Palestinian Christians and Muslims have lived together in the region for centuries − and several were killed recently while sheltering in the historic Church of Saint Porphyrius

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Christine Shepardson, University of Tennessee

(THE CONVERSATION) A bomb struck the complex of the historic Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza on Oct. 19, 2023, killing more than a dozen of the hundreds of Christians and Muslims taking shelter inside and wounding others.

As a historian of Roman Christianity who focuses on the Eastern Mediterranean, I am often confronted by the complexity of this region. Many Christian and Muslim families in Gaza today were displaced in 1948, after the United Nations divided this formerly Ottoman land into new Arab and Jewish states. Today’s Palestinian Christians occupy a complicated place in this contested land.

The Church of Saint Porphyrius, or Porphyry, is named for a fifth-century bishop remembered for building a church in the city and destroying the local temples to the Roman gods. The current building is a 19th-century renovation of a church European Crusaders built in the 12th century over the remains of its fifth-century predecessor, which had been converted to a mosque....