CHICAGO, September 15, 2025 (WAFA) – A number of Christian Americans and Palestinians have recently organized a series of events in the United States denouncing the Gaza genocide.
Speaking at the “Christ at the Crossroads” conference held in Glen Ellyn, a town in the suburbs of Chicago, at least 550 Christians of all denominations, many of whom had Palestinian keffiyehs draped across their shoulders, stressed the need to move beyond sympathy and prayer toward taking concrete steps to support the Palestinian people and to stop Israel’s unrelenting genocidal aggression in the Gaza Strip.
Israel has been waging an ongoing genocidal aggression on Gaza since October 2023, killing at least 64,905 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 164,926 others.
The three-day event, intended to “move American Christians from feeling bad about the war in Gaza to taking action to end it,” featured several Palestinian Christian speakers, including 25-year-old Lydia El-Sayegh, theologian Daniel Bannoura, Anton Tony Deik, a Palestinian Christian in Bolivia, and Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor based in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem.
In his intervention before the conference, Bannoura said that because America has supported Israel’s military operations in Gaza, being passive is not an option. “If you are not doing anything, you are doing something,” he said. “If you are in the U.S., then you are complicit.”
In his remarks, Isaac said: “Despite the overwhelming evidence, this genocide continues to be supported, justified, and even denied by some in the church.”
“The church is complicit,” he added, to shouts of “yes!” from the audience.
“Christian Zionism presents a tribal, violent, exclusionary God, let's call it for what it is,” he continued. “It has replaced Jesus with a secular, genocidal state”.
The Red Letter Christians booth is handing out big stickers that say, “God loves Gaza”.
Meanwhile, the Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs welcomed such a Christian initiative in the United States, noting that it represents the voice of human conscience and aligns with the committee’s continuous calls to support the Palestinian people, protect Christian and Islamic holy sites, and work earnestly to end the occupation and achieve justice and peace.
K.F.
