The Gaza Strip's only Catholic church held a solemn Easter service Sunday for the hundreds of Palestinian Christians who have taken shelter in the compound since the war began nearly six months ago.
The Church of the Holy Family is located in Gaza City, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. The area has been under the heaviest Israeli shelling since October, and a world authority on food security says full-scale famine is imminent.
Families sheltering in churches have been “desperately surviving” for months with limited food and “nearly non-existent” medical supplies, as many in northern Gaza, including Muslims, celebrate the holy month of Ramadan. Like all Palestinians, the priest said. Davide Meri, Prime Minister of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. “This is a great holiday for all of us,” he said.
Father Gabriel Romanelli, a priest from Holy Family Parish, was in Bethlehem when the war began on October 7, but Israeli authorities have repeatedly denied him permission to return to Gaza, Father Meri said.
Father Meri said more than 500 people had taken refuge in the Church of the Holy Family, and about 300 others in the nearby historic St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church. Together, they make up the majority of Gaza's small and close-knit Christian population, he added.
Both churches have been attacked during the war. In October, an Israeli airstrike killed 18 people at St. Porphyrius Church, according to the Jerusalem Orthodox Patriarchate, which condemned the attack as a war crime. The Israeli military later announced it was targeting nearby buildings.
According to Jerusalem's Latin Patriarchate, an Israeli military sniper killed a mother and daughter on the church grounds at the Church of the Holy Family in December and wounded seven others who rushed to their aid. Earlier in the day, Israeli military rockets also hit a monastery on the grounds, destroying the building's only generator and killing some of the dozens of disabled people living there, church officials said. He was reportedly left without the ventilator he needed to survive.
The Israeli military denied knowledge of the incident, and Pope Francis condemned it as an attack on a church where “there are no terrorists, but families, children, people with illnesses and disabilities, and sisters.” He called for an immediate ceasefire in his Easter speech on Sunday.
