Jartz | #FREEPALESTINE🇵🇸

I know that Yoseph Haddad is lying or misinformed because I’m a Christian from Gaza. My family is sheltering in the Holy Family church, not from Hamas, but from Israeli airstrikes that murdered my cousin at St. Porphyrius. It wasn’t Hamas that murdered my great aunt Elham who only wanted to return home. She was sniped and left to bleed to death. The Red Cross wasn’t given permission to rescue her. And last week we discovered a tank had run her over and flattened her body. We don’t know if she was still alive when it happened. It wasn’t Hamas that murdered Nahida and Samar Anton, my family friends, when snipers shot them and seven others in the church courtyard. It wasn’t Hamas that confiscated our lands in 1948 when my grandfather’s home was destroyed by the Haganah. Hamas didn’t even exist until 39 YEARS after we were expelled from our homes and 20 YEARS after the military occupation of Gaza. It wasn’t Hamas that bulldozed my family’s orchards in 2004. It wasn’t Hamas that prevented my relatives from travelling to Bethlehem to pray at the Nativity, or Jerusalem to pray at the Holy Sepulchre for Easter. All my relatives and family friends who left Gaza did so because they couldn’t stand the suffocation under the illegal blockade. And the truth is, we’re part of the middle and upper-middle class of Gaza; we have the means to leave. And many have relatives in the “West” and in the Gulf states that they can go to. Many of the Muslim upper-middle class also left, just as they did when Zionist forces began their ethnic cleansing operations in December 1947. Despite that, I have relatives right now in the church who refuse to leave. Who will not let the cleansing of Palestine happen again to them. They say - proudly - we are Palestinians. We were born here, and we will do everything in our power to remain here. So stop speaking for us. Stop putting our lives at further risk. And stop participating in our persecution.