The Executive Director and Stated Clerk of the interim unifying agencies, the Rev. Jihyun Oh, joined more than a dozen U.S. Christian faith leaders in signing a letter addressed to both presidential campaigns requesting each “work toward a just and permanent solution that addresses the core issues” in the ongoing violence in Gaza and Israel-Palestine.
The Rev. Dr. Teri McDowell Ott, editor and publisher of the Presbyterian Outlook, conducted the following interview with Doug Dicks, a PC(USA) mission co-worker and regional liaison for Israel, Palestine and Jordan. The article originally appeared in the Presbyterian Outlook and is republished by Presbyterian News Service with permission from the Presbyterian Outlook.
Widely published theologian the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, the founder and president of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, spoke with passion and authority this week at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., as part of the McClendon Scholars program.
World Central Kitchen, which recently honored seven colleagues killed during an April 1 Israeli airstrike in Gaza, resumed operations in Gaza with a Palestinian team delivering food to address widespread hunger, including in the north.
On Wednesday, Palestinian Nakba Remembrance Day, national staff of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) were privileged to hear a sermon from Omar Haramy, executive director of Sabeel, a PC(USA) partner that works to challenge religious extremism.
Dear university presidents and chancellors,
We write to you as members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a 300-year-old institution that divested from companies profiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory in 2014. We encourage you to take similar measures at your university.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Office of Public Witness joined with more than 100 additional immigrant, refugee, human rights and humanitarian organizations urging Congress to introduce and pass legislation that supports reinstating funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA. The letter calls it a “moral and strategic failure” to suspend funding during a period of catastrophe and extreme need.
World Central Kitchen, which last week honored seven colleagues killed during an April 1 Israeli airstrike in Gaza, will resume operations in Gaza Monday with a Palestinian team delivering food to address widespread hunger, including in the north.
The Presbyterian Hunger Program has been supporting its partner Improvement and Development for Communities Center (IDCO) in Gaza since 2014 in IDCO’s efforts to improve the food security situation for Gazans.
The pictures of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza being forced by the Israeli military to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza Strip heading south evoked old memories of the 1948 Nakba. In 1948, Jewish Israeli terror groups destroyed and erased over 500 Palestinian villages and displaced nearly 800,000 Palestinians,¹ including more than 50,000 Palestinian Christians who had to flee, thus becoming refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon.
