US Christian Leaders and Institutions Cannot Keep Silent on this Israeli Assault
(Washington, D.C., 7/18/2025) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), America’s umbrella group of Muslim associations, condemns in the strongest terms the deliberate and indefensible Israeli bombing of yet another sacrosanct institution in Gaza – Holy Family Catholic Church, which was sheltering children and elderly parishioners. The Israeli attack killed three worshippers and injured 10 others, including renowned parish priest Gabriele Romanelli.
Holy Family is Gaza’s only Catholic church. Its coordinates are well known to the Israeli military. The bombing killed the church’s 60-year-old janitor and an 84-year-old woman receiving psychological care in a Caritas medical tent within the church compound, according to Caritas Jerusalem, part of the famed global Caritas Catholic charity.
After a call from U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, once again shamelessly blamed the bombing on accidental “stray munitions.”
Yet Catholic officials and worshippers described the church’s bombing by an armored tank with clear vision as an unmistakable direct hit on the church’s main hall that blanketed the entire area, not just the church, with a huge black mushroom plume. This was a huge explosive device that the armored tank fired at the church.
One church parishioner there called it “massive, totally horrifying.” His report belies Netanyahu’s claim that this was an isolated accident. “No words could describe what we are living through … not even close to what you watch or hear” in reports.
Netanyahu’s excuse rings deathly hollow after nearly two years of systematic and categorical Israeli obliteration of every imaginable war-exempt target, be it hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings blown apart and buried or nearly all of Gaza’s religious, medical, educational, humanitarian, and food, water and power-source structures demolished.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem reported eyewitness accounts of the Israeli military’s strike on the Holy Family Catholic Church bombing to Vatican News.
Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, its patriarch and a recent candidate for pope, said, “What we know for sure is that a tank … hit the church directly.”
Widely popular late Pope Francis made Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza globally endeared with his daily calls to its priests and religious throughout the Israeli Gaza genocide.
His recent successor, Pope Leo XIV, said he was “deeply saddened to learn of the loss of life and injury caused by the military attack on the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza.” He called for an “immediate ceasefire” and “dialogue and reconciliation” as the only means that “can ensure enduring peace.”
“I assure the parish community of my spiritual closeness. I commend the souls of the deceased to the loving mercy of Almighty God and pray for their families and the injured.”
USCMO Secretary General Oussama Jammal said in a statement:
“Trump’s weak phone call to Netanyahu and passive acceptance of his pathetic and eminently unbelievable excuse for tank-shelling Gaza’s lone and well-known Catholic church is totally unacceptable.
“With a single phone call – if we had a strong, moral leader who cared and wasn’t afraid – Trump has the power to stop this illegal, immoral, consensus livestreamed Israeli genocide of Gaza that is deliberately exterminating its poor children, women, and elderly, Muslim and Christian alike.
“We must demand that our president extract our nation from this unholy Israeli assault on all that is sacred, and that he use his easily available power to stay the violent hand and means of this incorrigible warmonger Netanyahu and his supremacist administration that cares nothing for the sanctity of human life or the hallowed institutions of people of other faiths.”
USCMO calls on President Trump, Congress, and American religious leaders and institutions to openly compel Netanyahu to stop the Gaza genocide once and for all, and to force an end to belligerent Israeli war-making in the Holy Land and throughout the Middle East.
