On June 27th, the BBC World Service aired an interview with Johnnie Moore, an American Christian Zionist who oversees a so-called humanitarian initiative in Gaza. What the audience wasn’t told is that this project has become a death trap, where starving Palestinians, including many children, are being systematically killed while trying to access food aid. According to recent reports in Haaretz, Israeli army officers themselves ordered these killings.
Samuel Kuttab
As a Christian, I was stunned not just by the content of the interview, but by the absence of critical questioning. Mr. Moore’s appearance on one of the world’s most respected media platforms was granted without scrutiny, despite the deeply politicized nature of his initiative. Worse still, he cloaked the entire project in religious language — using the Gospel not to illuminate suffering, but to justify the killing of an indigenous people.
I am also co-founder of the Prayers for Peace Alliance, an initiative that brings together Palestinians and Jews committed to reconciliation and to ending the Israeli occupation. My father, a lifelong evangelical pastor, taught me that our Christian faith is rooted in the ethic of love: to forgive our enemies, to reject violence, to serve the oppressed, and to seek peace with justice.
When Scripture declares in Micah 6:8 that God requires us “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God,” Mr. Moore — and those who uncritically amplify his narrative — fail on all three counts. That civilians are dying under the protection of a mission led by someone claiming moral authority, while journalists offer no challenge, is not just a lapse in coverage — it is a betrayal of Christian ethics.
I speak as one who has lived through the region’s traumas. I remember the 1967 war vividly. Today, my family is among the thousands who have suffered devastating losses in Gaza. We have buried loved ones, watched entire communities crumble, and are now witnessing the onset of famine across a trapped civilian population. Over 56,000 have been killed, 109,000 injured — and the destruction is almost total.
Let me be clear: I do not support Hamas. But that moral clarity cannot be weaponized to justify or ignore Israeli war crimes. The children of Gaza deserve more than leaders who offer religious cover for their killers. The Gospel does not condone collective punishment, and it certainly does not allow us to look away while 16,000 Palestinian children are slaughtered.
A Palestinian boy sits on the rubble of his building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat camp in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 16, 2023. (Hatem Moussa/Associated Press)
Your editorial choices matter. Palestinian people — including thousands of Palestinian Christians who are consistently erased from these conversations — are watching. History is watching. And above all, God is watching.
Mr. Moore’s unwillingness to name Israel’s systematic violence for what it is — genocide — betrays the very Gospel he claims to serve. His defense of the IDF, even as the world watches hundreds of starving civilians gunned down at food distribution points, is not a Christian witness. It is moral complicity.
Perhaps most disturbing was the way the interview portrayed these massacres as unfortunate byproducts of a “war zone.” But we are not called to explain away the killing of innocents. We are called to defend the vulnerable, to name injustice, and to bear witness to truth — even when it is politically costly.
You cannot serve both Christ and the state of Israel. You cannot claim to follow Jesus while providing cover for the oppression and murder of an occupied people. The Gospel demands courage, not alignment with power.
In this moment of global reckoning, we must remember that humanitarian aid without justice is not peace — it is public relations. And Christians who lend their voices to such efforts, while ignoring the suffering their actions enable, will one day have to answer not only to history, but to the God of justice and mercy.
Samuel Kuttab, born in Jerusalem, is a Palestinian American businessperson and co-founder of the Prayers for Peace Alliance. He is active in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim peace initiatives aimed at justice, reconciliation, and the end of occupation. He is a member of the Mennonite Oxford Church in Philadelphia, PA.
