One family’s struggle to survive in Gaza

Written by
Doug Hostetter, Member of the Pax Christi International United Nations Team 
In cooperation with  
Amgad Al-Mhalwi, Staff of Al-Najd Developmental Forum

March 2024

Before joining the Pax Christi Advocacy Team at the United Nations, I directed the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) United Nations Office in New York for more than a decade and co-chaired the Israel/Palestine NGO Working Group Israel/Palestine at the UN. MCC supported several NGOs that were doing relieve, development and peace work in Israel and Palestine. On visits to Gaza, I became friends with several staff members of Al-Najd Developmental Forum, one of the MCC supporting NGOs with headquarters in Gaza City. Al-Najd, with Mennonite support, helped Gazan families develop home gardens and raise rabbits & chickens.

I have kept in touch with two of the Al-Najd staff over the years through Facebook Messenger. After the Hamas attack on October 7 and the Israelis response of massive bombing, I soon learned that in the early bombing the building that housed Al-Najd was completely destroyed and Mostafa Al-Naffar, one of my staff friends there had also been killed.  My remaining friend, Amgad Al-Mhalwi, who has worked at Al-Najd for 17 years, has continued sending me updates on his family.  

Amgad’s family, originally from Hamama (25 miles north of Gaza), but in 1948 Israeli military forces drove the family out of Hamama to the Nuseirt refugee camp near Gaza City, in what the Palestinians call the “Nakba” (“the catastrophe,” when during the creation of the state of Israel, the Israeli army forced the evacuation of more than 400 Palestinian villages).  Amgad (36) and his wife Qamer (25), both former university students, married five years ago and now have two boys, Majd (4) and Ibrahim (2 and a half).  Amgad and Qamer lived with his extended family of about 50 people in a compound of houses near Gaza City.  When the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) ordered everyone to leave northern Gaza in the first week of the war, several of Amgad’s extended family were killed while trying to travel to the south as ordered.  Amgad decided that it was safer to shelter in the north rather than getting killed trying to go south.  

“We left our house first to my aunt’s house, then to my uncle’s house, then to my wife’s family’s house, then to Al-Huda School in the Sheikh Radwan area, and after that, Ramez Luxury School, then Musab bin Omair School, and the finally to Umar bin Aas School.”

 Each time that they moved, it was because of shelling and bombing in that area, but actually there was no safe place to go.  

The Umar bin Aas school was already overcrowded but Amgad found a classroom on the third floor of the school (about 5 X 5 meters) which provided a safe, if crowded, refuge for the 55 people of Amgad’s extended family.

The school seemed secure until November 19, when the IDF moved into the area and started shelling.  

“My brother, the shells were everywhere. They were all around, next to the school. Many of the children who were in the school courtyard were injured and died. A shell came behind the school and people began to flee under the bombardment.

We said, ‘What do we do? Where do you go under heavy bombardment?’ We decided it was safest to stay in school. 

I was just outside the classroom door when, shortly after the afternoon prayer, at 3:20 PM a tank shell hit the classroom wall sending shrapnel throughout the classroom. The explosion blew me away from the door, and when I reentered the classroom, it was full of blood and screaming.

My beautiful father is dead, and my uncle’s wife does was not moving, and my sister’s neck was sliced open. I am crying, and my brother was praying, he died while praying. My wife face is bloody, her whole body is covered in blood. She is crying and screaming, and my children are crying and screaming, my whole family is screaming. I was in shock, uninjured and watching everyone scream.  

The most beautiful people in the world died that day. My father, the most affectionate person in the world, my brother who loved my children so much. My sister, who in my heart was more like my daughter, and my aunt was the 4^thmember of my family to die in that room.

Thirty people were killed in the school that day and over a hundred were wounded.  Three shells hit the school while we were there, and a 4^th exploded as we were fleeing, and I don’t know how many hit later.

I carried my two children and took my wife, sister, and brother to the nearest medical clinic.

My older brother told me that he would bury my dead family members. I was unable to say goodbye to any of them. The bombs and shells were falling, and I had to try to get my children to safety. 

It was the worst day of my life. 

Both of my boys had been in the room by their mother when the shell hit that night. They had witnessed their grandfather, their uncle, and their aunt being killed, with blood all over everyone in the classroom.  My sister was bleeding profusely from her neck, my cousin had his hand severed, and shrapnel had destroyed both of my brother’s eyes. The boys were screaming, quaking in fear and peeing in their pants”.  

I did not hear from Amgad for a month and a half and was worried that he and his family had been killed in the massive bombing.  Amgad and family miraculously had made their way, mostly walking, the 20 miles from Gaza City to Rafah on the Egyptian border. I finally got a short message: 

“We are in Rafah. My family is tired, sick and cold. We do not even have a tent to live in”.  

