Tag Archives: Gaza

The Gaza Death Toll Is Telling a Story Almost Nobody Is Reading

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Gaza’s daily reported fatalities plunged by more than 90% following the October 2025 ceasefire, falling from over 90 per day during intense fighting in July to roughly four during much of 2026. Meanwhile, adult men’s share of newly identified fatalities climbed from 42% to over 63%, although they represented just 24.4% of Gaza’s population. Hamas combatants likely accounted for a substantial portion of those deaths. These extraordinary shifts tell a story buried beneath three years of cumulative death toll headlines.

For three years, Gaza’s death toll has dominated headlines. The number rises, newspapers report the latest milestone, politicians condemn Israel, and the world is reminded of the mounting casualties.

Yet the underlying data tell a story that has received remarkably little attention.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health under the direction of Hamas publishes detailed fatality figures, reproduced by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Those figures reveal dramatic changes in who was dying, how frequently deaths were being reported, and how the cumulative death toll was being assembled.

Together, they offer a very different perspective on the progression of Israel’s military campaign.

The Remarkable Shift Toward Adult Men

Before the war, children represented approximately 47% of Gaza’s population. Adult men ages 18–59 accounted for just 24.4%, adult women 23.9%, and the elderly 4.8%.

The composition of reported fatalities changed substantially as the war progressed.

Among deaths newly identified between April and October 2024, adult men accounted for 42%, children 34.4%, and adult women 14.1%. By July–October 2025, adult men’s share had risen to 59.5%, while children’s share had fallen to 25.1% and adult women’s share to just 9.9%.

Adult men were therefore accounting for nearly two and a half times their proportion of Gaza’s population, while women and children represented substantially smaller shares of fatalities than their respective population shares.

The pattern continued after the October 2025 ceasefire. Among 1,076 fatalities verified by the UN Human Rights Office through July 2026, 63.4% were men, 24.9% children and 11.7% women. The UN’s categories differ from the earlier Ministry of Health breakdown, but the disproportionate representation of men remains striking.

Hamas combatants are overwhelmingly adult men. The growing concentration of fatalities among this demographic is consistent with Israeli forces increasingly engaging combatants as they gained control of the battlefield and improved their ability to identify and target Hamas and other terrorist group’s positions.

A chart titled 'Who Was Dying in Gaza?' illustrating the demographics of fatalities in Gaza. The data highlights that adult men aged 18-59, who make up 24.4% of the population, accounted for 59.5% of fatalities between July and October 2025. It also compares the shares of fatalities among children, adult women, and the elderly, showing discrepancies relative to their population sizes.

From More Than 90 Deaths a Day to Fewer Than Five

The changes in the daily death toll are equally dramatic.

During the first eleven months of the war, Gaza reported an average of approximately 124 fatalities per day. Following the January 2025 ceasefire, the rate declined sharply before rising again when major military operations resumed in March.

During intense fighting in July 2025, the Ministry of Health reported more than 90 deaths per day. Following the October 2025 ceasefire, that figure collapsed. By September 16–23, 2026, just 24 fatalities were reported over seven days, an average of 3.4 per day. That represents a decline of more than 96% compared with the July 2025 reporting interval.

The numbers demonstrate how dramatically the intensity of military operations affected fatalities. They also reveal how misleading it can be to treat Gaza’s cumulative death toll as though it describes an unchanging level of violence.

Bar graph illustrating average daily reported deaths in Gaza from October 2023 to September 2026, highlighting a significant decline in fatalities after the October 2025 ceasefire.

The Death Toll Includes Deaths From Earlier Years

Another remarkable feature of Gaza’s reported death toll is how many fatalities are being added retrospectively.

Hamas’s Ministry of Health continues identifying bodies, reconciling records and approving deaths that occurred in earlier periods. Those deaths enter the cumulative total when they are registered, regardless of when or how they occurred. In several 2026 reporting periods, retrospective registrations accounted for the majority of additions to the published total.

Between September 16 and 23, for example, 24 fatalities were reported for the period while another 85 earlier deaths were added after their identification details were approved. Retrospective registrations therefore represented 78% of the combined increase.

That distinction is almost entirely lost when the media simply announces another increase in Gaza’s cumulative death toll.

Bar graph illustrating reported fatalities in Gaza during several periods in 2026. The graph shows percentages of recently reported fatalities and earlier deaths added retrospectively, highlighting that most fatalities are registrations of earlier deaths.

