Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has compared Israel to the world’s most notorious terrorist group over the IDF’s missile attack on a Christian church.
“The bombing of the historical Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza, where women and children had taken shelter, is the latest crime on the part of the occupying apartheid regime,” Amir-Abdollahian wrote in an X post. “The savagery of this pariah regime and its acts of aggression and desecration of divine religions as well as its onslaught against the historical and cultural heritage of humanity are similar to those of uncivilized terror groups and Daesh (ISIS)*,” he added.
Completed in the year 1160 and named after the 5th century bishop of Gaza of the same name, Saint Porphyrius Church is the oldest continuously used church in the Gaza Strip, and is situated in the heart of the historic part of Gaza City.
Israel acknowledged its responsibility for Thursday’s strike on one of the church’s campuses, with the IDF saying in a statement Friday that the “incident is under review,” and that the military could “unequivocally state that the church was not the target.”
Gaza is home to three churches – Saint Porphyrius, which is Greek Orthodox, the Gaza Baptist Church for Evangelical and Protestant Christians, and the Roman Catholic Holy Family Church. All three have been providing shelter to Gaza’s residents over the past two weeks amid unrelenting Israeli air, missile, and artillery strikes. Gaza’s Christian community is estimated to consist of as few as 1,100 believers, but the churches have accepted people of all faiths and denominations during the crisis.
Separately, the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem operates the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. The hospital’s cancer treatment center suffered damage in an Israeli rocket strike on October 14, which injured four hospital staff. The hospital was hit a second time on October 17, killing up to 471 people. The Gaza Health Ministry blamed Israel for the attack, while Tel Aviv and Washington claimed the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
Officials from Iran, Israel’s main regional archenemy and geopolitical adversary, have been outspoken in their condemnation of Tel Aviv’s military operations in Gaza, which followed in the wake of the October 7 Hamas surprise attacks into southern Israel after months of rising tensions.
On Thursday, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian compared the escalation of the 75-year-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict to a “powder keg” ready to explode. Separately this week, Iranian top military commander Mohammad Baqeri warned that the crisis could escalate into a regional conflagration if attacks on Gaza don’t stop. The warnings come amid feverish efforts by some Israeli and US officials to manufacture consent for war against Iran on the pretext of unsubstantiated claims of Iranian support for Hamas.
So far, Tehran has not taken the bait to escalate, and has instead joined Russia, China, Turkiye, and other nations in calling for a ceasefire, and slammed the US for vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution Wednesday calling for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting.
Iran knows a thing or two about fighting jihadist extremists, sending hundreds of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force advisors to Syria in 2012 to save the Assad government from a CIA-backed dirty war, which involved the provision of billions of dollars in cash, arms, and training for jihadists flocking to Syria. From 2014 onward, the IRGC assisted in the formation of Iraq’s so-called Popular Mobilization Forces amid the international campaign to defeat Daesh.
The efforts of the IRGC and its late commander Qasem Soleimani, who was murdered in an unprovoked US missile strike in 2020, have been widely credited with helping to defeat Daesh, al-Qaeda*, and other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq, and saving the countries’ Christian, Yazidi, and Kurdish communities from the scourge of terrorism.
* Terrorist groups outlawed in Russia and many other countries.