Jenan Taylor
15 June 2025
Australian Christians looking for ways to ease the suffering in Palestine and Israel are being urged to continue praying for peace and supporting relief efforts as thousands die in Gaza.
Faith leaders are encouraging Christians to strengthen the capacity of organisations to deliver emergency aid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as one way to potentially save lives.
It comes as faith and human rights groups globally, including the Church of England, condemned the atrocities Israel was inflicting in the strip.
These include denying food, clean water and critical medicines to more than two million civilians, and accelerating attacks on healthcare centres, such as the Anglican al-Ahli hospital.
Relief groups, including Caritas Australia, warned that children, women and girls, the elderly and people with disabilities, and those being treated for cancer and serious illnesses, bore the brunt of the horror.
Read more: Growing urgency for medicine, water, aid in Gaza as ceasefire end looms
Religious leaders said more people of faith were describing feeling heartbroken about the scale of the suffering in the region and the international community’s inaction, as Israel continued to bombard Gaza.
These observations gelled with recent aid agency poll findings that more than 80 per cent of Australians saw the deprivation of food, medicine and water to civilians in Gaza as unjustifiable.
Most poll participants expected the Australian government to do more to support unhindered access to these necessities.
But Melbourne Anglican and social justice activist Irene Donohoue-Clyne said she had written to her local parliamentary representatives to press for change in the Palestinian territories for more than 50 years, and had never received a reply.
Dr Donohoue-Clyne said she advocated for the rights of Palestinians because she was committed to social change, justice and peace.
She was especially concerned about the safety and welfare of friends in the West Bank amid escalating violence from illegal settlers and the Israeli military there.
Read more: Anglicans hope Al-Ahli hospital funds will save lives in Gaza
Dr Donohoue-Clyne was aware many church-goers were also increasingly unsettled about what was unfolding in the region, but believed they had given up writing to politicians to press for change.
She suspected many individuals felt powerless to make a difference, because they didn’t see how their thoughts and calls for meaningful action could be made real.
Melbourne Bishop and Religions for Peace committee member Philip Huggins said parishioners often asked how they should pray or act with respect to the situation in Gaza.
He said it was important that people who felt anguished about responding considered carefully the intense and widespread distress that resulted from the October 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas, because the issue affected social cohesion.
Bishop Huggins said faith leaders of varying backgrounds had been debating with difficulty how to respond.
He said like many other migrants, leaders from Jewish and Muslim backgrounds had come to Australia seeking a place that didn’t have the kinds of problems they had faced in their origin countries.
Alongside this, they were grappling with their familial and cultural links to their origin communities.
“Tribal allegiances can make people feel intensely when they’re away from the place they loved so, and the pain of the people they know is their pain,” Bishop Huggins said.
“I know Jewish people whose families experienced the Holocaust and who thought Australia was going to be a safe place, and then some of terrible reaction after the intense suffering from October 2023 has unsettled them.
“On the other hand, there are Muslim people who night after night see the routine killing of people captive in Gaza and Palestine. That’s the tension that people feel very deeply.
“It’s testing people in ways they never have before. While some leaders will say ‘There should be a mediated conversation’, others then ask ‘How can there be a mediated conversation when there is a genocide going on?’”
Bishop Huggins said it was too hard to wash away this tension, but there were ways to act with care and support civilians caught in the situation.
One way was through bolstering the capacity of humanitarian organisations working in Gaza and supporting programs specifically designed to help hospitals there alleviate suffering and save lives.
This included financially supporting al-Ahli hospital through the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, and humanitarian organisations Anglican Overseas Aid and Anglican Board of Mission.
Melbourne diocese Social Responsibilities Committee chair the Reverend Gordon Preece said it was vital that people prayed and developed connections with groups that worked for peace.
These included organisations, such as the Bethlehem Bible College, that were already on the ground in the occupied territories, knew the situation well and could provide factual knowledge about the happenings.
Dr Preece said the SRC was teaming with a range of faith and civil society groups to advocate for policies that reduced the armed violence in Gaza and other parts of the world.
Organised by Quakers Australia, the campaign aimed to highlight Australia’s weapons trade, and included exploring its alleged role in Israel’s human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories.
Read more: Christians condemn bombing of Gaza Anglican hospital
He believed this was an important issue for Christians to raise because they were meant to be committed to peace.
Dr Preece said that necessitated being actively engaged in seeking and making peace, as Jesus taught, rather than being passive about it.
Quakers Australia peace worker Jessica Morrison said it was possible for Christians who were frustrated by the inaction of the international community to make a difference where the scale of suffering was overwhelming.
She said individually it was difficult to achieve change, but when people acted together in spiritual communities, they could accomplish things even if the odds felt insurmountable.
Ms Morrison said working together gave Christians the spiritual imperative to keep going and realise that their purpose was not necessarily to complete the work, but to not desist from doing it either.
“Our role is not to fix it, but to be faithful to do the bit that we can do,” Ms Morrison said.
“It’s about persistence … and knowing that everything matters to the people who are suffering, and everything matters in terms of opposing the horrors, and we need each other to be able to do this.
“It’s an horrific marathon because people in the church don’t just care about Gaza. They don’t just care about Sudan and about Syria. We must keep yearning and working for a non-violent world, but we can’t do it alone.”
You can contribute here to the work of Anglican Overseas Aid, Anglican Board of Mission, and Caritas Australia in the Palestinian territories.
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