Two Christian leaders from the Holy Land spoke of calamitous humanitarian conditions in Gaza and Lebanon and of the deteriorating political and economic situation on the West Bank during a web conference sponsored by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association on Nov. 4.
Joseph Hazboun, CNEWA’s regional director in Jerusalem, described expanding anxieties and difficulties for the Christian Arab community on the West Bank and within Israel proper but added that nothing, of course, compared to the complete humanitarian breakdown being experienced in Gaza. “Going into the 14th month of the war in Gaza,” he said, “90 percent of the population has been displaced. Women, children, families had to move from their own homes and apartments, seeking what was announced as safe areas, which were not safe at all.”
Gaza’s infrastructure, including its hospitals and schools, has been seriously damaged or utterly destroyed, he said. The church sites of Gaza’s tiny Chrisitian community have not been spared, according to Mr. Hazboun; church compounds have been hit by missile strikes and the Holy Family and Rosary Sisters schools have been destroyed. In addition, “All of the universities in Gaza City, where our Christian youth used to go, were destroyed.”
Since Israeli settlers and troops withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas took control of the enclave in 2007, the Gaza Strip has been the site of fierce conflict between Israel Defense Forces and Hamas militants on multiple occasions, but nothing in the past compares to the scale of destruction experienced over the last year, he said.
“Unfortunately, [the devastation now] is way beyond any imagination,” Mr. Hazboun said. He described the I.D.F. campaign over Gaza, in its year-long retaliation for a terror raid on Israel in October 2023 that killed over 1,200 people, as “a systematic destruction of the infrastructure and what makes life possible in Gaza.”
Humanitarian aid, insufficient since the beginning of the war, has been essentially cut off to north Gaza. Aid deliveries into Gaza will become even more difficult now that the Israeli government terminated an agreement on Nov. 4 that allowed UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, to function in Gaza and the occupied territories. The U.N. agency is the primary aid provider in Gaza.
The small number of Christians who remain endure the same suffering as everyone else in north Gaza. “We are doing what we can to help them,” Mr. Hazboun said. He noted that about 70 percent of the homes of the Gaza Christians have been lost, adding that the figure could be an underestimate. He said because of the constant fighting, it has been impossible to get out into the community to assess current conditions.
Now the palpable fear is that a similar fate awaits Lebanon, already reeling from a stepped-up I.D.F. campaign against Hezbollah Shiite militants that has enveloped the south and resulted in the destruction of entire villages. The conflict in Lebanon began on Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah began missile and rocket attacks into northern Israel in support of Hamas militants in Gaza. In this latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Christian villages and mixed Shiite-Chrisitan communities in South Lebanon have been regularly targeted.
More than 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced from the conflict zone north of the Israeli border and from villages under attack in the Bekaa Valley and South Beirut. According to the United Nations, a quarter of Lebanon is now under Israeli military evacuation orders.
“We estimate that already 25 percent of buildings, residential buildings, schools, churches or mosques [in the south] have been wiped out,” said Michel Constantin, CNEWA’s regional director in Beirut. He estimates that “almost 90 percent of the people of the south have left.”
Many have found refuge in temporary shelters without electricity or heat as winter approaches.
“People are [living] on the street. People are without any capacity to sustain themselves [or] their family.”
“The level of destruction is increasing day after day,” he said. Christian and Shiite villages along the border have been obliterated, he said, and as the I.D.F. attacks continue, villages deeper inside Lebanon and sites across the country have been targeted.
For now, most Lebanese have rallied in support of the people displaced from the south, accepting them into their homes and communities. But Mr. Constantin worries what tensions might arise over the longer term as displaced Shiite families take up new residences in Sunni communities in the north.
Since the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah erupted last year, 3,002 people have been killed and 13,492 wounded in Lebanon, the Lebanese health ministry reports. Health officials say that a quarter of those killed so far in Lebanon were women and children.
In Israel, 72 people have been killed by Hezbollah attacks, including 30 soldiers, according to the prime minister's office. More than 60,000 people have been displaced from their homes.
After more than a year of war against Hamas in Gaza, more than 43,000 people have been killed, Palestinian health officials say. More than half of those killed were women and children, and it is unclear how many of the other dead were Hamas combatants. Untold numbers remain buried under the rubble of thousands of bombed out buildings and neighborhoods across Gaza.
In the attack that provoked the current conflict, Palestinian militants killed more than 1,200 people in Israel—mostly civilians—and abducted 250 others.
