Gaza: a Christian mother and daughter killed, the pope writes to the Holy Family's priest

In the early hours of 3 October 2026, an Israeli airstrike on a residential building in Gaza killed five people. Among them were two Christian women of the city's only Catholic parish: Maysa Khader Ibrahim Abu Daoud and her daughter, Mary Hafez Michel Najjar. Mother and daughter served the parishioners and the displaced refugees at the Holy Family church. They were buried a few hours after their death, following a funeral celebrated at the Greek Orthodox church of Saint Porphyrius.

"Thou shalt not kill." The fifth commandment forbids the shedding of innocent blood, and the Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that the voluntary killing of the innocent is among those sins whose blood cries to heaven for vengeance. Those who perish in the house where they had sought refuge, and even in the church where they served the poor, are not combatants. Their death is not an act of war: it is the murder that tradition names innocent blood.

The priest of the Holy Family parish, the only Catholic parish in Gaza, made public, in his daily video of 4 October, a personal message of condolence addressed to him by Pope Leo XIV. In it the Holy Father takes up the cry of the psalm: "How long, O Lord?" The priest said that sixty-two Catholic and Orthodox Christians have died since the war began, twenty-five of them by violent death, by bombardment or by snipers, most of them where they had found refuge, at the Holy Family church. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, in the name of Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, offered its condolences to the families and to the Christian community of Gaza; the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem prayed for the repose of the deceased and for the protection of civilians.

We commend these two souls to the mercy of God and pray for the repose of the dead. The Church has always wept for and buried with honour those whom violence tears from her altars, and she venerates as blessed the blood poured out for the faith.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment "Thou shalt not kill"; Psalm 12 according to the Vulgate, "How long, O Lord?"; Dom Guéranger, The Liturgical Year, on the communion of saints and prayer for the dead.