An errant IDF tank shell killed three civilians at Holy Family in Gaza – a tragedy that warrants mourning. But it should not be used as a pretext to further that strain of special antagonism that runs through the faithful when it comes to Israel.
July 24, 2025 10:24
Saad Salameh was in the courtyard of his church when the Israeli shell hit. The 60-year-old was caretaker of Holy Family Catholic Church in Al-Zaytun, in the Old City of Gaza, the house of worship struck last Thursday morning by artillery fire from an IDF tank. Salameh was killed along with Najwa Abu Daoud, 69, and Fumayya Ayyad, 84, who are believed to have been sheltering in an adjacent humanitarian tent. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.
Holy Family has become a refuge for 600 Gazans, Christian and Muslim alike, many of them children. They have been displaced by Iron Swords, Jerusalem’s military response to the October 7 pogroms, in which Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, massacred 1,200 people, raped women, and took 250 people hostage, including children. The initial IDF assessment is that the church was hit accidentally by ricocheting shrapnel, but Israel’s government has ordered an investigation. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Pope Leo XIV for over an hour on Friday and is understood to have expressed regret over the deaths and conveyed his condolences. On Sunday, the Holy Father called for “an immediate end to the barbarity of the war” and for “a peaceful resolution to the conflict”.
A hearty “Amen” to that. Saad, Najwa, and Fumayya are not the first casualties of Iron Swords connected to the church. In 2024, three people were killed in an Israeli strike on a Hamas official hiding in the Holy Family compound and the previous year two Palestinian women were shot dead, though the Israelis and church authorities dispute the circumstances.
For Catholics like me, the thought of one of our churches bombed in war, and those sheltering under its cross killed, is too monstrous to contemplate. This is no less the case for those of us who are also supporters of Israel. The investigation into this tragedy must be thorough, transparent and unafraid to assign blame where it belongs. That the world holds Israel to double standards is no reason for Israel to hold itself to no standards.
Catholics ought to be deeply troubled by the Holy Family killings, but they should not be used as a pretext to further that strain of special antagonism that runs through the Church and the faithful when it comes to Israel. That strain is typically blamed on a shameful history of clerical antisemitism and its echoes in certain strains of contemporary traditionalism, and while there is some truth in this, mainstream and liberal Catholics tend to look past their own beams when they scrutinise this particular mote.
The late Pope Francis, a faithful foe of classical antisemitism, was less guarded against those progressive prejudices that replicate the stigmatisation of Jews in the isolation, defamation and delegitimisation of the Jewish state. It was the liberal Jesuit Francis who called for an investigation into whether “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide”, who prayed before a Bethlehem nativity scene featuring the baby Jesus swaddled by a keffiyeh, who chose the first anniversary of October 7 to publish a letter to Middle East Catholics alluding to a passage from the Gospel of John long relied upon to justify antisemitism.
Francis’s injudicious interventions on the October 7 war cannot be blamed on traditionalist Catholicism, of which he was no friend. Rather, they reflect the embrace of a worldly gospel that preaches temporal politics, and a divisive politics at that, under the guise of caritas, the Catholic doctrine of love-in-action. I won’t be the only Catholic to notice the intense interest some of our NGOs, lay organisations and even bishopric commissions take in the Holy Land, or rather certain parts of the Holy Land, or rather certain populations in certain parts of the Holy Land.
Catholicism is not and should not be the continuation of politics by other means. Offences against life, peace and human dignity should scandalise us regardless of who commits them and against whom they are committed. That means protesting when Israel fails to prosecute extremist settlers who attack Christian activists olive-harvesting alongside Palestinians in the West Bank. But it also means raising hell over the intolerance and intimidation faced by Palestinian Christians at the hands of Palestinian Muslims. (It has been repeatedly pointed out that Holy Family is the last Catholic church in Gaza. Catholics who are only just learning this fact ought to ask themselves why.)
Since the beginning of the year, I have attended at least a dozen Masses in which the people of Gaza were singled out for prayer, none in which the Israeli people were prayed for, and just one which also mentioned the hostages. This is not a plea for politically correct balance but for universal obedience to the doctrine of imago Dei, which says that all persons are created in the likeness of the Almighty. As Pope Paul VI decreed in Nostra Aetate, which rejected the libel of Jewish deicide: “We cannot truly call on God, the Father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man, created as he is in the image of God.”
At Holy Mass last Sunday, the first reading was from Genesis 18, in which God appears to Abraham and Sarah and tells them Sarah will soon bear a child. The couple erupt in laughter for she was too old to conceive, and this inspires the name of the son who later arrives as foretold: Isaac – he who laughs. Catholics who know their Bible know what happens next: Isaac begets Jacob who begets a dozen sons who beget the 12 tribes of the Israelites, who eventually beget Mary and Joseph, who, with a little help from the Holy Spirit, beget Jesus Christ.
A lesson Catholics should take from this passage is one preached by Saint John Paul II, that Jews are “our elder brothers in the faith of Abraham”. Family can be honest with one another – must be honest with one another – when there is wrongdoing. As Catholics, we should speak up when Israel does wrong and bear witness to the sanctity of life, so agonisingly violated at the Holy Family Church, whether it is taken with intent or in error. In doing so, however, it is vital that we guard against worldly vices such as hypocrisy and hatred. We are called upon to bear witness to the eternal truths of the Gospel, not the passing ideologies of man with their capricious and unspiritual judgments. We must not allow our sacred faith to become a soapbox for profane politics.
Stephen Daisley is a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail
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