JERUSALEM — Gaza’s Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, has dwindled to only a few hundred people, according to Christians who escaped the territory and spoke with CBN News. Years of intimidation, religious pressure, and war have cut a community that once numbered several thousand down to an estimated three to four hundred souls.

Naji, a Christian who grew up in Gaza, told CBN News that life for believers changed sharply after Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. He said the group reshaped the thinking of ordinary Gazans through mosques, sermons, and organized religious teaching circles.

Through those channels, he said, people were taught to view non-Muslims through an Islamic lens, as dhimmi — “People of the Book” regarded as unbelievers bound for hell. Christians, he said, came to be seen not as fellow Palestinians but as outsiders. Neighbors did not understand what a Christian was, he explained; all they had heard was that Christians were connected to the Crusaders or that they “worship the cross.” They did not grasp that Gaza’s Christians were Gazans just like them. “For them, we’re merely guests,” he said.

The pressure went beyond words. Naji said there have been cases in which Christians were abducted, and he recalled one man who was forced to convert to Islam on live television and later fled to Cyprus. The man did not want to become a Muslim, Naji said, but the pressure on him was intense.

Another Christian, Ahad, who grew up in Syria, told CBN News that Christian children faced bullying at school and that stones were sometimes thrown at churches during worship services. He said such treatment is a common experience for Christians across the Middle East — in Syria and Lebanon, in Egypt, in Sudan — and that the problem began long before October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas massacre and kidnappings in Israel.

Asked whether a Christian under such rule becomes a dhimmi, a second-class citizen, Ahad answered plainly: that is what is demanded of them. Accept the status of a second-class citizen, in which the Muslim is superior, he said — or you cannot live. “They tell us in our faces,” he said.

For Ahad, Gaza is part of a much larger story. Christianity began in the Middle East, yet some of the world’s oldest Christian communities are shrinking. He fears that without greater attention from the wider church, the Christian presence in the biblical homeland could disappear altogether. “The area which witnessed the birth of Christianity is really going to become with no Christians,” he warned.

He gave Christians in the West a direct message: “Listen to us. We exist over there. You cannot forget about us.” His ancestors, he said, carried Christianity to the whole world, and the sacrifices of the early Christian martyrs spread the Word of God everywhere.

Ahad also warned that the same culture of religious superiority he experienced in the Middle East is spreading into Europe and the United States, where he said democratic institutions are being used to organize toward goals he described as unconstitutional. Christians from the Middle East who have lived under Islamic rule, he said, want the West to understand what that life is really like before it is too late.

For Naji, the message is simpler: Gaza’s Christians are not foreigners. They are an ancient community trying to survive war, religious extremism, and discrimination in the land they have called home for generations — and they are asking the church around the world to remember them.