Amgad eventually was able to buy a nylon tent for $400, but there was no heat, and food and water were very hard to find.

“The children became sick. We need psychological support and food. We are very tired. We long to return to our homes, even though they are destroyed.

The experience of that night in the bloody classroom has changed my boys. Najd now always wants to sleep with Amgad and Ibrahim always wants to sleep with Qamer. When the boys heard bombing, they wet their pants and ran terrified to their parents. If they see red, even a piece of clothing, they run away screaming, blood, blood, blood”.

On February 12 the Israeli Defense Forces rescued two Israeli hostages in Gaza. To distract from the IDF operation to rescue the hostages, they bombed and shelled other areas of Rafah killing at least 67 Palestinian women and children. 

Amgad and his family were living in a nylon tent in Rafah that night, February 12th.

“Tonight was very difficult
Very strong bombardment
I saw my son Majd trying to hide from the bombing
He was trembling as he tried to hide his face in the ground, thinking that if no one could see him, he wouldn’t die.

Food, money, water for me, that’s ok, but here we are not safe. We need safety. 
Please pressure your government to end this war and the occupation.”

Fred van Iersel and the importance of study and prayer for peace-activists – Gied ten Berge

“PAX for Peace” in the Netherlands is 75 years old. From his commitment, theologian Fred van Iersel felt heir to this peace movement. For two years he was general secretary of one of the ‘forerunners’ Pax Christi NL, combining it with a professorship for issues of spiritual care in the armed forces. Earlier, he was a Catholic council member in the Dutch IKV (Interkerkelijk Vredesberaad / Interchurch Peace Council, PAX’s other constituent). Gied ten Berge held intensive talks with Van Iersel during his illness until his death on 27 July 2023. Fred van iersel would have liked to write a kind of ‘testament’ for the peace movement, but death intervened. Ten Berge wrote the draft for such a text and, after consulting with his widow Marieke Feuth, he reworked it into his own.

Full text available here.

Fred van Iersel (1954-2023) in his last stage of life on the beach of Schiermonnikoog, Netherlands.
Image by: Gied ten Berge

Nicaragua Bishop Rolando José Álvarez sentenced for raising his voice in the face of injustice !

Source : https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/253648/imprisoned-nicaraguan-bishop-deserves-us-support-religious-freedom-advocates-say

Brussels, February 15th, 2023

Pax Christi International, a global movement for peace and nonviolence, is deeply concerned about the unjust sentence of 26 years imprisonment handed down by the Appeals Court of Managua, Nicaragua against the Bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando José Álvarez, for allegedly engaging in treason, undermining national integrity, and spreading false news. Bishop Alvarez has actively advocated for civil and political rights, including for freedom of expression, conscience, and religion, and for the protection of human rights.

Pax Christi expresses its solidarity as well with the Catholic bishops’ conference of Nicaragua, which has been similarly subject to prosecution and harassment for taking positions in support of civil and political rights.

We pray for those who are striving with great effort to build a more just and peaceful Nicaragua. We stand in solidarity with the Catholic Church and other faith-based and civil society organizations calling for genuine democracy grounded in international human rights standards.

Pax Christi International is a plural faith-based peace network, promoting peace, respect for human rights, justice, ecological sustainability, and reconciliation for almost eight decades

#pci #paxchristiinternational #peace #humanrights #nicaragua #rolandoalvarez

To dowload our statement in english, press here !

Para descargar nuestra declaración en inglés, pulse aquí !

Reflection on guns and security

This blog post originally appeared on the Mennonite Church USA website.

By Doug Hostetter

Doug Hostetter is the peace pastor at Evanston Mennonite Church (which he attends digitally), and is the associate representative of Pax Christi International to the United Nations in New York City.

105 Howitzer, Tam Ky, Vietnam, 1968. Photo by Doug Hostetter.

Many Mennonite homes in Harrisonburg, Virginia, had guns in the 1950’s. No, we were not worried about “personal protection” —  most of our neighbors never even bothered to lock their doors — but we lived on the edge of farmland, surrounded by wonderful state parks. Like most of my male friends, I grew up owning guns and looked forward to hunting season in the fall. I was totally comfortable around guns. I had been taught gun safety by an older Mennonite neighbor before I was allowed to buy my first rifle. The first and most important lesson always was: Never point a gun, loaded or unloaded, at another person. Guns were to be used for target practice, until one learned to use them accurately, and then, for hunting, carefully following safety precautions so that one didn’t accidently kill a protected animal or injure another hunter. Our Mennonite faith taught us that personal safety comes not from guns and locked doors but from personal relationships that can be built, even with one’s enemy, through integrity, trust and vulnerability.

