Palestinian Christians hold on to hope amid conflict

On the heels of a visit to the Holy Land, Mr Alistair Dutton, Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis, spoke to Vatican media about the inhumane impact of ongoing conflict and the resilience of Christians living in the land of Jesus. Mr Dutton spoke of the urgent need for international action to uphold humanitarian laws and ensure lasting peace. The following is the English text of the interview with Mr Dutton.

“Hope is fragile but alive” among Palestinian Christians in the West Bank and Gaza, as they cling to faith and their connection to the Holy Land amid ongoing conflict, displacement, and a severe humanitarian crisis.

Caritas Internationalis has been working tirelessly to provide critical aid, but access remains nearly impossible, and the escalating situation has left many without basic necessities, according to Alistair Dutton, Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis.

You recently visited the Holy Land. Would you care to share your impressions of the situation there?

Back in July, I was meant to visit Jerusalem together with the World Council of Churches and the Protestant Action by Churches Together Alliance, but we had to postpone that because circumstances were so difficult, particularly with the attacks directly on Beirut and Tehran. So, it was felt not safe. And it’s been on the top of my list to try and get there before the end of the year. I was pleased to be able to go back just a couple of weeks ago, and it was almost exactly the anniversary of when I was last there. I travelled a month after the attacks on Israel and the response in Gaza, and then was back. And I have to say, it’s been so sad to see the way the situation has continued, to see the level of carnage that continues in Gaza today, which is so disproportionate and inhumane. I was in the West Bank this time. Obviously going into Gaza is not possible. And the West Bank just feels eerily quiet and very repressed, controlled and intimidated. I went up to Jenin in the north of Palestine and stayed a night with Caritas’ team in Jenin. For them I think that was a very important occasion. I think it was the first time people had been up [...] and been able to stay over with them.

So for people who are feeling completely isolated, who are feeling cut off in this war, cut off from their normal way of life, cut off from their jobs and their livelihoods (they were working across on the Israeli side previously so they’ve lost all of their employment) — and the day-to-day pressure and repression of Israeli activity around the border... For them it was deeply important to have someone there who could just be with them in solidarity and compassion.

It’s always such a privilege and so inspiring to see the work of Caritas and to see the way they’re working in local communities, trying to help people — yes, survive — but more impressively than that, I think: in the news all the time, what we hear is that it’s all a humanitarian fight for survival, and [to] a degree [...] that’s absolutely true. But for all the Palestinians I met, what is in their mind is: ‘How do we continue to build a dream for the future?’ So, ‘how do we survive today? But how do we do it in a way that genuinely gives us a future here in the Middle East?’ I think they’ve watched so many people leave, so much harm, the number of Christians fall so far, that for them, they can’t just concentrate on what they need today. They constantly have an eye on how [to] remain present within the Holy Land and the Middle East as a whole actually.

You were also in Jerusalem and in Israel. How was the situation there?

In Jerusalem itself, my big memory is it’s eerily quiet. This time I spent more time outside Jerusalem. But when I was there just after the attacks last year, I was right in the centre at six o’clock in the evening, where it would normally have been absolutely packed with Israelis, Palestinians going about their business, and a huge number of tourists. And there was nobody out. [...] I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and remember being in the Sepulchre for about 15 minutes and nobody came in. Normally you have to queue for hours to get in there. So, the first thing is just it is empty and quiet, and people feel isolated in that sense of being cut off from the rest of the world, and somewhere which is just an impossible place to visit. Needless to say, the conflict continues and numbers aren’t returning... The economy is collapsed, and there’s none of the tourism.

For us, as we look at some of the areas of the West Bank and then particularly into Gaza, the situation is absolutely brutal, and the inhumanity and brutality that we’re seeing... While I was there, I spoke to Father Gabriel, who is the priest at the Catholic Church in Gaza City, and to one of our social workers in Gaza. They’re incredible — how they continue to go on, day in, day out. They were describing how they have their own domestic woes, and they have to look after their families and try to make sure that day by day they can get back. But this incredible sense of service and care for their people and doing whatever they can... But that is so difficult at the moment. Getting anything into Gaza is almost impossible today. We have teams who are working hard, teams from Caritas Jerusalem and Catholic Relief Services. And for all their efforts, in the month before I was there, they had only managed to get six trucks in, and that was with very close co-operation with the American military and the Israeli military to try to get past all of the restrictions. We have to remember, before the attacks [of 7 October 2023], 500 trucks were needed every day. And they’ve managed six trucks in the last month, and that’s been taking really basic equipment into families, just so that they can sleep at night and cook their meals.

How will Christmas be celebrated in this situation?

I honestly don’t know. [...] I think one of the main things that I’ve witnessed in the Palestinians, particularly the Christian Palestinians in the West Bank, is a real need and thirst to hang on to hope, and to maintain a sense of hope and a sense of their life within their own land. What I see is them drawing great strength from their own faith, from the stories of the Bible. One of the great things they have, of course, is that theirs is the land where it all happened. One day, when I was there, they just said, ‘Oh, we’ve got a surprise for you.’ We went into one church, and it was the church where the [healing] of the 10 lepers happened. And this is all on their doorstep.

