Leo Hohmann – Leo’s Newsletter Oct 6, 2026
As we approach the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace deal, brokered by his billionaire son-in-law Jared Kushner and signed with great fanfare in Egypt on October 13, 2025, it warrants an assessment of its achievements, or lack thereof.
Trump just two weeks ago boasted about the peace deal in his address to the United Nations in New York on September 22, 2026.
Trump gave himself credit for ending the war in Gaza, even though the killing has never stopped. You can read his plan, called “The Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity” on the White House website, and then compare it to what’s going on in Gaza today, one year later. Trust me, you won’t be impressed.
Trump, in that same speech before the U.N., railed against the killing of Christians in places like Nigeria, where Fulani Muslim herdsmen have been targeting Christian villages for years in jihad attacks.
Trump fancies himself the great protector of Christians worldwide, though I can’t see what he’s actually done to protect them.
- Christians are persecuted in North Korea and Trump ignores it.
- Christians are persecuted in China and Trump stays silent about it.
- Christians are persecuted by Israelis in Gaza and, again, not a peep from Trump.
So, it would appear that Trump is only concerned about Christian persecution when it benefits his hegemonic ambitions to speak out about it, and even then he doesn’t do much other than talk.
One place where Christian persecution is definitely on the upswing but Trump and his most ardent backers will never utter a peep about it is in Gaza, where Palestinian Christians are being killed in attacks by the Israeli army in surprising numbers.
Just this past weekend, on Saturday, a Palestinian Christian woman and her daughter were killed in their apartment home in Gaza City in an attack by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Five people in all were killed in the attack. The mother and daughter were unlucky enough to reside in an apartment building where a single Hamas bad guy also was reported to have lived. Israel wanted him dead. They launched a missile at the apartment building from a military jet overhead, killing at least four innocent civilians in the process.
It would be like a gang member conducting a drive-by shooting to kill a rival gang member sitting at an outdoor cafe, only instead of shooting just the hated opponent, he kills everyone at the restaurant.
Trump himself has accused the Israeli regime of PM Benjamin Netanyahu of overkill in its fight against Islamic terrorists. In June of this year, Trump said Syria could do a better job of fighting Hezbollah than Israel because Israel will often blow up an entire apartment building in order to kill a single alleged terrorist. That’s exactly what they did this past Saturday in Gaza City.
The Jewish news outlet The Forward reported in a June 16, 2026 article:
Trump addressed the issue of Hezbollah on Tuesday in France during a meeting with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim in Hamad Al Thani.
“Israel is fighting Hezbollah too long, and too many people are being killed, and you do not have to knock down an apartment house every time you are looking for someone,” Trump said.
“There are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they are not all Hezbollah, and I suggested to Israel that Syria should take care of Hezbollah, and to be honest with you, I think they will do a better job at it.”
BOTTOM LINE: The Israeli military are cowards. Rather than send a team of IDF soldiers into the building to nab an alleged terrorist, they take the easy route, standing off from afar and launching a missile, or dropping a 500-pound bomb from the sky and blowing up the entire building. Then Netanyahu gaslights the world by standing at the U.N. and bragging that his military is the world’s most precise and ethical military in world history. Give me a break. They are among the most ruthless and careless.
And the numbers bear that out, with more than 70,000 Palestinians killed – these are the IDF’s own numbers so they are probably much higher – and roughly 60 percent of them being civilian non-combatants. How many countries could get away with this type of mass slaughtering and then receive an invite for its leader to address the U.N.?
But back to the two Christian women they killed on Saturday. These are real people with names and families, who worship the same Jesus Christ as those of us who call ourselves Christians in the West. The only difference is they are part of a community steeped in Christianity for 1,000 years or more, dating back in some cases to right after the time of Christ.
Maysa Abu Daoud and her daughter Mary al-Najjar were among five Palestinians killed by an Israeli airstrike that hit an apartment building in Gaza City in the early morning hours of Saturday, October 3. They were members of the St. Porphyrius Orthodox Christian Church. Though not Catholic, the mother and daughter had previously sheltered at the Holy Family Catholic Church before moving recently to the apartment building, and they still worked as volunteers serving parishioners and displaced people at a shelter affiliated with the Holy Family parish, according to a Palestinian official who oversees church affairs.