After graduating from Eastern Mennonite College (now University) in 1966, I filed for and received conscientious objector status. As this was the middle of the Vietnam War and men of my generation were being drafted and sent to Vietnam against their will, I felt it was only just that I volunteer to do my alternative service in Vietnam as well, but I served with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). MCC at that time was the director of Vietnam Christian Service (VNCS), which also included volunteers from Church World Service and Lutheran World Relief. I was assigned to start a VNCS unit in Tam Ky, Quang Nam, in central Vietnam, where the heaviest U.S. military activity was taking place at that time. Our primary project was a literacy program that utilized 90 Vietnamese high school students to teach 4,000 refugee children how to read and write their own language, after the schools in their home villages had been destroyed by the American Air Force.

Experiencing life in Vietnam during the war was a total shock to my system.

Wall around the VNCS house. Photo by MCC.

I had grown up feeling very comfortable and safe around guns, which were being used responsibly by neighbors for hunting. Now, I was in a country at war, with nearly a half-million American soldiers bristling with guns that were designed for killing other human beings.

I learned a lot about protection and guns during my three years in a war zone. When I visited Tam Ky to explore whether VNCS should start a unit there, I had been informed by the American officials that the only safe place for me to stay in Tam Ky would be in one of the U.S. government compounds. There were three options: the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam (MACV); the CIA compound; or the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) compound. All three compounds were heavily walled and guarded with land mines and machine gun posts.

Wall around the USAID compound. Photo by Doug Hostetter.

I stayed in the USAID compound, but I soon realized that I could not remain there. Vietnamese people were allowed to come into and leave the USAID compound during the day, but at night, all Vietnamese people — except prostitutes — were expelled, and Americans were not allowed to leave the compound in the evening. I realized that, if I was there as a Christian peace witness to the Vietnamese people, I could not live in a U.S. Government compound, where I could not interact freely with Vietnamese people. When I returned to start the VNCS unit in Tam KY, I and one other VNCS volunteer moved into one of the dorm rooms of the local Catholic high school that the priest had built for students whose homes were far from the school.

Eventually VNCS was able to rent a small bungalow across the street from the Catholic high school for our unit house. I will never forget the advice we received from the woman who rented us the bungalow. Mrs. An explained that, occasionally, the National Liberation Front (NLF, which the Americans called the VC) would briefly take over Tam Ky. She pointed out that, since the house was fenced in by only a small four-foot wall, we could add a steel gate, a few rolls of concertina barbed wire for the front and top of the wall, and a 50-caliber machine gun for the front yard. That, she thought, would be adequate protection, so that when the NLF guerrillas came into town, we could hold them off with the 50-caliber until the U.S. Marines arrived to rescue us. No, I explained, that was not how we wanted to live. We never put a gate in that four-foot wall, and everyone in the village knew that we had no weapons. Our only protection was a small sign “Vietnam Christian Service” (in Vietnamese), with a peace dove and a cross. The VNCS house was the only place in Tam Ky where Americans lived outside of walled and guarded compound. I lived in Tam Ky for three years. The National Liberation Front took over the village — often for only a few hours in the middle of the night — about a dozen times. Each time that the NLF entered Tam Ky, they attacked the heavily guarded MACV, the CIA and the USAID compounds, but the VNCS bungalow, the one unprotected place where Americans lived, was never attacked.

I came to realize that most people in a war kill
to keep the enemy from killing them first.

When it was clear to everyone that we had no weapons, and in fact could not even protect ourselves, we were no longer a threat; we were not feared and many Vietnamese people, on both sides of that war, became our friends.

My attitude towards guns has changed drastically since Vietnam. I have seen, up close and personal, the way military weapons destroy the human body. It astounds me that my country, or any nation, would allow civilians to purchase military style automatic rifles, like the AR-15 or the AK-47. These automatic rifles were specifically designed for war — to kill and or seriously maim people.

Why would any government allow the sale of automatic rifles to the civilian population, and why would any decent person want to own such a weapon?

I am not philosophically opposed to hunting, and some of my brothers still do, but since returning from Vietnam, I have not been able to bring myself to reassemble my boyhood .22 caliber rifle, which I had carefully disassembled and stored before I left for Vietnam, over 50 years ago. I do know, both from the Sermon on the Mount and personal experience, that true safety comes not from higher walls or bigger guns but from the refusal of weapons and hostility, which can enable trust and friendship whether with neighbors at home or enemies abroad.

PCI’s UN representative Doug Hostetter shares his path of nonviolence

Listen to the part one of the interview with Doug.

Listen to the second part of the interview with Doug.

Pax Christi International has been fortunate to have Doug Hostetter as part of our team of volunteers at the United Nations in New York for several years.

Doug, a Mennonite and conscientious objector, served in the middle of a hot zone during the Vietnam War supporting the people who lived there. He shared his incredible story with Alan Winson and Rebecca McKean with Bar Crawl Radio in mid-June 2022.

