Al Mezan strongly condemns the Israeli attack on the Holy Family Church, the only Catholic church in Gaza, carried out on the morning of 17 July 2025. The strike targeted a place of worship sheltering hundreds of civilians, killing three members of Gaza’s Christian community and injuring several others, including the church’s priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli.
According to field information and eyewitness accounts, at approximately 10:15 a.m., on Thursday, 17 July 2025, Israeli forces bombed the Holy Family Church, which is within the Latin Patriarchate School compound, near Al-Shawwa Gas Station on Omar Al-Mukhtar Street in central Gaza City. The attack killed three people, including two women, and injured several others. Since the beginning of Israel's ongoing genocide, the church had been sheltering around 400 displaced members of Gaza’s Christian community who had taken refuge there to escape Israel's relentless attacks and had remained inside since the early days of the genocide.
Throughout the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israel has systematically targeted both Christian and Muslim places of worship. Dozens of mosques and churches have been struck since the start of the genocide. For example, on 19 October 2023, Israel bombed Saint Porphyrius Church—the oldest church in Gaza—located in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, killing 18 civilians. These repeated attacks are neither accidental nor isolated; rather, they reflect a deliberate policy aimed at dismantling the social and religious fabric of the Palestinian people and forcibly displacing civilians from spaces they considered to be safe.
Such crimes would not have occurred without the silence and failure of the international community to take meaningful action to hold Israel accountable, a failure that has effectively granted impunity and enabled the repetition of such atrocities.
Al Mezan urges the international community to act without delay to halt the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and to ensure immediate international protection for Palestinian civilians. Al Mezan reiterates its call on all States, the UN Human Rights Council, and the International Criminal Court to fulfill their legal and moral obligations by holding perpetrators of international crimes to account and ensuring justice and redress for the victims.
