What has happened lately in Gaza has been brought to light with clear words, surely agreed on with the pope, by Vatican secretary of state Pietro Parolin, in an interview with Tg2Post on July 18, when he said that “it is necessary” for Israel to “actually say what happened : whether it was truly a mistake, which can legitimately be doubted, or whether there was a desire to directly attack a Christian church, knowing how much Christians are a moderating force precisely within the setting of the Middle East and also in relations between Palestinians and Jews.”
In reality, the bomb that fell the previous day on the Catholic Church of the Holy Family in Gaza (see photo), which knocked down part of the roof and killed three and wounded ten of the 550 worshipers who daily took refuge there, is only the latest sign of a growing wave of rejection of the Christian presence in the Holy Land by a significant segment of Judaism, with its fanatical parties and ministers, its settlers rampaging in the occupied territories, its soldiers intolerant of orders. It is that messianic extremism which Benjamin Netanyahu’s government supports in its acts and which makes any political solution to the war unrealistic, that of two states, Israeli and Palestinian, and that of a single state with two peoples with equal rights.
At the Angelus the following Sunday, July 20, Pope Leo called by name the Christians killed : Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh, Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad, and Najwa Ibrahim Latif Abu Daoud, the latter a young Gaza correspondent for L’Osservatore Romano. And to “our beloved Middle Eastern Christians,” he said, “thank you for your witness of faith,” or in other words, for their martyrdom.
But Leo also spoke unequivocally against the “forced displacement of the population,” which is what extremist Jews want for their fellow Palestinians, perhaps toward surreal destinations recently identified in Libya, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.
Of course, the bombing of the Church of the Holy Family, the only little Catholic enclave in the Gaza Strip, forced intervention at the highest levels. Donald Trump took action, and the next day Netanyahu personally telephoned Leo XIV to express his regret. In an hour-long conversation, first reported by the Holy See, the pope reiterated “the urgent need to protect places of worship and, especially, the faithful and all people in Palestine and Israel.”
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas also telephoned the pope on the morning of Monday, July 21, and during their conversation, the pope once again reiterated his appeal against “the indiscriminate use of force and of the forced transfer of the population.”
The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, promptly went to Gaza with Greek Orthodox patriarch Theophilos III, and received a phone call from Pope Leo just as he was stuck at the entrance to the city awaiting clearance from Israeli command. He was followed by trucks carrying tons of food and medicine, which however had to wait days before entering to distribute the aid : “not only to Christians, but to all those in need,” Pizzaballa emphasized during his three-day visit to the Strip, for the third time in a few months.
In reality, a year and a half ago the Church of the Holy Family had already had its victims. It was December 16, 2023, when an Israeli army sniper – back then too this was said to have been a mistake, with the announcement of an investigation that never reached a conclusion – killed two Christian women and wounded seven others on the short route between the church and the convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa.
But what matters most is that the bombing of the church in Gaza is only the latest act in an increasingly aggressive erosion of the Christian presence in the Holy Land, within that much broader “massacre of the innocents”– “pointless and unjustifiable,” practiced by Israel but even before that by Hamas – of which Pope Leo incessantly invokes an end.
A prime example of this erosion is what is happening in Taybeh, the ancient village traditionally identified with the one called “Ephraim” in the Gospel of John (11:54), where Jesus is said to have withdrawn before his last Passover.
Taybeh, not far from Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian territories, is today the last village in the West Bank entirely inhabited by Christians, 1,500 in all, 600 of whom are Catholic.
But the ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers surrounding it are ever more intolerant of this presence, wrongful in their view. They want an Israel purified “from river to sea,” from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, of every Palestinian presence, whether Muslim or Christian. And they systematically harass the villagers, without any restraint on the part of the Israeli army.
On July 7, after days of escalating violence, some settlers set fire to the ancient 5th-century Church of St. George and the nearby cemetery. The village’s Latin parish priest, Bashar Fawadleh, recounts : “More than twenty young people rushed to the scene with me and managed to put out the fire, while the attackers stood by and watched. They also blocked the roads with their cars, preventing us from using them, while the main roads leading into and out of Taybeh remained blocked by army checkpoints.”
On July 14, the patriarchs and heads of the Churches of Jerusalem, including Cardinal Pizzaballa, visited the site and subsequently issued a stern joint declaration. It reads in part :
“In recent months, the radicals have led their cattle to graze on the farms of Christians on the east side of Taybeh — the agricultural area — rendering them inaccessible at best but at worst damaging the olive groves that families depend on. Last month, several homes were attacked by these radicals, lighting fires and erecting a billboard that said, translated into English, ‘there is no future for you here.’
“The Church has had a faithful presence in this region for nearly 2,000 years. We firmly reject this message of exclusion and reaffirm our commitment to a Holy Land that is a mosaic of different faiths, living peacefully together in dignity and safety.”
But the violence didn’t stop. On June 17, some Jewish settlers took their cows to graze among the scorched ruins of the Church of St. George, a clear insult to the sacred nature of the site.
Even the United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, long known for his ardent support of Jewish settlers, condemned the violence against Taybeh as “terrorist,” and on July 19 he went to the town, also following the killing in a nearby place of a young Palestinian with American citizenship, and visited an evangelical community that is also under attack.
But what is causing the strongest alarm throughout the world and in particular at the top of the Catholic Church is the daily “barbarity” that every day mows down the lives of dozens of Gaza inhabitants who flock to the food distribution centers of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, with American contractors and Israeli soldiers opening fire on them, with subsequent justifications never once seriously verified.
Cardinal Pizzaballa, too, has seen with his own eyes and denounced the widespread famine starving the population of Gaza, unequivocally intended by the Israeli authorities. But he also took care to clarify, in an interview with Vatican News, that “we have nothing against the Jewish world and we absolutely do not want to appear to be against Israeli society and Judaism, but we have the moral duty to express with absolute clarity and frankness our criticism of the policy that this government is adopting in Gaza.”
And as for the future of this starving and bombed population, Pizzaballa said that “some will leave, but the majority will stay there.” And alluding to the idea that Trump floated : “There will be no Rivieras in Gaza.”
Certainly, Palestinian Christians have long been clearly on the decline in Gaza and the West Bank. But not within the borders of the State of Israel, from which even the more than 2 million Arab Muslim citizens show no signs of wanting to emigrate.
The future political solution to the war in the Holy Land appears today as a utopia, but it cannot be other than this : a single state for two peoples and three religions, within the borders of what was originally the “Palestine British Mandate.”
It is the solution that is also being silently cultivated at the Vatican, for one who carefully reads La Civiltà Cattolica and the latest thorough articles by the Jesuit David Neuhaus, a Jew and citizen of Israel.”
(Translated by Matthew Sherry : traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
