Justin Amash, the first Palestinian American to serve as US Congress member, confirms several relatives killed
The first Palestinian American to serve as a US Congress member said he was grieving after several of his relatives were killed at a Greek Orthodox church in Gaza that authorities report was hit by an Israeli airstrike.
The first Palestinian American to serve as a US Congress member said he was grieving after several of his relatives were killed at a Greek Orthodox church in Gaza that authorities report was hit by an Israeli airstrike.
With great sadness, I have now confirmed that several of my relatives … were killed at Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza, where they had been sheltering, when part of the complex was destroyed as the result of an Israeli airstrike,” Amash wrote in a post that pictured whom he identified as two lost family members, Viola and Yara.
On Thursday evening, hundreds of Christians and Muslims were sheltering inside Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City when a missile took down part of the church, killing at least 16 people.
Israel’s military said in response it had damaged “a wall of a church” while hitting a Hamas “command and control center” nearby, but it denied deliberately targeting Saint Porphyrius.
Saint Porphyrius is less than 300 meters (nearly 1,000ft) from the al-Ahli hospital compound where an explosion on Tuesday killed and injured hundreds of people who had fled there to escape Israeli airstrikes.
Amash’s lamentation over his late relatives was one of two statements he made on Friday about the war that Israel launched in retaliation for the 7 October attack by Hamas, in which 1,400 were killed as they overran military posts, murdered civilians in their homes and took nearly 200 hostages.
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