Caritas Secretary General: Palestinian Christians hold on to hope amid conflict

By Stefanie Stahlhofen

Alistair Dutton is head of Caritas Internationalis, the Catholic Church’s aid organisation – the second largest in the world.

He has recently returned to Rome after a visit to the Holy Land, where Caritas has been at the forefront of relief efforts since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. 

Upon his return, Dutton spoke to Vatican News. Subjects on the agenda included:

– Caritas’ tireless aid work in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. “It is incredible”, said Dutton, speaking of Caritas workers in Gaza, “how they continue to go on day in, day out”.

– The urgent need to prevent the supply of weapons to the region: “This only leads to more deaths”.

– The ways in which the local population are keeping up hope despite the dire circumstances. In Arabic and in French, says Dutton, there are two words for hope – in French ‘espérance’ and ‘espoir’. “Espérance has a connection with the divine,” Dutton explains, “a connection with something that is greater than the hardship you feel at the moment. I think that’s deeply important.”

The following is a transcript of the interview with Alistair Dutton:

Q: You recently visited the Holy Land. Could you share your impressions of the situation there?

Certainly. I was meant to visit Jerusalem back in July together with the World Council of Churches and the Protestant Action by Churches Together Alliance, but we had to postpone that because circumstances were so difficult, particularly with the attacks directly on Beirut and Tehran. So it had been at the top of my list to try and get there before the end of the year.

I was pleased to be able to go back just a couple of weeks ago, and it was almost exactly the anniversary of my first visit. I had travelled there a month after the attacks on Israel and the response in Gaza. It’s been so sad to see the way the situation has continued and to see the level of carnage that continues in Gaza today, which is so disproportionate and inhumane.

I was only in the West Bank this time. Obviously going into Gaza is not possible. And the West Bank just feels eerily quiet and very repressed, controlled, and intimidated. I went up to Jenin in the north of Palestine and stayed a night with the Caritas team in Jenin. For them, I think, that was a very important occasion. I think it was the first-time people had been up to spend time with them.

There are many people who are feeling completely isolated, who are feeling cut off in this war, cut off from their normal way of life, cut off from their jobs and their livelihoods. They were working across on the Israeli side previously, so they’ve lost all of their employment, and the day-to-day pressure and repression of Israeli activity around the border. It was deeply important for them to have someone there who could just be with them in solidarity and compassion.

It’s always such a privilege and so inspiring to see the work of Caritas and to see the way we’re working in local communities; trying to help people survive, but so much more than that. In the news, all the time, what we hear is that it’s a humanitarian fight for survival, and there’s a degree to which that’s absolutely true. But for all the Palestinians I met, what is in their mind is: ‘How do we continue to build a dream for the future?’

So, how do we survive today? But how do we do it in a way that genuinely gives us a future here in the Middle East? I think they’ve watched so many people leave, so much harm. The number of Christians is falling so drastically that they can’t just concentrate on what they need – they constantly have an eye on how to remain present within the Holy Land and the Middle East as a whole.

Q: You were also in Jerusalem and in Israel. How was the situation there?

Jerusalem itself, as I remember, was eerily quiet, actually. This time I spent more time outside Jerusalem. But when I was there just after the attacks last year, I was right in the centre at six o’clock in the evening, when it would normally have been absolutely packed with Israelis, Palestinians going about their business, and a huge number of tourists. But there was nobody else; I have pictures of emtpy streets and shops.

I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and remember being in the Sepulchre for about 15 minutes and nobody came in. Normally you have to queue for hours to get in there. So, the first thing is that it is empty and quiet, and people feel isolated in that sense of being cut off from the rest of the world. Needless to say, the conflict continues, and many people aren’t returning. The economy has collapsed, and there is no tourism.

For us, as we look at some of the areas of the West Bank and then particularly in Gaza, the situation is absolutely brutal and we’re seeing inhumanity and brutality. While I was there, I spoke to Father Gabriel, who is the parish priest at the Catholic Church in Gaza City, and to one of our social workers in Gaza. It’s incredible how they continue to go on day in, day out.

They were describing how they have their own domestic woes, and they have to look after their families. There is this incredible sense of service and care for their people and doing whatever they can. But that is so difficult at the moment. Getting anything into Gaza is almost impossible.

Today, we have teams who are working hard, teams from Caritas Jerusalem and Catholic Relief Services. But, for all their efforts, in the month before I was there, they had only managed to get six trucks in, and that was with very close cooperation with the American military and the Israeli military to try to get past all of the restrictions. We have to remember that, before the attacks (of October 7, 2023), 500 trucks were needed every day. And they’ve managed only six trucks in the last month, and they’ve been taking really basic equipment in to families, just so that they can sleep at night and cook their meals.

Q: How will Christmas be celebrated in this situation?

I honestly don’t know. I think one of the main things that I’ve witnessed, particularly with the Christian Palestinians in the West Bank, is a real need and thirst to hang on, to hope, and to maintain a sense of their life within their own land.

What I see is them drawing great strength from their own faith from the stories of the Bible. One of the great things they have, of course, is that theirs’ is the land where it all happened.

