By LifeSiteNews (Politics) | Created at 2024-11-20 22:33:08 | Updated at 2024-11-23 08:16:45
2 days ago
Wed Nov 20, 2024 - 5:14 pm EST
(LifeSiteNews) — Two regional directors of Pontifical Mission organizations in the Middle East have testified to the vast ongoing destruction Israel is inflicting upon the peoples of Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank, leaving Christian communities decimated along with their fellow Muslim countrymen.
Speaking during a November 5 webinar sponsored by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), regional director for Israel and Palestine, Joseph Hazboun, along with Michel Constantin, director for Lebanon and other regions, spoke of facts on the ground including reports of Israel’s clear intent to make survival impossible in Gaza for the civilian population, and the effects of the Zionist state’s ongoing assaults upon civilians in Lebanon.
CNEWA was founded by Pope Pius XI in 1926 to assist vulnerable communities in the unstable lands of the ancient Eastern churches, including the Middle East, Northeast Africa, India and Eastern Europe. Following the initiation of hostilities by the Israeli army against the Palestinian people in 1948, Pope Pius XII founded a special Pontifical Mission to Palestine under the management of CNEWA in 1949.
In his comments, Hazboun first compared the current Israeli onslaught on Gaza with past wars, stating it has gone “way beyond any imagination” of what they would have considered possible. The ongoing Israeli attack, which many have judged to be a genocide, includes what he called “a systematic destruction of the infrastructure and what makes life possible in Gaza.”
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This includes 90% of the population being displaced to “safe areas, which were not safe at all,” the bombing of a church last October leaving 21 Christians dead, the bombing of a Christian hospital “leaving 400 dead,” along with the destruction of “the Latin Patriarchate Holy Family School as well as the Rosary Sister School.”
In all, “around 470 schools out of 564 were damaged or destroyed,” Hazboun continued. “So that’s 85 percent (of schools). Seventeen hospitals out of 36, almost 50 percent of the hospitals, were damaged or destroyed,” and these numbers are increasing “as the Kamal-Adwan Hospital in Gaza City was under attack for the past two weeks.”
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After being ordered to leave their homes by the Israeli army—an assault in itself which has been determined to be an international war crime and a crime against humanity—many Christian community members in Gaza took refuge in the two church compounds, Holy Family Catholic Church and St. Porphyrios Orthodox Church.
“Seventy percent of the apartments of the Christian communities are destroyed. The others received some damages,” he said, but they stopped counting around March of this year because it was too dangerous to go outside.
“The number of deaths have surpassed 42,000,” said Hazboun, who lives and works in Jerusalem. “Half of them are women and children. And the injured are over 120,000, not to mention those that are under the rubble with no way of being saved.”
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Throughout these ongoing attacks from the Israeli army, “ambulances, medical teams, rescue teams were all a target. The number of doctors killed, reporters killed, is beyond imagination,” he said.
Euro-Med Monitor reports that Israel has killed 190 journalists and 1,030 medical personnel, including 83 doctors, while injuring an additional 1,280 health care staffers.
In the West Bank, settlers protected by Israeli army as they attack Palestinian civilians
Christians and other Palestinians on the West Bank suffer from attacks by Israeli colonizers (“settlers”) continually taking over their internationally recognized land, most often with violence, Hazboun explained. And families are deprived of the vast majority of their annual income, which they need to survive, due to settler attacks preventing them from harvesting their olives to make and sell olive oil.
READ: UN overwhelmingly votes to demand Israel end ‘occupation’ of Palestine within 12 months
“Only last night the settlers attacked Al-Bireh near Ramallah, and they burned 20 vehicles, 20 cars. No one was apprehended, and they do all of this under the protection of the Israeli military forces,” he reported.
Due to Israel revoking work permits for Palestinians on the West Bank to work in Israel, along with the complete shutdown of the tourist industry, thousands of families are under severe circumstances struggling to live without income, with their electricity being shut off by their utility providers and an inability to put food on the table.
Lebanese civilians given only 20 minutes to evacuate, then watch Israeli army destroy their homes
Reporting from Beirut, Michel Constantin said, “in South Lebanon we estimate that already 25 percent of buildings, residential buildings, schools, churches, or mosques, have been wiped out, have been destroyed completely, and they are almost at the ground level.”
As in Gaza, “almost 90% of the people of the South, have left. They have left and they are displaced in Mount Lebanon and in Beirut and in North Lebanon,” he said.
The Christian hub of Deir el Ahmar “remains safe” and has “seen a wave of displacement that is far beyond the capacity of the people to receive,” which includes around 20,000 people sharing the homes and schools of a town with an original population of 7,000 to 9,000. These Christian families lack the capacity to sustain themselves along with these many people.
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“The Israeli army would warn the people of one quarter of one village to leave immediately. Sometimes he gave them only 20 minutes,” Constantin explained.
“After 20 minutes they were still on the road leaving, and they saw their houses and the whole village destroyed completely. So they don’t have time to pick up anything, to take anything with them. We have seen people in pajamas on the street, they left at midnight. They were warned and they had to leave immediately,” he said.
“I have seen elderly people who need oxygen. They were left behind and they were killed in their homes because they couldn’t take them in 20 minutes,” the Catholic director lamented.
READ: Israel launches new form of terrorism with its exploding pager attacks in Lebanon
Despite such war crimes Constantin also thanked God for “the internal solidarity” among the diverse Lebanese, “because the hosting communities are non-Shiite. All Shiite areas in Lebanon are under attack and under heavy, heavy destroying. So the other religious groups, Christians, Sunnis, Druze, have welcomed people in their homes,” and refer to them as “our guests” rather than “displaced people.”
However, “Israel is trying even more to create an internal conflict” by “chasing the Shiite displaced families” and “bombing them inside the Christian villages and Sunni villages” where they have taken refuge. This causes fear in the hosting communities who may ask the displaced to leave, though they have nowhere else to go.
“Day after day we see bombing of Christian, Sunni and the Druze villages where the displaced have found shelter and refuge,” he concluded.
Many tens of thousands killed, injured, mostly children and women
Though massacres by the Israeli army against the decimated Palestinian people have been routine occurrences for decades, reliable reports of Palestinian deaths since October 7 of last year include at least 44,631 (43,847 in Gaza, 69% children and women) with 10,000 more buried under the rubble (est. 4,900 women and children), and at least 785 in the West Bank (~167 children), with 345,000 facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
Additionally, 108,320 Palestinians are reported as injured, including “over 10,000 children losing at least one leg” with ongoing atrocities continuing on an essentially daily basis.
In this same period, at least 3,516 people have been killed in Lebanon, including more than 200 children, and no less than 14,929 have been injured.
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