By Benoit Lannoo*
ANTWERP, Belgium | 7 October 2026 (IDN) — On the Instagram account of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa reported early Saturday morning that an airstrike on an apartment building in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City had killed, in addition to three other Palestinians, Maysa Abu Dawood and her daughter Mary al-Najjar. The two Christians were very appreciated in the Catholic parish of the Holy Family in Gaza, as they regularly volunteered to help parishioners and refugees who were victims of Israel’s destructive response to the brutal terrorist attack from Hamas, three years ago.
Ceasefire?
Fouad al-Najar, Mary’s fourteen-year-old son, was the first to announce the news of the death of his mother and grandmother. The young man explicitly called for an end to the war in Gaza, because “every day it still kills Palestinians”, despite… a ceasefire from about a year ago. The truce announced by US President Donald Trump on October 10, 2025, indeed can enter the Guinness Book of Records as the bloodiest truce ever recorded. Since then, Israel has effectively murdered another 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza.
Funeral
The two Christian victims were buried on Saturday afternoon in their (Arabic-speaking) Greek Orthodox parish of St. Porphyry. Before the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, and the disproportionate war unleashed by Israel afterwards, there were a thousand Christians in Gaza, but one to two hundred of them have fled Gaza in the meantime. And about twenty of the Christians who remained were killed by the Israel Defence Forces, which is 2 per cent of the Christian population of the Gaza Strip, where Christianity has been present since the first century AD.
Gabriel Romanelli
In October 2023, for example, an air raid on the Christian site around the church of St. Porphyry – consecrated there in 1150 – killed eighteen people. And in July 2025, an attack on the Church of the Holy Family also left three dead and several injured. Among these wounded was the Argentine priest Gabriel Romanelli, whose testimony (written in collaboration with Guillaume de Dieuleveult) under the title The Priest Who Stayed in Gaza: A Witness to Hope in the Rubble has just received the 15th Literary Prize of the French humanitarian organisation L’Œuvre d’Orient.
Live in dignity
It was Father Romanelli whom the late Pope Francis called once a day. “The people of Gaza want to live in dignity”, the parish priest yesterday said during one of his regular comments on YouTube, referring to the expression ‘to die in dignity’ used in the West to promote euthanasia. “But in the Gaza Strip, we are living in fear – Christians just like Muslims. These people see their children die and they fear to die too. There seems to be no hope since there is no significant political authority worldwide who speaks out clearly and loudly that this war must end.”
*Benoit Lannoo is Church Historian and Expert in Eastern Christianity