One day, when I was there, they just said, ‘Oh, we’ve got a surprise for you.’ We went into one church, and it was the church where the healing of the 10 lepers happened. And this is all right on their doorstep.

Caritas has a team in Bethlehem. So, where Christ was born is where one of our largest teams is. I think they do draw enormous strength from the physical proximity of the stories themselves and the Gospel of hope, and they keep talking about that.

Speaking of hope: what was really interesting was when I met Cardinal Pizzaballa (the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem) in Amman, because he was visiting Jordan at the time, and he was talking about how difficult it is to hope at the moment.

But in conversation both with him and Fr. Michel Abboud, who is the head of Caritas Lebanon, we were talking about how in Arabic and French there are two words for hope, whereas in English we only have the one word. So, in French you have espérance and espoir. The sense of espérance has a connection with the divine, a connection with something that is greater than the hardship they feel at the moment. This is deeply, deeply important to them as they have to maintain their strength and their sense of the future.

Q: We are also about to begin the Jubilee, with the motto ‘Pilgrims of Hope’…

Regarding hope, I think we have to be careful that we don’t use hope in a superficial way. That hope is a journey to really discover something deep within us that really gives us strength, rather than grasping at things and saying they give us hope. So, I think that sense of espérance is so important

Q: Given the situation, how is Caritas responding? How can you do your work?

Caritas has been working since long before the attacks, and ever since the attacks. Needless to say, as everyone will understand having heard the news, the situation within Gaza, and in the West Bank as well, has been incredibly difficult. Just moving anything around has been almost impossible.

I just described how difficult it is to get aid trucks in, and so supplies to Gaza are almost nil at the moment. Despite that, we still have our health teams who are out and about and trying to help their people. Obviously, medical supplies are a huge concern.

But they have been working throughout and also trying to get assistance, whether that’s material assistance or supplies or cash. If there are no supplies, the cash is very difficult to use.

We’ve already reached over 1.6 million people in the last 13 months since the attacks through our emergency response: that’s in Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank; so Palestine, generally. This includes health, food support, and basic equipment, like helping people with bedding, pots and pans, things to cook and eat meals, mental health and psychological support, shelter, and some hygiene kits and some provision of water. So, through our teams, we are doing as much as we possibly can.

However, circumstances make humanitarian access incredibly difficult, and this is where the international community really needs to start taking action. It’s responsible. Under International Law the international community must seriously bring pressure to bear so that people don’t suffer so egregiously.

Q. This is what Pope Francis has been saying all along, calling for this to be guaranteed and also that the hostages must be freed.

Yes, and we absolutely must have a ceasefire. The war is just hurting everyone and is crippling the Israeli economy.

It’s not just the Palestinians who are suffering. It’s creating generations of psychological disturbance, which will just create the fighters for the next generations to come. We have to stop the supply of weapons, which only leads to more deaths. Those who are arming Israel today are just preventing a ceasefire from coming any closer.

We have to mention the Israeli hostages and those who are detained on both sides, because so many of the Palestinians are also arbitrarily detained. So, the hostages absolutely must be released. There is also the respect for International Law and the norms of International Law. We have the International Criminal Court, and we also have international Humanitarian Law which says that people have a right to receive assistance.

Yet, for those of us who are trying to provide assistance, it is all but impossible, and it’s also far from safe. We have had two members of staff killed this year, and many members of their families. Just the week before I was there, two of our doctors were in hospital, having recently been injured, along with all of their families. I believe about a dozen people had just been killed in a direct hit on the church. These are humanitarians, trying to bring humanitarian assistance, who are targeted within this war.

Q: As you know, a ceasefire has been reached in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah. What does this mean for your work for Caritas Internationalis?

I’ve been in touch with our colleagues in Lebanon, and I share their hope and the hope that Pope Francis mentioned that this might in some way signal a move towards peace in the Middle East.

I have to say firstly that the ceasefire is very, very precarious today. There have been attacks and people killed in southern Lebanon under the ceasefire, and one has to wonder how long it will hold. I sincerely hope that it will continue to hold and they can step back from it. It’s not as easy as blowing the final whistle and war just stops in a moment.

Having said that, I don’t see a way that translates directly into peace for Gaza. And we’ve now seen the attacks launched in Syria, and I can’t help but think the timing of it all was far from a coincidence. It was the very day that the ceasefire was announced that the attack on Aleppo started. Syria today has suffered 14 years of war and then the earthquake more recently. Now people are fleeing from Aleppo and Hama to try to get to safety.

I was there in January, and that is a country that has not been allowed to rebuild ever since the war. The effect of sanctions is absolutely crippling that country and just leaving them literally living among the rubble.

I walked down a street in January that I walked down eight years previously. May God bless those people. They keep that street as clean as they possibly can. But that just means the rubble is piled up on the side, and they sweep around it.

Syria has been held in an inhumane status by sanctions for the last several years, and now we see these attacks. So much of it is forces way beyond the Middle East, which are now flexing their muscles and jostling for position and power.

When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.