What the Numbers Say About Israel’s Campaign

The world has spent three years judging Israel’s military campaign largely through a steadily increasing cumulative death toll. Yet the underlying statistics reveal a campaign whose reported fatality patterns changed dramatically.

As Israeli forces gained control of the battlefield, adult men accounted for an increasingly disproportionate share of identified fatalities. Women and children represented progressively smaller shares, well below their proportions of Gaza’s population.

These patterns are consistent with a military increasingly able to distinguish and target Hamas combatants. They challenge the portrayal of a campaign conducted without regard for the distinction between fighters and civilians.

Meanwhile, the reported daily death rate has collapsed, and much of the recent growth in the cumulative total during selected periods has come from deaths registered long after they occurred.

The accusation of indiscriminate slaughter collapses when looking into the data. The numbers have been available. The story they tell has largely gone unread.

Sources: Gaza Ministry of Health fatality figures published by UN OCHA; Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2023 population estimates; UN Human Rights Office verified-fatality reporting. Demographic identification cohorts and UN-verified post-ceasefire deaths use different methodologies and should not be interpreted as directly comparable measures of battlefield fatalities.

The New York Times Pretends Gazans Hope for Normal Life, Not Slaughtering Israelis

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Three days after the third anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, The New York Times devoted its dominant front-page photograph and two full inside pages to the “hopes” and aspirations of Gazans. There were weddings, swimming, barbershops, reopened businesses and families trying to rebuild their lives amid the rubble.

It was a touching portrait of ordinary dreams – at least for normal people in the western world. But what about the extraordinary support among Gazans for killing Israeli civilians that preceded the war?

In June 2022, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 73% of Gazans supported armed attacks inside Israel similar to those had been recently carried out. Fifteen months later, Hamas invaded Israel, slaughtered civilians, kidnapped families and celebrated the massacre. By March 2024, five months into the war and amid Gaza’s devastation, 71% of Gazans still considered Hamas’s decision to launch October 7 correct, according to the same polling organization.

Two-thirds of Gazans on average since 2001 have supported killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel according to PCPSR polls

These were majority attitudes, measured before the massacre and after its consequences became devastatingly clear.

Hamas is Gaza’s government, controlling the territory since 2007. It operated ministries, schools, police and security forces alongside its military apparatus. It is Gaza’s political life. Before October 7, PCPSR polling showed Hamas leading Fatah in hypothetical Palestinian parliamentary voting and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh defeating Mahmoud Abbas in a two-candidate presidential contest. Hamas continues to lead Fatah, which is why PA President Mahmoud Abbas continues to delay elections.

Yet the Times’ sprawling photographic treatment of Gaza’s aspirations ignored the genocidal ideology that permeates Gaza and helped produce October 7. The newspaper deliberately failed to show what Gazans truly hope for: dead Jews and the destruction of the Jewish State.

Imagine the same treatment of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces. Three days after the anniversary of an RSF massacre, would the Times devote its front page and two inside pages to swimming, weddings and employment in communities governed by the militia, with little examination of the violence and political support behind it?

The Times showed readers Gazans dreaming of a swim. Its own society’s polling shows overwhelming support for killing Jewish civilians both before and after the October 7 massacre.

The Times has whitewashed the genocidal ideology of Gazans and portrayed them as victims of the jihadi war they launched. Doing so is not just anti-Israel, it is a promotion of radical Islam deployed against Jews.

Or perhaps worse – the Times is educating its readers that those who want to rape and kill Jews are very much like us.

At the UN, Borders Are Inviolable, Except Israel’s

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At the closing of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, its president, Annalena Baerbock, offered a final defense of the international order.

At 10:15, she invoked Gaza and said “if borders can be changed by force, if sovereignty can be set aside when inconvenient, or upheld only when politics allows, then no Member State can sleep peacefully anymore.” She repeated Gaza alongside Ukraine as she closed her remarks at 17:00.

Israel is a UN member state. Gaza is not. Palestine is not. Yet the UN increasingly discusses this war as though those roles were reversed.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the government of Gaza alongside thousands of Gazans invaded Israel. Thousands of terrorists attacked communities and military installations, killed roughly 1,200 people and abducted 251 into Gaza.

Members of Hamas tear down fence and invade Israel on October 7, 2023

If Baerbock wanted an example of a member state’s border being violated by force, she had one.

Instead, the UN performs a remarkable double inversion. It starts the clock after October 7, making the war appear to begin with Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Then it treats Gaza as the territory whose sovereignty and borders are paramount, while the actual member state that was invaded becomes the accused.