[Caritas has] a team in Bethlehem. So, where Christ was born is where one of our largest teams is. I think they do draw enormous strength from the physical proximity to the stories, from the stories themselves and the Gospel of hope, and they keep talking about that.

What was really interesting was, as we talk about hope — I met Cardinal Pizzaballa [the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem] on my way in, in Amman (because he was visiting Jordan at the time), and he was talking about how difficult it is to hope at the moment — but in conversation both with him and Père Michel [Abboud], who is the head of Caritas Lebanon, we were talking about how in Arabic and French there are two words for hope, whereas in English we only have the one. [...] In French you have espérance and l’espoir. And that sense of espérance, a connection with the divine, a connection with something that is greater than the hardship they feel at the moment, is deeply, deeply important to them, as they have to maintain their strength and their sense of a future.

We are also about to begin the Jubilee with the motto ‘Pilgrims of Hope’. Maybe this can help...

I think on hope, we have to be careful that we don’t use hope in a superficial way. That hope is a journey to really discover something deep within us that really gives us strength, rather than grasping at things and saying they give us hope. So, I think that sense of espérance is so important.

Seeing the situation, what is Caritas doing in terms of response? How can you do your work? How are you working there?

Caritas has been working ever since — well, before the attacks, and ever since the attacks. Needless to say, as everyone will understand having heard the news, the situation within Gaza particularly, but in the West Bank as well at times, has been incredibly difficult. Just the ability to move anything around has been almost impossible. I just described how difficult it is to get trucks of aid in, and so supplies to Gaza are almost nil at the moment. Despite that, we still have our health teams who are out and about and trying to help their people. Obviously, medical supplies are a huge concern.

But yes, they have been working throughout and also trying to get assistance, whether that’s material assistance that they could find in shops — although that’s been very few and far between, but occasionally they’re able to get supplies — or providing cash to people. But of course if there are no supplies, the cash is very difficult to use.

We’ve already reached over 1.6 million people in the last 13 months since the attacks through our emergency response: that’s in Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank; so Palestine, generally. That’s health, food support, and basic equipment for helping people: bedding, pots and pans, things just to cook and eat meals, mental health and psychological support, shelter, and some hygiene kits, etc., and some provision of water. So, through our teams, we are doing as much as we possibly can. But circumstances make humanitarian access incredibly difficult, and this is where the international community really needs to start taking its responsibilities under international law seriously and bringing pressure to bear so that people don’t suffer so egregiously.

This is what Pope Francis has been saying all along, calling for this to be guaranteed, and also that the hostages be freed.

We absolutely must have a ceasefire. The war is just hurting everyone. It’s also crippling the Israeli economy. It’s not just the Palestinians who are suffering. And it’s creating generations of psychological disturbance, which will just create the fighters for the next generations to come. But we have to stop the supply of weapons that only end in more death. And to those who are arming Israel today, it is just preventing that ceasefire coming any closer. You mentioned the hostages. We have to mention it’s the hostages and those who are detained on both sides, because so many of the Palestinians are also arbitrarily detained. So, the hostages absolutely must be released. But also, there’s the respect for international law and the norms of international law. We have the International Criminal Court, and we also have international humanitarian law, which says that people have a right to receive assistance.

And yet, for those of us who are trying to provide assistance, it is all but impossible, and it’s also far from safe. We have had two members of staff killed this year, and many members of their families. Just the week before I was there, two of our doctors were in hospital, having recently been injured, and all of their families — I believe about a dozen people — had just been killed in a direct hit on the church. So, that’s humanitarians trying to bring humanitarian assistance who are targeted within this war.

A ceasefire has been reached in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah. What does this mean for your work for Caritas Internationalis?

I’ve been in touch with our colleagues in Lebanon [...] and I share their hope and the hope that Pope Francis mentioned, that this might in some way signal a move towards peace within the Middle East.

I have to say firstly that that ceasefire is very, very precarious today. There have been attacks and people killed in southern Lebanon under the ceasefire, and one has to wonder how long it will hold. I sincerely hope that it will continue to hold and they can step back from it. It’s not as easy as blowing the final whistle and war just stops in a moment. So, I hope that ceasefire can hold. Having said that, I don’t see a way that that translates directly into peace for Gaza. At the same time, we’ve now seen the attacks launched in Syria, and I can’t help but think the timing of it all was far from a coincidence. It was the very day that the ceasefire was announced that the attack on Aleppo started. So in Syria today, having suffered 14 years of war and then the earthquake recently, now people are fleeing from Aleppo and Hama today to try to get to safety. I was there in January, and that is a country that has not been allowed to rebuild ever since the war. The effect of sanctions is absolutely crippling that country and just leaving them literally living among the rubble. I walked down a street in January that I walked down eight years previously. God love the people. They keep that street as clean as they possibly can. But that just means the rubble is piled up on the side [of the road], and they sweep around it. [...] Syria has been held in an inhumane status by sanctions for the last seven, eight years since peace, and now to see these attacks... And you can see so much of it is forces way beyond the Middle East who are now flexing their muscles and jostling for position and power. When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.

By Stefanie Stahlhofen