The staff of the international Catholic relief arm, Caritas Jerusalem, are expressing praise and gratitude for God’s seeming miraculous intervention on a Gaza church compound church compound 29 July.
A missile fired from an Israeli battle tank crashed into an annex of St Porphyrios Church in Gaza City, causing destruction and some injuries, but it miraculously failed to detonate on impact, sparing the lives of many displaced Palestinians, mainly Christians, sheltering in the Greek Orthodox church since the outbreak of fighting erupted between Israel and Hamas on 7 October 2023.
Some 70 people were in the hall next to the church, said Nathalie Sayegh, a Caritas Jerusalem employee present during the incident.
“Thank the Lord, it did not detonate, otherwise we would have been left with nothing but remnants.”
St Porphyrios Church was the scene of a previous Israeli missile strike on 19 October 2023 and that time was deadly. An Israeli airstrike damaged one of the four buildings on the church compound causing the ceiling to collapse and killing at least 18 civilians, including children.
At the time more than 450 Christian and Muslim Palestinian residents in Gaza had been sheltering there. Meanwhile, Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land condemned the attack in which 12 children were killed while playing on a soccer field when a rocket struck the Israeli-controlled small town of Majdal Shams near Lebanon.