Territorial integrity cannot be a foundational principle when Russia enters Ukraine and an inconvenient technicality when Gazans invade Israel. A rule whose application depends upon who is doing the invading is not a principle. It is politics dressed up as international law.

The organization created to protect member states has demonstrated that when Israel, a member state, is invaded and its civilians raped, slaughtered and kidnapped, by some evil orchestration and institutional design, the terrorist enclave from which the attack emerged can be turned into the aggrieved party.

The UN has not merely failed its own basic test. It has exposed the fine print in its supposedly universal principles: borders are inviolable, sovereignty is sacred, and member states must be protected – unless the member state is Israel.

Hamas terrorist in Israeli kibbutz on October 7, 2023

The Arab League Condemns New Jewish Communities Inside Israel. Is This Simple Antisemitism or Strategic?

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The Arab League issued a remarkable condemnation of Israel: it objects to the “expansion of new Jewish communities in the Negev and Galilee and increasing their Jewish populations.”

These are not settlements in the West Bank. They are areas inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Further, Israel is described as “1948 territories.”

That makes the statement difficult to reconcile with the Arab League’s simultaneous support for a Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967 lines. Under that formula, the Negev and Galilee remain part of Israel. And why suggest that Israel is just part of Palestine, calling the entire state “1948 territories?”

The question is particularly relevant to Egypt.

Egypt was the first Arab country to recognize Israel and signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, ending the two countries’ state of war. Nearly fifty years later, Cairo continues to endorse a two-state solution: a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines alongside a secure Israel.

That position should carry a simple implication: Israel’s right to develop its own communities within its own territory.

Egyptian officials should therefore answer a straightforward question: Does Egypt believe Israel has the same right to develop Jewish communities within its territory that a future Palestinian state would have to develop its own communities?

If the answer is yes, Cairo should say so.

If the answer is no, then the issue is not simply the borders of a future Palestinian state. It is whether Jewish demographic and community development inside Israel is itself considered illegitimate. It reeks of antisemitism.

But is their another way to think of these hateful remarks?

Egypt made peace with Israel nearly half a century ago to get back the Sinai Peninsula it lost in the 1967 Six Day War. Is Egypt deliberately opening cracks in that treaty? Is it preparing to push Israel to hand some of the Negev to Gazans now – alongside its own contribution of part of the Sinai – as Gazans hope to rebuild the strip after its failed war on Israel?

Is the Arab League simply being antisemitic or is it deliberately setting the course for a new map for Gaza?

Meet the M8: The Muslim Bloc Trump Built

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Eight Muslim countries issued a joint statement Sunday condemning Israel’s rejection of the latest roadmap for implementing President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. They are: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia.

They have no formal collective name. So call them the Muslim Eight — the M8.

Together, the M8 countries have roughly 817 million people and contain forty percent of the world’s Muslims. Indonesia and Pakistan alone are two of the world’s largest Muslim-majority countries.

The M8 was assembled by U.S. President Donald Trump with a specific purpose.

On September 23, 2025, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Trump convened the leaders and senior officials of these eight Arab and Muslim countries. The goal was to end the Gaza War and build a day-after framework. Trump needed Muslim and Arab countries with street-cred in Gaza to make that happen, as well as a history of operating functioning governments.

Egypt controlled the critical border with Gaza and, together with Qatar, was central to negotiations with Hamas. Jordan brought its relationship with Israel, the Palestinian Authority and sensitive holy sites in Jerusalem. Saudi Arabia brought money, Arab leadership and the enormous prize of possible normalization with Israel. The UAE brought capital, administrative expertise and an existing relationship with Israel. Turkey brought regional power and channels to Hamas. Pakistan and Indonesia brought two enormous Muslim populations and legitimacy extending well beyond the Arab world.

Trump assembled M8 to be directed at the problem in Gaza. Help end the war. Get the hostages released. Stabilize the ceasefire. Keep Hamas from returning to power. Reconstruct Gaza. Support a new Palestinian administration. Reform the Palestinian Authority. Create a workable security structure.

Six days after Trump’s meeting, the M8 jointly welcomed his Gaza peace proposal and committed themselves to working with the United States and the parties to implement it.

When Hamas responded to Trump’s proposal in October, the M8 responded together. When disputes developed over Rafah, the M8 responded together. When Trump established his Board of Peace to oversee Gaza’s transition, all eight announced together that they would join.

