Written by: Ryan Thorson on October 13, 2025

Walking down the Mount of Olives, overlooking the city of peace, my heart and mind tried to picture what Jesus would have seen riding in on a donkey—the crowds and palms, the temple mount rising above the city. He knew He was coming to be rejected, even as the people cried for a savior. Pulling off the road, He sat down and wept over Jerusalem: “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:42). We stopped at the Church of Dominus Flevit, Our Lord Wept, and we gazed across to the Western Wall as the Muslim call to prayer echoed through the city, and we wept as well.

I have had the privilege of visiting the Holy Land four times as a pastor and seminary professor, leading trips and pilgrimages with people from around the world. Each visit deepens my sense of how heavy, tense, and sacred this “city of peace” truly is. History, longing, and conflict saturate its stones. So, when I reflect on the current violence between Israel and Gaza, even as hostages and prisoners continue to be exchanged, I do so with a deep awareness of its gravity. I am not Jewish or Palestinian, yet I carry a heart for these people because I believe Jesus carries a heart for them.

One afternoon in 2018, our group met with a Palestinian Christian pastor in Bethlehem. His church was small, pressed against the separation wall that cuts through the city. He told us how his congregation gathers each Sunday to pray not only for peace but for their enemies. As he spoke, children played soccer in the dusty lot beside us, the concrete wall towering over them. I remember thinking that these children were growing up in the shadow of a division they did not choose. His words and their laughter stayed with me. That day, I understood in a new way that faith in this land must be both courageous and costly.

My understanding of the conflict has been shaped by such moments: standing at checkpoints where soldiers inspect IDs, witnessing how walls divide not only land but opportunity and trust, and listening to Palestinian and Israeli Christians who insist that while their histories are ancient and divisive, their hope is bound in Yeshua, the Messiah. Their stories, alongside what I have studied, have helped me see this not as a problem with easy sides, but as a centuries-long wound in need of truth and healing.

History, Displacement, and Regional Realities

Both Jewish and Palestinian histories are stories of exile and return. Each people has endured oppression, and each sees its suffering as a claim to the land. I once stood in Independence Hall in Tel Aviv on the seventieth anniversary of David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of the State of Israel. Israel’s founders acted out of desperation as the British departed and hostile neighbors prepared to invade. They sought survival and succeeded, but their victory displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Most fled to Gaza or the West Bank, but Egypt and Jordan refused to absorb them, leaving them stateless.

Historian Howard Sachar notes that “the influx of refugees turned Gaza from a provincial backwater into a teeming camp of the dispossessed, where dependence upon international relief replaced the older subsistence economy” (A History of Israel, p. 332). Today, roughly two-thirds of Gazans descend from those 1948 refugees. In that sense, Gaza is both their homeland and their exile.

Egypt’s refusal to take them in is partly political. A 1950s Arab League resolution discouraged host nations from resettling Palestinian refugees in order to preserve their right of return. Egypt has also feared the spread of Islamist movements linked to Hamas. As Milton-Edwards and Farrell observe, “Egypt has alternated between mediation and strangulation, opening the Rafah crossing to ease pressure, then sealing it to contain Hamas” (Hamas: The Quest for Power, p. 102). Thus Gaza remains trapped between national identity and geopolitical calculation.

Hamas, October 7, and the Ethics of War

Hamas emerged in 1987 as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, blending Islamist ideology, social-welfare networks, political participation, and armed struggle. Its 1988 charter framed the conflict in religious and national terms, and though a 2017 document softened its language, it never renounced violence.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters breached Israel’s border, attacking villages and kibbutzim, killing more than a thousand civilians, and abducting about 250 hostages. The massacre, widely called the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, shattered any illusion of stability. Israel’s massive military response has since leveled large parts of Gaza and killed tens of thousands, many of them civilians.

Hamas had been democratically elected in 2006, but no elections have followed. Its early legitimacy has turned into authoritarian control. While Gazans initially voted for social reform and resistance to corruption, they have lived under coercive rule ever since. Holding an entire population morally responsible for its rulers is unjust, yet the absence of civic freedom within Gaza leaves little room for change.

