Killing of Nahida and Samar Anton

On 16 December 2023, Nahida Khalil Anton, 70, and her daughter Samar Kamal Anton, 49, were shot and killed while walking inside the grounds of the Holy Family Church in Rimal, Gaza City, on their way to a bathroom. The church compound was sheltering hundreds of displaced people, mostly Christians, during the Gaza war. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said the shots were fired by an Israeli sniper; the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has repeatedly denied this.

Nahida Anton was the mother of the largest Catholic family in the Gaza Strip. Born in 1953 in Dbayeh, Lebanon, to a Palestinian refugee family, she was displaced again to Yemen after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon before eventually returning to Gaza, where she volunteered for the local Catholic community. Her daughter Samar worked as a cook for disabled children cared for by the Missionaries of Charity nuns.

According to an account from Samar's brother, Edward Anton, who worked with Doctors Without Borders, he believed he saw Israeli military personnel outside the church around noon and shouted warnings for people to stay inside. His mother, who had not heard the warnings, was shot three times, including once in the stomach, while crossing the courtyard. When Samar ran out to help her fallen mother, she was shot in the head. The killings were reportedly witnessed directly by a resident nun, Sister Nabila Saleh. Over the following minutes, seven more people were shot and wounded, including Edward Anton himself and other family members. The Latin Patriarchate stated: "No warning was given, no notification was provided. They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents." Both Hamas and the Patriarchate said an Israeli sniper was responsible.

The IDF initially said the incident occurred during an operation to search for weapons in the area. Following an internal investigation, the IDF said Hamas had fired a rocket-propelled grenade from near the church and that its soldiers fired back at Hamas spotters, a claim Church officials disputed, maintaining there were no Palestinian combatants in the area. In January 2024, the IDF said it would undertake a further examination of the incident.

The killings drew international reaction. Pope Francis, who maintained near-daily phone contact with the Gaza parish, condemned the attack. The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, said the women had been "shot in cold blood." The Israeli ambassador to the Vatican accused the Latin Patriarchate of "blood libel" after it condemned the killings. The Israeli military said it had not targeted the church and that church representatives had not reported an attack or civilian deaths when contacted by the IDF on the morning of 16 December. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and British MP Layla Moran, who had family sheltering in the church, both publicly condemned the killings.