In the second part of the interview, Doug describes his daily activities in and around the Tam Ky battle zone during the Vietnam War – his interaction with the U.S. American Marines and a very different relationship with U.S. officers who saw his positive work with the local population – as sapping GI morale. This led to a decision he had to make when he learned that the CIA was putting out rumors that could lead to his assassination. He describes surviving the violence of the two-week TET offensive of 1968 and the human devastation that he witnessed afterwards.

Doug’s experiences in Vietnam established his life path working for peace throughout the world: in Nicaragua during the Contra War, in Iraq with his attempts to prevent the First Gulf War by trading a plane-full of medicine with the Iraqis for U.S. citizens and UN hostages, and his work to save Bosnian students from genocide in the 1990s.

Listen to the part one of the interview with Doug.Listen to the second part of the interview with Doug.

In a world rife with intense violence, this story of a man of nonviolence should be heard.

Hohourongo: Reconciliation and Peace Making

The following is a contribution to our Peace Stories blog and to the Pax Christi International movement from our friends in Aotearoa (New Zealand). This is a contextual theological contribution on peace making. Photo: Pedro Szekely via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Led by Kevin McBride, our Pax Christi Aotearoa New Zealand section thinks it is important that we develop a spirituality of peace that is right for our part of the world and that there is much we can learn from Māori as the indigenous people of our country. To be in dialogue with Māori about these things is a way of addressing the harm and disrespect that was generated by colonisation. It is a dialogue that restores healing to all in our country.

At a recent study on Pax Christi and a Spirituality for Peace, Rangi Davis shared this lovely reflection on the Māori concept of Hohourongo. It is a model she uses in her teaching and counselling practice. Rangi explained that to move along the pathway to hohourongo, other important Māori principles are needed, namely, tika, pono, and aroha working alongside tapu, mana, noa and turanga (see explanations below). Rangi’s understandings developed under the guidance of Pa Henare Tate (Rev. Dr. Henare Tate) who was a preeminent scholar and teacher of Māori theology and spirituality.

Hohourongo

The imagery is:

picking up the pieces, putting together again, binding the wounds,

healing the wounds, mending the rifts, re-connecting the severed links,

 replacing the lost, empowering, reclaiming wellness,

reclaiming relationships, balancing the scales,

casting off the rubbish, entering the house of Rongo (Peace)

Hohourongo indicates a violation has occurred to Atua, tangata and whenua (God, people and land) and there is need for restoring tapu and mana through reconciliation or settlement. Hohourongo heals and restores wellbeing to people. The restoring of spiritual wellbeing restores psychological wellness and physical health. Violation severs relationships. Hohourongo re-connects and strengthens the severed three-fold relationship with God, people and land.

Violation ignores and tramples upon tapu restrictions and weakens the power of that safety measure. Hohourongo restores to tapu boundaries the power to safeguard the tapu and mana of all things that exist.

Hohourongo and tika, pono and aroha

Violation is the result of failing to act according to tika, pono and aroha.

Tika is needed to re-establish and maintain right relationships to make right responses and for the right exercise of mana by following the process of hohourongo.

Pono in the first place reveals the reality of the act and the effect of violation on the victim and perpetrator and their whānau (family, community). Secondly, it reveals the reality of the damage done. Thirdly it ensures all steps are taken to repair the damage. Fourthly, if there is no truth or integrity, hohourongo is not effected.

Aroha must always be a part of hohourongo because there is always need for compassion, sacrifice, generosity, and even affection during the process of victim, perpetrator and whānau.

Elements for Hohourongo

Admission, sorrow for the violation, resolve to mend and make right, utu or compensation is required of the perpetrator.

Signs/Whakamā, tears, sorrow, maybe relief.

The victim and whānau can determine the format of the hui hohourongo.

Acceptance of confession, sorrow, admission of guilt and utu, the compensation, granting forgiveness if hohourongo is to be achieved.

Signs/ Maybe tears, karakia, hariru and hongi.

Kua houtia te rongo – reconciliation has been achieved.

Kua tau te rangimarie – peace has been established.

I end with this Psalm 119:10:

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light to my path.”

“Ma te tini me te mano kia taea” With all our contributions we can achieve it.

Arohanui, Rangi

The Essence of Peace for Aotearoa

It is very important as we in Pax Christi Aotearoa-New Zealand explore the foundations of our work for peace, along with other sections and associates across the world, that we ground our principles in the vital essence of the land, the taha wairua of its Tangata Whenua, the Maori people. 

And while it is fully appropriate that we do this, it is also very much in the spirit of the founder of the Pax Christi movement, Marthe Dortel-Claudot, who saw it as a means of reconciliation and of mending the divisions that had been caused by years of warfare among European neighbours. In a similar way, we can heal the wounds of colonisation in our own land and become a sign of hope to others in our region and beyond engaged in working for peace for all, everywhere.

In the spirit of justice, love and peace

Kevin McBride