Two Gaza City churches stand in areas affected by Israeli evacuation orders ahead of a planned assault. The Holy Family Church shelters nearly 550 displaced people, including Fouad Abu Youssef and his extended family, who have lived in the church for over a year after losing homes and burying relatives in the fighting. The church survived a tank shell strike in July that killed and wounded people. Other churches were placed in evacuation zones, but many sheltering at Holy Family refuse to leave due to mistrust of the military and repeated attacks on places of worship.
In the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, Fouad Abu Youssef, 34, wears a tattered, worn-out shirt as he sifts through a heap of salvaged clothes, remnants of what had been his home, hoping to find a change of clothes for his five-year-old daughter, Layla. In the past two years of Israel's war on Gaza, Fouad, a member of Gaza's small Christian minority, has buried his sister after an air strike and seen his own home and his family's house in Gaza City's Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood collapse.
Although the Holy Family Church was not placed by Israel in the zones marked for expulsions, the other churches in Gaza City, including the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius and the Anglican St Philip's Church, were. But the nearly 550 displaced people sheltering in the Holy Family Church still mistrust the Israeli military. The church has been attacked so many times before despite Israeli guarantees that it does not target places of worship.
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