Love your neighbour is a question of humanity, not politics. Our faith provides no justification for standing back.
Written by Tarryn Pegna
| 01 Aug 2025
A young teenage boy receives wound treatment at a clinic in Gaza run and supplied by Tearfund’s local partner before supplies were no longer able to get through. Currently, truck loads of aid are waiting for access to be allowed to them. Image: IHP/Anera
A friend of mine visited Gaza some time back, not long before it became impossible to do so. The terrors perpetrated on 7 October 2023 on average, everyday humans (a category amongst which I count myself) escalated longstanding tensions and provided a catalyst for a protracted tableau of horror. It turned what had been a place with limited access, into a landscape of brokenness, fear and, most recently, the onset of famine conditions.
But, once, it was a place where people carried out their lives in a way that was not dissimilar to many of us. They did their jobs. Their children went to school. They met friends in coffee shops and restaurants. They attended places of worship – including, although a minority, churches.
Right, wrong… and the Christian command
People with different languages, styles of dress and politics, living in different places, can feel quite far removed from us. We meet them more frequently in news headlines than in person, and, even with our best intelligent intentions, it makes it easy for us to turn their lived human realities into political agendas and ideologies. Conflict slogans, agreements and disagreements. From afar, we join arguments about whose actions are right or wrong, or whose are worse. Who is justified in what horror.
At a political level, there are all kinds of points to be made in all directions and with all lenses. They are complex and convoluted.
At a human level, for us as Christians, there is only one, very simple, point to be made: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’*
More than politics
Transcending the politics of retribution, restoration and reckoning for choices and actions made by factions and governments – both by physical weapons and weaponised words – the suffering humans bearing the brunt of the politics, are where our love must lie.
And, in our love, we must act to respond to the pain we see.
Tearfund’s local partners – ready to respond
Tearfund’s local partner in Gaza keeps a blog. Most days it shows how many meals were given out to people desperate for food, how much drinking water was shared with families struggling to keep their children alive, and how many patients were treated – people suffering with everything from ongoing illnesses and health concerns to injuries and sicknesses directly related to the conflict situation.
It also talks about our partner’s staff – the people whose job it is to deliver the aid. They are not exempt from the hunger and suffering.
Nor are they spared the losses.
On 8 March 2024, our partner’s logistics coordinator was killed in Deir Al Balah shortly after coming back from work distributing humanitarian aid. The strike claimed his life as well as that of his six-year-old son. More recently, on 17 June 2025, their psychosocial support coordinator was killed alongside two of his young children in a drone strike while they slept in their tent in Khan Younis, a so-called safe zone.
Stories of sadness
Our partners tell stories of children stabbed by desperate gangs for the meagre food supplies they had managed to get.
Of two small boys shot at as they sifted through the rubble of their home, searching for a bag of macaroni they remembered they had owned.
A bag of macaroni.
Of children dying of diarrhoea – mothers watching their children slip away for want of simple medication that could be bought over the counter for a few pounds (or free with a prescription) on most high streets in the UK.
We hear of a local Gazan church member’s aunt whose hip operation had to be carried out without any anaesthetic.
Aid within reach, but without access
And we see the pictogram at the top of the most recent entry (30 July at time of writing this) of our partner’s blog: 47 trucks of aid supplies within a reachable distance. 0 pallets in Gaza distribution centres [currently accessible].
The IPC, the agency who are responsible for measuring food security, states: ‘The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip. Conflict and displacement have intensified, and access to food and other essential items and services has plummeted to unprecedented levels. Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths. Latest data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.’
Complicit in cruelty?
Can we be complicit in such cruelty?
Is there a political or religious view that justifies wilfully watching the slow deaths of others, particularly of children, where we could act to bring rescue?
This is not loving our neighbour.
Tearfund’s local partners, IHP and Anera, are working to deliver desperately needed medical assistance. But access to supplies, and indeed even to enough food to feed their staff, is being withheld.
We are asking you
We are asking for your prayers.
And that you will stand with us as we call on the Israeli government to open all land crossings and ensure safe and sustained humanitarian access to all of Gaza.
Will you join us in calling for an immediate and sustained ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and for Israel to abandon the military-controlled aid distribution model and restore a principled, UN-led humanitarian response, in keeping with international humanitarian law?
The use of aid air drops is deeply undignifying, incredibly dangerous and does not meaningfully ease people’s suffering.
Aid – in vast quantities – is sitting on the border with Gaza.
Regardless of wider political conversations and ongoing complexities to be dealt with, we must see an end to policies that are inflicting starvation on the people of Gaza.
Please will you love your neighbour with us.
*Luke 10:27 (Also Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31, Romans 13:9, Galatians 5:14, James 2:8)
Pray for Gaza and Israel
Pray for a ceasefire and sustainable solutions that will bring lasting peace and protection to all in the region.
Pray for immediate, safe and sustained access to life-saving aid in Gaza.
Pray for the safe release of the remaining hostages.
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