Gaza's Christians bury a mother and daughter killed in an Israeli strike — five dead as the 'ceasefire' bleeds

Gaza's tiny Christian community gathered in grief on Saturday to bury a mother and daughter killed in an Israeli air attack — another killing carried out under the banner of a "ceasefire" that keeps taking lives. Maysa Abu Daoud and her daughter Mary al-Najjar were among five Palestinians killed when the strike hit the ground floor of a building in Gaza City's Remal neighbourhood at about 1:30 am on Saturday, according to Al Jazeera. Their funeral took place the same day at Saint Porphyrius Church in Gaza City's Old City. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, expressed his "deep sorrow and grief" over what he called the "tragic" killing of the two women. Palestine's Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs said both women had devoted their time to helping parishioners and displaced people sheltering at the Holy Family Church; its chairman, Ramzi Khoury, described their deaths as a "painful loss" for their families, the church and its parishioners. It was Mary's 14-year-old son, Fouad al-Najjar, who gave the killing its human measure. Speaking to the Anadolu news agency, he said: "My grandmother and my mother died. May God have mercy on them." Then, an appeal from a child who has known little else: "We are exhausted by this war and have endured so much. For almost three years, we have been living through the same destruction, the same grief and the same war." The strike is the latest Israeli violation of the United States-brokered "ceasefire" agreement with Hamas — a truce that exists on paper while Gaza's dead keep being counted in ones and twos, in night-time strikes on residential buildings, far from any battlefield. Gaza's Christians number only in the hundreds, a remnant of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Every killing thins a presence that predates the modern state of Israel by nearly two millennia. The community that buried Maysa and Mary at Saint Porphyrius — itself damaged in earlier strikes — keeps burying its own, and keeps asking the question the ceasefire was supposed to answer: when does it stop?