Trump had created a Muslim steering committee for Gaza. But soon, the M8 discovered it could steer other things.

By December, it was collectively defending UNRWA, even as Trump’s postwar architecture was establishing new institutions to govern, finance and rebuild Gaza.

In March 2026, the M8 jointly condemned Israeli restrictions at Al-Aqsa Mosque/ the Jewish Temple Mount. Later that month, it issued another statement about Muslim and Christian access to Jerusalem’s holy sites.

In April, it jointly declared that the entire 144-dunam Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif compound was exclusively a Muslim place of worship and backed the Jordanian Waqf’s authority there.

The M8 began issuing collective positions on Israeli settlements, Israeli sovereignty measures, “settler violence” in Judea and Samaria.

None of that was why Trump assembled the M8.

The Board of Peace was created around a specific Gaza program: maintain the ceasefire, demilitarize Gaza, establish transitional Palestinian governance, rebuild the territory, reform Palestinian institutions and create conditions for a different future.

Yet the M8 now speaks on subjects well outside of Gaza with the institutional weight it acquired by becoming Trump’s chosen Arab-Muslim partner. A coalition created to solve Gaza has become a platform to pressure Israel over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, UNRWA and Palestinian statehood.

Trump gave the M8 a mandate to help fix Gaza. The M8 is turning it into a mandate to lecture Israel.

Genocide Math

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We know that every death is a tragedy. We all wish there wasn’t war. Yet wars happen.

There have been several attempts to portray the current Gazans war against Israel in various lights. Some people have used the civilian-to-death ratio in this war of roughly 2-to-1 as historically low compared to any urban combat in modern times, especially one in which the army hides underneath the homes and hospitals of the civilian population.

Here, we lay out the civilian death figures relative to other modern wars which had many civilian deaths.

Assuming:

  • 73,356 reported total deaths in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to August 2, 2026
  • 25,000 of those were Hamas or other militants (a rough figure supplied by the Israeli army in January 2026)
  • Civilian deaths = 48,356
  • Prewar population = 2.2 million
  • Duration = 34 months

The calculation is:

  • Overall civilian mortality: 48,356 ÷ 2,200,000 = 2.19% of Gaza’s population.
  • Average civilian mortality per month: 2.19% ÷ 34 = 0.055% per month.

That yields the following comparison:

CaseEstimated monthly percentage killedMultiple of Gaza civilian rate (0.055%/month)
Gaza [2023-present]0.055%1×
Guatemala (Ixil) [1981-3]0.10%1.8×
Darfur [2003-5]0.11%–0.17%2.0-3.1x
Roma genocide [1939-45]0.20%–0.69%3.6–12.5×
Anfal (Kurds) [1987-8]0.22%–0.44%4–8×
Ustaše genocide [1941-5]0.36%6.5×
Cambodia [1975-9]0.44%–0.59%8–10.7×
Rohingya [2017-8]at least 0.67%12.1×
Holodomor [1932-3]0.73%–1.04%13.2–18.9×
Holocaust [1941-5]1.32%24×
Yazidi genocide [2014-7]0.65%–2.5%11.8–45.4×
Rwanda [1994]13.8%–22%250.9–400×
Srebrenica (monthly equivalent) [1995]~80%~1,454×
Monthly toll of civilian deaths in wars over last 100 years, as a percentage of the total population, in comparison to current Gazan war against Israel
Yazidis are a non-Muslim ethnic group in and around Iraq targeted for persecution and annihilation by ISIS. They continue to suffer persecution from Muslims in Turkey and Iraq.

“IS fighters invaded Yazidi villages and towns in Northern Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, rounding up men, women, and children. Yazidi men were ordered to convert to Islam; those who did not, and even some who did, were executed in mass graves. Yazidi women and girls were abducted and sold into sexual slavery, being forcibly “married” to jihadists and other individuals in Iraq, Syria, and other countries. Yazidi boys were also kidnapped by the Islamic State and sent to training camps, where they were indoctrinated into the group’s severe interpretation of Islam and trained to become soldiers. IS glorified its atrocities online in gruesome videos, propaganda magazines, and religious publications, emphasizing its commitment to eradicating Yazidi identity.” – Vicken Cheterian, “ISIS Genocide against the Yazidis and Mass Violence in the Middle East,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 1-7, doi:10.1080/13530194.2019.1683718.