Christian Daily International reports:
Gaza City resident Ahmed Al-Dahdouh was among those who tried to pull people out. “This is happening every day to us; it is not safe. One sleeps at night and does not know if he will wake up in the morning or not; we woke up, we woke up,” he said.
“We are Muslims, and these are our Christian brethren, who are not involved in anything; they are peaceful people, and everybody loves them, and now we pulled out their bodies, a mother and her daughter.”
In July 2025, an Israeli tank shelled the Holy Family Church, killing three Christians and wounding several others, including the church’s pastor, Father Gabriel Romanelli.
Romanelli said in a YouTube video that since the start of Israel’s Gaza war, a total of 62 members of Gaza’s tiny Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities have been killed, including 25 killed by direct military violence.
Below is an excerpt from Dave DeCamp’s article at antiwar.com on the most recent killings of a mother and daughter. And keep in mind as you read it that Israel is doing this with your American tax dollars. We give them $4 billion a year and recently Trump announced plans to give them $2 billion in free weapons to continue their endless wars, even as he praises them for signing his peace deal – a deal that offers no peace at all.
“We have had 62 deaths: 62 Catholic and Orthodox Christians who have died in this war,” Romanelli said. “Of those 62 people, 25 have died violent deaths from bombardments or military snipers, and the majority died where they had taken refuge here, at Holy Family Church.”
Romanelli noted that frequent airstrikes and other attacks are “the reality for every resident of the Gaza Strip.” Since the so-called ceasefire deal was signed in October of last year, the IDF has constantly violated the agreement, killing at least 1,460 Palestinians in Gaza, according to numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry.
“The people are exhausted; the people are asking for peace, for this war to truly end,” Romanelli said. “May these innocent victims from this part of the Holy Land, like Maysa and Mary and so many others, serve — united to the redeeming sacrifice of Christ — to grant us peace of soul, peace among families, peace in society, and peace throughout the world.”
And this doesn’t even touch on the Christians being killed by the IDF in Lebanon, where Israel has opened another front in its war.
I know the argument the Israel-firsters will make to defend these indefensible actions. They say Hamas and Hezbollah hide their terrorists in among the civilian population. Sorry but this is old news and not in any way unique to Israel’s wars. If you look at military history, anytime you have a war in which one side is vastly superior in terms of weapons and firepower, the less powerful side conducts what are known as guerilla tactics, blending in among the population by day and attacking at night or in the shadows of an urban setting. This is the way American colonists defeated the massively superior British army in the Revolutionary War. To meet a superior force out in an open field using conventional tactics when you do not have equal firepower amounts to suicide. This is simple military science 101, so don’t act like Israel is somehow special or justified in its role as a superior power fighting against an inferior power utilizing guerilla warfare.
The numbers in this war also bear out the fact that Israel is the superior power. For every one Israeli killed in this war, hundreds of Palestinians get killed in response. Israel has made no attempt at a proportionate response to the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, an attack that, by the way, we now know was allowed to take place by the Israeli government.
These are cold hard facts that many Western Christians don’t like and will never accept, because it doesn’t fit the narrative they’ve been brainwashed with for decades. They truly believe that Israel is a tiny underdog country fighting against Islamic hordes from 26 Arab countries that hate them. That’s total nonsense. Israel has the full support of the world’s most powerful military (America), it has at least 200 nuclear bombs in its own arsenal, and most of the Arab Muslim countries in the Middle East have supported the U.S. and Israel against Iran, with Yemen’s Houthis being one of the rare exceptions.
What I’d like to know is, why don’t more Christians in America, Europe, Canada, Australia and the West care about their brothers and sisters being murdered in Gaza by a high-tech killing machine? Even Catholic and Orthodox Christians seem generally quiet and uninformed about these atrocities. This should be a topic of weekly discussion in the Western churches in connection with fervent prayer for the safety of these innocent civilians. Offerings should be taken up for them. It’s time to wake up. When this same entity comes for you, and they will, would you want your brothers and sisters in other countries to stay silent?
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