After Israel’s 2005 disengagement, it withdrew soldiers and settlers but retained control of borders, airspace, and maritime access. Aid has remained tightly regulated. The result has been chronic dependency and resentment. Beneath the surface, Hamas constructed a vast tunnel network—the so-called “Gaza metro”—allowing movement of weapons and fighters beneath dense civilian areas.

Meanwhile, everyday life revolves around UNRWA schools, originally built in 1949 for temporary refugee education. They now teach nearly 300,000 students. To educate children in a refugee camp for seventy-five years is, as I often say, a moral indictment of the world’s failure to make peace. These schools embody both the resilience of Gaza’s people and the paralysis of global diplomacy.

Judging Israel’s Response

Moral evaluation must hold two truths in tension: Hamas’s acts were evil, and Israel’s response must still meet the standards of justice and restraint required by international law. The principle of jus in bello, right conduct in war, demands distinction between combatants and civilians and proportional use of force. Israel argues that its strikes target Hamas infrastructure embedded among civilians, while humanitarian agencies counter that the scale of destruction exceeds any justifiable military objective.

The International Court of Justice has stopped short of declaring genocide but has ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts and allow humanitarian aid. Human-rights organizations have documented extensive civilian casualties and the collapse of Gaza’s infrastructure. Comparisons to other urban wars, like Mosul and Raqqa, show that fighting militants in cities always brings devastation, yet even those precedents highlight the moral peril of prolonged siege warfare.

As Christians, our task is not to pronounce geopolitical verdicts but to pursue truthful compassion: to lament the slaughter of innocents on both sides and to name sin without losing empathy. The theologian Beth Felker Jones writes,

“On one side—you know the one—national Israel can do no wrong and the United States has an uncritical mandate to support Israel’s military at any cost, as if death weren’t evil, as long as it happens in Gaza. On the other side—you know this one too—any mention of the suffering of Israel is only an affront to suffering Palestinians, as if death weren’t evil when it’s sprung on settlers.”

Her words capture the tragic symmetry of a world that justifies violence through ideology rather than mourning it as evil. As disciples of Jesus, we must refuse both simplifications. Our moral clarity must never eclipse compassion. Truth must serve reconciliation, not vengeance.

Theological and Vocational Reflection

For followers of Jesus, this conflict exposes how easily religion, land, and identity become idols. The covenant with Abraham was meant to bless all nations, not divide them. Jesus wept over Jerusalem not because one side was right but because both were blind to what makes for peace. Paul envisioned a new humanity in Christ that breaks down the dividing wall of hostility (Ephesians 2:14).

Christian leadership in such a world requires disciplined lament, patient listening, and courageous truth-telling. We must resist simplistic narratives that baptize national interests in divine language. Our call is to stand with the suffering, Israeli and Palestinian alike, and to embody the reconciling love of Christ amid political hatred.

In pastoral ministry, that means modeling prayerful speech and empathy over outrage. It means acknowledging both Jewish trauma and Palestinian despair, while holding fast to the belief that every image-bearer of God is worthy of life and peace. In practical leadership it may look like fostering informed conversation in our churches, refusing anti-Semitism and Islamophobia alike, and inviting people to pray not for one side’s victory but for shalom, the flourishing of all.

Conclusion

The Israel–Gaza conflict is not a puzzle to be solved but a wound to be tended. Its history is tangled with faith, fear, and generational trauma. Yet the tears of Jesus on the Mount of Olives remind me that divine compassion still runs through this land. To be a Christian leader today is to carry that same heartbreak, to see beyond ideology toward the image of God in every neighbor, to speak truth with tenderness, and to pray for the day when both all people will finally know what brings them peace.

“Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.”

About the Author

Ryan Thorson

Follower of Jesus. Husband. Father. Pastor. Coach. I am passionate about helping people discover the gift of Sabbath and slow down spirituality in the context of our busy world.