INNOCENT civilians will suffer the most in the war between Iran and Israel, and dialogue must prevail, religious leaders said this week.
On Saturday, Pope Leo XIV called for “responsibility and reason”, the day after Israel launched missiles at Iran, including on nuclear facilities. Iran responded with strikes on Israel.
“A safer world, free from nuclear threat, must be pursued through respectful encounters and sincere dialogue, in order to build a lasting peace founded on justice, fraternity, and the common good,” Pope Leo said.
It was reported that civilian areas had been struck in both countries. On Monday morning, Iranian authorities said that 224 people had been killed in the attacks, while at least 14 people were killed in Israel over the weekend, according to reports.
“As is so often the case, it is the innocent who are suffering most as a consequence of this latest conflict,” the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, said on Tuesday.
Dr Francis-Dehqani, who was born in Iran, said that her “thoughts and prayers” were with civilians in both countries. “For the small number of Anglicans in Iran that I am in touch with, their focus is on trying to evacuate their families and ensure they can find shelter during the attacks,” she said.
“While the Iranian regime has clearly lost moral authority amongst the vast majority of Iranian people, these latest developments bring a new sense of fear, of more violence and bloodshed and of an uncertain future, not least because of the prospect of change imposed from the outside without the agency of the Iranian people,” she said.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long suggested that the Iranian regime poses an existential threat to Israel. In media interviews this week, he did not rule out targeting Iran’s leader, Ali Khamenei.
On Tuesday evening, President Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender”. He claimed, on social media, that the US knew the location of Ayatollah Khamenei, but would not kill him “for now”.
Speaking to reporters at the G7 summit in Canada, Sir Keir Starmer sought to down-play suggestions that President Trump was considering US military intervention; he was confident that the president was committed to a de-escalation of the conflict.
President Trump signed a G7 agreement that called for a “resolution of the Iranian crisis leads to a broader de-escalation of hostilities in the Middle East, including a ceasefire in Gaza”; but he then left the summit early, and, on social media, denied suggestions that he had done so to work on a “Cease Fire”.
The occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and east Jerusalem have been under lockdown since last Friday, with Israeli authorities barring access to Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City, according to reports.
“There’s no doubt that Israel is using the current war conditions to impose new restrictions and create new facts on the ground,” the director of international affairs, diplomacy and tourism at the Islamic Waqf in Jerusalem, Aoun Bazbaz, told Middle East Eye.
The Dean of St George’s College, the Very Revd Canon Richard Sewell, has described the situation within the Anglican community in Jerusalem since last Friday. Residents and staff at the Anglican Cathedral Close had been in the bomb shelter several times each day, as air raid warnings sounded around the city, he said.
“Before we get to the bunker we can see missiles in the sky being intercepted by the defense system and we can feel/hear windows and sometimes the ground shake,” he wrote on social media.
Canon Sewell called for attention to remain on the situation in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, drawing attention to even greater restrictions on West Bank residents since last Friday. He also expressed “great concern for civilians in Iran and especially for the vulnerable Christians there”.
Last Friday, the RC Archbishop of Tehran-Ispahan of the Latins, Cardinal Dominique Joseph Mathieu, told Vatican News that his prayer was that “peace through dialogue based on a consensus will prevail”.
There is a large and growing community of Iranian-born people worshipping in the Church of England (Features, 6 June). They have reacted to the escalating conflict with shock, and prayers for the country of their birth.
The congregation of St Aphrahat the Persian Sage, a Farsi-speaking Anglican church in Manchester, has been “shaken profoundly” by the conflict, the church’s senior minister, Canon Omid Moludy, said.
“What has hurt us even more is the lack of visible sympathy from much of the media and from many human rights advocates,” he said. “It’s difficult to see the suffering of innocent people go unnoticed or unacknowledged.”
Canon Moludy lost contact with his mother at the start of the conflict, when communications systems were brought down by Israeli strikes. He finally heard from her on Tuesday morning, after several days without news.
The Persian community at St Aphrahat “continue to gather in prayer, supporting one another in grief and in hope”, he said.
At St George’s, Leeds, the Persian community is “distressed, sad, and challenged by what is happening”, the associate rector, the Revd Eve Ridgeway, said.
On Tuesday, in the House of Lords, the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun, said that he prayed for “wise judgment and a swift end to the current conflict between Israel and Iran . . . for restraint and for the safety and well-being of Jewish people, here and around the world”.
He reiterated warnings about the war in Gaza, which, he said, “cannot be divorced from the accelerated annexation of land we are seeing in the West Bank”. He called for the UK to recognise Palestine as a state.
In Gaza, it was reported on Tuesday that Israeli forces killed more than 51 Palestinians at an aid-distribution point in the south of the territory. Witnesses told BBC News that Israeli drones, and then a tank, opened fire as a crowd gathered to collect aid parcels.
Lockdown has been imposed on much of the occupied West Bank since late last week, CAFOD’s representative for the Middle East, Elizabeth Funnell, said on Tuesday.
“Despite the broader escalation between Israel and Iran, we must not take our eyes off what is happening across the occupied Palestinian Territory,” she said, referring to reports that Israeli settlers are “taking advantage of the situation to attack Palestinians.”
