GAZA CITY: Many Christians in the Gaza Strip participate in the customs and rituals of Ramadan, Sanaa Tarazi, secretary of the Supreme Presidential Committee for Churches Affairs, told Arab News. She stressed that Christians in Gaza are “an integral part of the Palestinian people.”
According to church statistics, there are 390 Christian families, with an estimated 1,313 members, living in Gaza among roughly 2 million Muslims.
“No one can distinguish a Muslim from a Christian, for we are all close neighbors, having a bond of love and affection between us,” Tarazi said.
Tarazi grew up in her family’s home in the heart of old Gaza. Ramadan, she said, is a month of “beautiful childhood memories” when she and her friends from the neighborhood would play with lanterns and fireworks in the streets, transforming night into day.
She has passed that love on to her two children, who are currently studying abroad, decorating the house with lanterns and other ornaments every Ramadan.
“Our eating and drinking habits change greatly during Ramadan,” she said, “Many days, we will (forego) lunch and eat at the Maghrib (evening) prayer call.” She added that she is careful to delay cooking her family’s food so that the smell will not disturb her Muslim neighbors when they are fasting.
As is the prevailing custom among Gazans, Tarazi said she traditionally cooks Mulukhiya on the first day of Ramadan, in anticipation of a good and blessed year.
She and her neighbors exchange Ramadan food and sweets. Tarazi said she makes Qatayef at home to distribute to her Muslim and Christian neighbors throughout Ramadan.
Tarazi’s husband, Majed — leader of the Arab Orthodox Scouts in Gaza, shares her love for the Muslim holy month. He told Arab News that Ramadan nights out with friends are a “special experience” and that this year, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he is missing a number of the usual Ramadan rituals with his many Muslim friends.
The scouts are often deployed on Gaza’s streets during Ramadan to distribute water and dates to those returning home late after work before iftar, he explained. The scouts also normally host an iftar at the Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza, but it has been canceled this month, for the second year in a row. “We host that iftar at the church to express tolerance and show the depth of the relations with Muslims that bind us in Gaza,” he said.
He pointed to the historic minaret of the Kateb Wilaya mosque, which dates back to the early 14th century CE and overlooks the church. “This is our relationship: Loving neighbors, partners in the homeland, sharing a common destiny,” he said.
“Just as our Muslim brothers congratulate us on our religious occasions, and they share our joys and sorrows, we exchange love and respect with them, and we appreciate the holiness of their rituals and religious occasions,” he added.
In Gaza, Christians share in the spirit of Ramadan
https://arab.news/2vyy2
In Gaza, Christians share in the spirit of Ramadan
- According to church statistics, there are 390 Christian families living in Gaza among roughly 2 million Muslims
- As is the prevailing custom among Gazans, Tarazi said she traditionally cooks Mulukhiya on the first day of Ramadan
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
