North Texas leaders representing a range of religious traditions gathered Thursday to condemn the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
More than a dozen speakers attended a news conference at the Wyndham DFW Airport hotel in Irving, including Methodist, Lutheran and Mennonite pastors; imams; representatives from several Muslim advocacy and civil rights groups; and two doctors who had returned from trips to Gaza in the past month.
Speakers said their faith compelled them to speak about Palestinian suffering in Gaza.
“Religious leaders, activists and community advocates of diverse faith traditions all come together to raise a united moral voice against the deliberate starvation and suffering of innocent civilians, particularly children in Gaza,” said Mustafaa Carroll, D-FW executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which helped organize the event.
Nearly 63,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. The agency said that 71 people were killed by Israeli strikes in the past day, The Associated Press reported, while scores more were injured. While the ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants, it says more than half of the dead are women and children.
The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The United Nations and independent experts consider it the most reliable source on war casualties, according to the AP. Israel disputes its figures but has not provided its own, the AP said Thursday.
Hamas-led militants abducted 251 people and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel that triggered the war. Most of the hostages have been released in ceasefires or other deals. Of the 50 remaining in Gaza, Israel believes around 20 are alive, according to the AP.
Conference speakers called attention to the killing of journalists and famine in parts of Gaza.
Dr. Bilal Piracha, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at UT Health East Texas, said he’d taken three medical trips to Gaza, most recently last month. He condemned a recent Israeli strike on a hospital that the AP said targeted Pulitzer Prize winning Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif.
Hospital officials told the AP that those killed while sheltering outside the Shifa hospital, the largest hospital complex in Gaza City, also included Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, four other journalists and two other people.
Carroll, with CAIR, called for increased media access to Gaza, where Israel has barred international journalists from entering since October 2023. “We want increased media accessibility to responsibly amplify the truth on the ground and to humanize the victims,” he said.
Speakers also called attention to widespread hunger in Gaza. The world’s leading authority on food crises said Friday that Gaza Strip’s largest city is gripped by famine, and that it’s likely to spread across the territory without a ceasefire and an end to restrictions on humanitarian aid.
Imams, pastors, and lay people of faith said their faith traditions compelled them to speak out against widespread starvation in Gaza. The Rev. Eric Folkerth, senior pastor of Kessler Park United Methodist Church, said North Texas UMC leaders passed a resolution in June calling the Israeli response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks “grossly disproportionate.”
He said he supported cutting military aid to Israel, saying the country was acting beyond the moral boundaries of a nation-state. But Folkerth also said Israel had a right to exist. “We can support our Jewish friends and neighbors while also demanding that the humanitarian needs of those in Gaza be met,” he said.
Critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have accused him of prolonging the Israel-Hamas war for political reasons. Netanyahu blames Hamas, which still holds around 20 living hostages, for the ongoing conflict, and says criticism of Israel’s wartime conduct is only making the militant group more intransigent.
Muhammad Abdullah, an imam at Dallas’ Masjid al-Islam, said the situation in Gaza ought to be unacceptable not only to Muslims, but to Christians, Jews and any human being. “They’re being bombed in their tents; as they seek health in hospitals, they’re being bombed in the hospitals; as they go to pray, not just in mosques, but in churches, they’re being bombed in the churches; as they go to humanitarian aid sites to get food, they’re being bombed and shot there, killed indiscriminately,” he said of the people of Gaza.
“Despite that, Palestinians still have hope in their hearts,” Abdullah said.
“Why? Because they have faith.”