Less reported by the international media are dire conditions on the West Bank, according to Mr. Hazboun, where I.D.F. raids against Palestinian militants have become increasingly destructive. In addition, the tourism sector, a primary economic driver for West Bank Christians and Muslims alike, has been obliterated because of the renewed conflict.
He said the West Bank’s agricultural sector has similarly been affected because of brazen attacks by Jewish settlers, who prevent Palestinian farmers from reaching family olive groves or who sometimes destroy the ancient groves outright. For many families on the West Bank, gathering and pressing olives provides the entire income for the year, Mr. Hazboun said.
“In Jerusalem, life seems to be normal, but the tension is unbearable,” he said. “There is a rupture in the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians that will take years to mend.” The two communities now live in fear of each other, and most Christians simply prefer to stay at home or venture no farther than their own neighborhoods.
Though CNEWA is particularly concerned about supporting Christian communities across the Holy Land and the Middle East, Michael La Civita, CNEWA’s director of communications, emphasized that the agency’s various humanitarian efforts assist all people regardless of their faith or ethnicity.
In an email following the web conference, Mr. La Civita asked U.S. Christians to “pray, be informed, give of your time, talent or treasure” to help address the precarious position of Christians in Lebanon, Gaza and throughout the Holy Land. “Their support, their prayers, their understanding of the situation on the ground in the Middle East—and the role of the Christian community as a vehicle for justice and peace—can and does make a difference,” he said.
He urged U.S. Catholics to “advance the cause of justice for all in the pursuit of peace,” to “influence public policy that reflects our concern for the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized.”
“Their solidarity comforts and consoles...those who feel forgotten, abandoned and isolated by raw power,” he said.
Mr. La Civita describes himself as “absolutely” concerned that the catastrophe in Gaza and the hardships in the occupied West Bank could push remnant Christian communities over the edge. There are only a few hundred Christians left in Gaza; they remain huddled together in two church compounds near Gaza City, where renewed fighting has led to even greater suffering. Christian numbers in the Holy Land have collapsed from about 20 percent of the region’s population in 1949 to little more than 1 percent today, he said.
Now he worries the same rapid diminishment of Chrisitan numbers could begin in Lebanon, where the Christian population has endured a steady decline for decades. But CNEWA’s “concerns are not for Christians alone,” he said, “but for all those who want a full, happy and prosperous life for their children—Christians, Muslims, Jews and those of no faith.”
“Total war—and make no mistake about what is happening, this is total war—makes no distinctions among race, religion or ethnicity,” he said. “It kills and maims all.”
CNEWA is hardly alone among Catholic and secular humanitarian groups seeking an end to the violence in Lebanon and Gaza. On Oct. 25, Caritas Internationalis, the church’s relief and development global umbrella agency, joined more than 150 other aid groups calling on U.N. member states to end “the violence impacting civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.”
“Governments must do everything in their power to end this growing catastrophe and cycle of impunity,” the coalition said in a statement released on Oct. 25. “It is not only a moral imperative but a legal obligation. All Member States must prevent further atrocities and ensure that those responsible for any violations of international law, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, are held accountable.
“Failure to act now risks further eroding international norms and emboldening perpetrators. The cycle of violence against civilians needs to stop.”
Two Caritas Jerusalem doctors were injured on Nov. 1 while at home with their families after an I.D.F. attack on the Al-Nuseirat refugee camp. Caritas Jerusalem reports: “One doctor was pulled from the rubble with a broken collarbone and has lost his brother, his sister-in-law, and their two young children, including a six-week-old baby in this attack. The other doctor sustained a leg injury, and her father was also hurt.
“We’re urgently calling for a ceasefire to prevent any more innocent lives from being lost.”
Fourteen people were killed in a series of Israeli air strikes and shelling from warships at the Al-Nuseirat camp that day, along with 41 others across Gaza.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller gave Israel a “fail” grade on Nov. 4 in terms of meeting the conditions for an improvement in aid deliveries to Gaza laid out in a letter last month to senior Israeli officials from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
“As of today, the situation has not significantly turned around,” Mr. Miller told reporters. “We have seen an increase in some measurements. But if you look at the stipulated recommendations in the letter—those have not been met.” The Biden administration on Oct. 15 had issued a 30-day warning to Israel to improve humanitarian aid flow into Gaza at the risk of being cut off from new supplies of U.S. weapons. The United States has spent a record $18 billion on military aid to Israel since the war in Gaza began.
With reporting from The Associated Press
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