Measured against the last century’s ethnic group civilian deaths, the war in Gaza has produced a far smaller death toll than the wars that shaped recent history. Yet few conflicts of comparable scale have generated such an extraordinary level of international media attention, UN action, street protests, and campus activism.

The conflict has spilled far beyond the battlefield. Around the world, Israelis and Jewish communities have increasingly become targets of hostility, harassment, and violence tied to the war. Whatever one’s views of the prosecution of the war, the global reaction has extended well beyond criticism of a government and the borders of Israel unlike every other conflict, raising profound questions about why this war has become so singular in international political and cultural life.

The numbers remind us that history matters. A world that loses its sense of proportion does not become more moral but selective, narrow and biased.

Related:

We Let Minorities Die In The Middle East (July 2025)

The Burden of Proof

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An Israeli strike destroys a warehouse beside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza. A crater remains. Medical supplies are scattered across the site.

Those facts are visible.

What the warehouse actually was is not.

Palestinian officials say it was a medical supplies warehouse. Israel says Hamas had turned the site into a weapons cache hidden beside the hospital.

Reuters reported both claims. But after Israel’s explanation came an important sentence:

“The Israeli military… did not provide any evidence.“

Fair enough. But where is the equivalent sentence for the Palestinian claim?

What evidence was presented that the warehouse contained only medical supplies? Who independently verified it was not also being used by Hamas? The reporting does not say.

Reuters and CNN took the Palestinian Authority version of events as plain facts but left a question outstanding about the Israeli account. The reader is left with one side making a factual assertion, while the other appears to be offering an unsupported excuse.

Journalists should demand evidence from Israel. They should also demand it from Palestinian authorities. If neither side has independently substantiated its account, then neither claim should receive a presumption of truth.

In war, the burden of proof should not belong to only one side. Journalism earns trust when it applies the same evidentiary standard to everyone.

Gaza Was Called “Hell on Earth” Long Before This War

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Long before the current war began, prominent advocates for the Palestinian cause were describing Gaza as “hell on earth.”

In January 2009, Palestinian Queen Rania of Jordan released a video for UNRWA titled “Hell on Earth.” Eight months later, speaking at UNRWA’s 60th anniversary, she recalled that video and lamented that Gaza was still “Hell on Earth.”

Palestinian Queen of Jordan Rania called Gaza “Hell on Earth” in 2009

In May 2021, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared, “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza today.”

When Israel began to respond to the war waged by Gazans in 2023, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Gaza had become “a living hell.” In January 2024, UN humanitarian coordinator Sigrid Kaag told the Security Council, “Gaza is hell on earth.”

The description has been remarkably consistent. What has often been missing is the question: Why?

Hell is not merely a place of suffering. It is a place where evil reigns.

Hamas violently seized Gaza in 2007 after defeating Fatah in a brief but brutal civil war. Fighters executed political rivals, threw some from rooftops, publicly brutalized opponents, and dragged the bodies of alleged collaborators through the streets. Those who challenged Hamas risked imprisonment, torture, or death. Independent political life disappeared, and an entire generation grew up under the rule of an armed Islamist movement that prioritized rockets, tunnels, and perpetual conflict over building a prosperous society.

Hamas drags a disloyal Gazan through the streets to his death

And Hamas was a known entity, a political party which won 56% of Palestinian parliament in elections with the most antisemitic political charter ever written. It remains the most popular political group to this day, expected to win Palestinian elections in every poll.

Calling Gaza “hell on earth” without acknowledging who built that system leaves the story unfinished. Should people want to transform the region, they must work to end the evil rule and worldview that turned part of the holy land into such a place in the first place.

Israel Is Surrounded by Failed States – and Failed States in Waiting

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Much of the discussion about Israel’s security focuses on borders, settlements, or ceasefires. Less attention is paid to a more fundamental reality: Israel is surrounded by governments that have failed – or have yet to demonstrate they can function as sovereign states.

To Israel’s north lies Lebanon, a country where the government spent years unable to enforce a monopoly on force within its own territory. While the Lebanese Army wore the national uniform, Hezbollah built an independent army, amassed an enormous missile arsenal, dug tunnels, launched drones, and ultimately dragged the country into war. A sovereign state that cannot control its own territory has surrendered one of the defining responsibilities of statehood.

Lebanese pound to Israeli shekel exchange rate, defaulting on debt in March 2020, enormous explosion in Beirut for stored Hezbollah weapons in August 2020. The bank devalued currency by 90% in February 2023 and again in February 2024

Next to Lebanon is Syria. More than a decade of civil war shattered the country’s institutions, fractured its territory among competing armed groups and foreign militaries, and left millions displaced. Syria has long stood as one of the clearest examples of state failure in the modern Middle East.

