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 two thousand years to the original followers of Christ.
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