these calls are a daily reminder that the Pope is praying for the parish, to encourage and give strength to the community, and certainly to the religious.”
Fr. Romanelli had gone to Bethlehem to buy medicine when Hamas attacked southern Israel in 2023. He risked returning to the parish on May 16 last year, expressing relief and pain at the reception. “It’s hard to explain my feelings, because I’ve been a missionary in Gaza for twenty years and now, when I’ve finally been able to return, many of my fellow citizens are no longer here,” he told the Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) foundation.
“Life in Gaza has never been peaceful,” says Romanelli. “They say the war started on 7 October, but we’ve always lived in a climate of war. Of course, not as tragic as the one we’re suffering now, but in Gaza living with sirens and explosions has been routine. […] Let me be clear: being born in Gaza cannot be considered a crime.”
Romanelli divides Gaza’s Christians into three groups. The first has always lived in this enclave occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. They are wealthy people, linked to commerce and various professional classes, most of whom have emigrated. The latter are refugees from the 1948 war, from Jerusalem, Jaffa and present-day Ashkelon. Several of them managed to prosper “despite having arrived here with only a suitcase in their hands.”
It was the Catholic mission that helped them integrate: in 2023, there were only eleven families left living in the so-called “Christian neighborhood” where Caritas operates. Some of these refugees “were born in the church or in the courtyard opposite.”
The third group entered Gaza in 1993, after the Oslo Accords, when PLO leader Yasser Arafat appointed Christian figures to administer the territory. Many of these leaders, who were loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor, were sacked by Hamas and, although the Palestinian Authority continues to pay their salaries, “they represent the weakest segment of the Christian community.”
If “the social status of Christians is still slightly better” than that of the rest of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, this “is mainly due to an effective Catholic aid network,” Romanelli emphasizes. In 2023, for example, a “truly ecumenical” Church had more than ten ambulances equipped by Caritas-an organization that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, “treated more patients than the local Ministry of Health.”
IT’S TOUGH BEING A MINORITY
The priority is to continue supporting the Christian refugees in their two churches. Catholics “share what they have with their Orthodox brothers and sisters and we shouldn’t underestimate this, because the aid includes water, food, medicines and other essentials,” emphasizes the PLJ administrator. “The latest shipment included 80 tons of food, mainly fruit and vegetables (a precious commodity in Gaza) and non-perishable goods. With just one shipment we were able to support 7,000 families, or around 50,000 people.”
“We also continue pastoral and faith formation activities,” rejoices Sami el-Yousef. “We have enrolled children in a special education program since all the schools have been closed for over a year. When the war ends, we will assess the needs and draw up programs to help our Christian community, particularly regarding education, health, housing, job creation and psychological help.”
“Nobody expected this war to last so long and expand to include Lebanon and Iran,” confesses Yousef. “And nobody expected it to be so destructive. The Palestinians can’t defend themselves. The world needs to hold Israel, which has so far gone totally unpunished, accountable on the basis of international humanitarian laws and standards. The world must stop sending weapons to this region. Anything less is empty talk.”
Unlike many Palestinians, Sami el-Yousef, who belongs to one of the thirteen Christian families with a continuous presence in Jerusalem for centuries, is not afraid of the return to power of Donald Trump in the United States of America, supported by self-proclaimed “Zionist evangelicals,” defenders of Israel’s most extremist government. “I hope that the new administration will work for a just peace solution,” he commented. “Otherwise it will be the end of the Palestinian cause, and the Christian presence in the Holy Land will be the first victim.”
In a message addressed to Europeans and Americans, via L’Osservatore Romano, Fr. Romanelli asks them to understand “the religious dimension” in Gaza and the West Bank, “where even atheists believe.”
Recalling a time when “convinced communists were fervent Christians,” he said: “I don’t know if the Islamization of [Palestinian] society occurred by convention or by imposition, but I do know that radicalization is fed by the injustice of living conditions.”
Territory controlled by the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamic and Ottoman empires, and which, in 1948, under Egyptian rule, “served as the seat of a [very brief] government for the whole of Palestine-the first and only one in history”, Gaza was a Marxist bastion until the emergence of Hamas, a group encouraged by Israeli military governors in the 1970s and 1980s to serve as a counterweight to the PLO.
“Being a minority is tough anywhere, but being a minority in the Middle East is even tougher,” Romanelli emphasized. “The majority around us is not hostile, but ignores our existence. Our parish owes its name to the Holy Family, because in Gaza Jesus, Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt. We too are fleeing today-from fear, from oppression.”