Syrian civil war killed nearly 600,000 and dispersed 13 million. It is now ruled by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani who headed ISIS in the region

To Israel’s south lies Gaza. Hamas spent years and billions of dollars to build an underground military fortress instead of a functional society. The result was war after war after war. Destruction and death.

Hamas on October 7, 2023 slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel and brought over 250 people as hostages into Gaza to cheering crowds.

In the West Bank, the picture is different but equally troubling. The Palestinian Authority maintains civil institutions in parts of the territory, yet it has never established a monopoly on force or unified governance. Rival armed factions continue to operate, political legitimacy remains deeply contested, and governance has been divided from Gaza for nearly two decades.

“recent poll shows a majority of Palestinians rejecting moderate leadership, despairing of peaceful change and now favouring armed struggle? That tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture is the result of the continued brutality of the occupation.” – James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute at the United Nations Security Council on June 27, 2023

The collapse of governance in the states surrounding Israel has turned the region into one of the world’s greatest concentrations of terrorist groups. This is the strategic reality Israel faces every day.

Its neighbors are not peaceful democracies with settled borders and accountable institutions. They are governments weakened by civil war, dominated by militias, or unable to establish unified authority. Israel is repeatedly asked to take security risks on the assumption that these entities will prevent terrorism and enforce agreements, even though their recent history demonstrates the opposite.

The tragedy is not only Israel’s. The greatest victims of failed governance are the Lebanese, Syrians, and Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) themselves. They deserve governments that build economies instead of militias, schools instead of tunnels, courts instead of armed factions, and national institutions instead of perpetual conflict.

Peace agreements are negotiated between states because states can make commitments and enforce them. Militias cannot. Failed governments cannot. A failed state in waiting cannot.

Until the governments surrounding Israel control their territory, uphold the rule of law, and prioritize their people over perpetual conflict, Israel’s security challenges will remain the consequence of failed governance, not simply hostile neighbors.

From Jesus the Jew to Gaza: The Vatican’s Dangerous Narrative

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For years, pro-Palestinian activists have promoted the false claim that Jesus was a Palestinian.

Jesus was a Jew, born to a Jewish family, living in the Jewish homeland, speaking to Jewish audiences, teaching from the Hebrew Bible, and making pilgrimages to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The word “Palestine” was not even the name of the province during His lifetime. The Roman renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina occurred about a century after His death.

Yet the claim persists because it serves an ahistorical but political purpose: If Jesus can be transformed from a Jew into a Arab, then the central figure of Christianity can be detached from Jewish history and reinserted into a modern political narrative. Suddenly, Jews are no longer obvious indigenous people in the Holy Land, but Arabs – who did not arrive en masse to region for another six centuries – are the real Jews.

The recent Vatican News article about Gaza takes that process one step further.

The article does not explicitly call Jesus a Palestinian. Instead, it wraps a Gazan narrative in the language of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. Gaza becomes the tomb. The refugee becomes the suffering servant. The journey out becomes resurrection.

The symbolism is unmistakable.

For centuries, Christians looked to the suffering of Jesus as a uniquely sacred story. Increasingly, anti-Israel agitators are attempting to woo parts of the Christian world by recasting that story through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian Arabs occupying the role once reserved for Christ Himself.

The war in Gaza did not begin with suffering descending from heaven. It began with decisions made by thousands of Gazans. Hamas invaded Israel, murdered civilians and took hostages. Hamas launched a war that it knew would bring devastating consequences to Gaza as it hid it tunnels and refused to let women and children enter the shelters.

Does that resemble Jesus?

Genocidal psychopaths are being transformed into the innocent sufferer. The political and military context disappears from view. Agency gives way to symbolism.

What makes this especially troubling for many Jews is that the institution promoting this narrative is no longer just fringe anti-Israel groups or university protest movements.

It is the Vatican itself.

For two thousand years, the Church has wrestled with the consequences of separating Christianity from its Jewish roots. In recent decades, Catholic-Jewish relations made enormous progress by reaffirming the Jewishness of Jesus and Christianity’s historical connection to the Jewish people.

That progress is undermined when contemporary narratives replace Jesus the Jew with a new symbolic figure: the Palestinian sufferer who cheered Jews being burned alive.