Catholic charity Caritas Jerusalem said the parish’s 60-year-old janitor and an 84-year-old woman receiving psychosocial support inside a Caritas tent in the church compound were killed in the attack. Romanelli was lightly wounded.
“We were struck in the church while all the people there were elders, innocent people and children,” said Shady Abu Dawood, whose mother was wounded by shrapnel to her head.
Three people were killed in the strike, and 10 others were injured.Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images
“We love peace and call for it, and this is a brutal, unjustified action by the Israeli occupation.”
The Israeli military said an initial assessment indicated that “fragments from a shell fired during operational activity in the area hit the church mistakenly”. It said it was still investigating.
The military said it only struck militant targets and made “every feasible effort to mitigate harm to civilians and religious structures, and regrets any unintentional damage caused to them”.
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Israel has repeatedly struck schools, shelters, hospitals and other civilian buildings, accusing Hamas militants of sheltering inside and blaming them for civilian deaths. Palestinians say nowhere has felt safe since Israel launched its offensive in response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni blamed Israel for the strike on the church. “The attacks on the civilian population that Israel has been demonstrating for months are unacceptable,” she said.
The church is just a stone’s throw from Al-Ahli Hospital, Naem said, noting that the area around both the church and the hospital has been repeatedly struck for more than a week.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which also has a church in Gaza that previously sustained damage from Israeli strikes, said the Holy Family Church was sheltering 600 displaced people, including many children, and 54 people with disabilities. It said the building suffered significant damage.
Targeting a holy site “is a blatant affront to human dignity and a grave violation of the sanctity of life and the inviolability of religious sites, which are meant to serve as safe havens during times of war”, the church said in a statement.
In the last 18 months of his life, Francis would often call the lone Catholic church in the Gaza Strip to see how people huddled inside were coping with a devastating war. The Washington Post reported that Francis used to ring Romanelli every evening.
Francis had repeatedly criticised Israel’s wartime conduct, and last year suggested that allegations of genocide in Gaza – which Israel has rejected as a “blood libel” – should be investigated. The late pope also met the families of Israeli hostages and called for their release.
Only 1000 Christians live in Gaza, an overwhelmingly Muslim territory, said the US State Department’s international religious freedom report for 2024. Most are Greek Orthodox.
The Holy Land’s Christian population has dwindled in recent decades as many have emigrated to escape war and conflict or to seek better opportunities abroad. Local Christian leaders have recently denounced attacks by Israeli settlers and Jewish extremists.
Separately, another person was killed and 17 were wounded on Thursday in a strike against two schools that sheltered displaced people in the Al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, Al-Awda Hospital reported. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike.
The Gaza Health Ministry said that over the past 24 hours, local hospitals had received the bodies of 94 people killed in Israeli strikes and another 367 wounded.
Meanwhile, there has been little visible progress from months of indirect talks between Israel and Hamas aimed at a new ceasefire and hostage release agreement, after Israel ended an earlier truce in March.
Early on Friday AEST, Axios reported that Qatar, Egypt and the US had presented Israel and Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas with an updated Gaza ceasefire proposal, citing two sources.
The two main updates in the latest proposal had to do with the scope of the Israeli military’s withdrawal from Gaza during a ceasefire and the ratio of Palestinian prisoners to be released for each Israeli hostage.
The Qatari prime minister is expected to meet Hamas leaders in Doha on Saturday to seek their agreement to the updated proposal, the report added.
Hamas-led militants killed about 1200 people, mostly civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack and abducted 251 people, most of whom have since been released in ceasefire agreements or other deals. Fifty hostages are still being held, less than half of them believed to be alive
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 58,600 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which has said women and children make up more than half of the dead. It does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its tally.
AP, Reuters
