When construction crews building a shopping centre in Gaza unearthed the ruins of what appeared to be a Byzantine church about 1,500 years old, local authorities did not halt the work to preserve the site. Instead, bulldozers continued in early April to prepare the site, wiping away the traces of the church, according to Fides.
Rev. Ibrahim Nairouz, a Palestinian Anglican priest in Nablus, sent a letter of protest to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, and to the Palestinian minister of antiquities, Rula Maavah. “If they had found the remains of a mosque or a synagogue, or any other ancient structure, would they have handled the situation in the same way?” he wrote, according to accounts in the Israeli media.