(WARREN, MI) — Nearly 50 Palestinian-American Christians from the Taybeh American Youth Association (TAYA) attended St. Sharbel Maronite Catholic Church on Sunday, to pray for the victims of the Palestinian-Israeli clashes over the last few weeks, which have claimed the lives of hundreds of Gazans.
TAYA is a nonprofit cultural organization that was created to reconnect Palestinian-Americans from Taybeh, Palestine to their cultural roots. Taybeh is a Palestinian village in the West Bank, 15 kilometers northeast of Jerusalem.
The memorial mass recognized one of Taybeh’s residents, Jalila Khourieh, who was killed by Israeli aggression, according to th
e group.
“(Khourieh) is the first Christian woman that was martyred in Gaza. Her son lost both legs and her husband is in a coma at this time,” said TAYA president August Awwad.
Awwad, who was born in Jersualem, says he visited Gaza in recent years and called it “one of the poorest cities on earth.” He also called the ongoing clashes “very sad.”
“We wanted to have special services for all the innocent children that were slaughtered by the Israeli army and their savage way of indiscriminate killing,” he told Lebanese Examiner following the mass.
Juliette Boutros brought her family to pray for Gazan victims. They, like many other Palestinian-American parishioners, wore the trademark Palestinian keffiyeh around their necks.
“I want to get the word out that there are innocent human beings being killed and people are only seeing one side of the story,” Boutros said. “These are innocent people caught in this war and they’ve lost everything — no food, no water, no clothes on their backs, dead children, dead women.”
Boutros called on other ethnic communities to join in united prayer.
“We have to come together as a community — Lebanese, Palestinian, Chaldean — and pray, not only for the Gazans, for the Lebanese, and for the Iraqi Christians,” she said.
Awwad remains hopeful that unity between cultures and religions will help Gazans move forward. In one particular case, Awwad said the Archbishop in Gaza told the Muslim Imam that if their mosque is bombed, they could use the church as a place of worship.
“This shows you that in Palestine, as well as in Lebanon, there is no difference between Muslims and Christians,” he said. “This is something that people are trying to use in order to make people believe that this is a religious war rather than an occupation. This is an occupation that has been going on for 60 years.”