Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, a Franciscan friar who has served as the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem since November 2020, said that on December 16, an Israeli soldier shot dead “in cold blood” a Christian mother and daughter on the grounds of the Gaza Strip’s only Catholic church.
French President Emmanuel Macron expressed “great concern” about a Catholic parish in war-torn Gaza with the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, his office announced on Sunday.
Macron spoke with the Cardinal by telephone to discuss the “tragic situation” there since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas militants.
“Hundreds of civilians of all confessions … have been living under bombs and bullets for more than two months while worshippers and nuns take care of the sick, elderly or disabled,” Macron was quoted as saying.
Pizzaballa said an Israeli sniper shot the women, Nahida and Samar, on the grounds of a Catholic church in Gaza City. One of the women was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety.
“They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents,” said Pizzaballa, who described the convent as home to 54 displaced people and the Holy Family Church as a place of worship since the start of the war.
The patriarchate insisted that no warning was given before the shooting started and claimed that “they were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents.”
Seven other people were also wounded by gunfire as they tried to protect others, the statement said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the war in Gaza was exacting a “very heavy price” after the Israeli army announced 14 soldiers had been killed in the Palestinian territory while fighting with Hamas.
“This is a difficult morning, after a very difficult day of fighting in Gaza … The war is exacting a very heavy price… but we have no choice but to keep fighting,” said Netanyahu, whose response to the October 7 terrorist attack has been criticized as excessive.
The Palestinian population is predominantly Arab and Muslim but it is diverse in terms of religion, language, and culture.
According to the U.S. government, the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is predominantly Sunni Muslim, with small Shia and Ahmadi Muslim communities.
Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — is a Sunni Muslim political and military organization that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, while its secular rival Fatah exercises control in the West Bank, the larger of the two Palestinian territories.
Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told New York Times reporter David K. Shipler that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat.
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009.
Cohen described Israel’s investment in Hamas as an “enormous, stupid mistake” made to thwart unity behind the PLO, which dropped its vow to destroy the Jewish state during the 1990s.
“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early ’90s as an Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.”
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