Nearly 300 Christian leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., for the three-day Joint Christian Advocacy Summit on May 5. The ecumenical group, including over 40 sponsoring organizations, is seeking an end to American arms sales to Israel and a restoration of funding of humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

“Instead of funding war, our faith calls us to feed the hungry, defend the oppressed, and work for just peace. We are here to pressure Congress to enact these values,” Allison Tanner, a Baptist pastor and leader of the summit, said in a press release.

Specifically, the coalition is demanding the restoration of funding to the East Jerusalem Hospitals Network and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees.

The event, which included multiple speakers and advocacy training, involved Catholics, mainline and evangelical Protestants, and Orthodox Christians from across the country. It has been organized in response to more than two years of violence in Gaza, the continued aggression of Israeli settlers toward Palestinians in the West Bank and the recent Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon as part of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Eli McCarthy—a just peace fellow for the Franciscan Action Network, one of the organizations involved with the summit—spoke to America. He argued that restoring funding to E.J.H.N. and U.N.R.W.A. is crucial for addressing the ongoing humanitarian crisis brought on by what he called an “ethnic cleansing and genocide” in Gaza.

The East Jerusalem Hospitals Network, which includes six facilities, provides Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with health care services and procedures otherwise unavailable in the territories. Mr. McCarthy, who also teaches at Georgetown University, said that Israel is blocking Gazans from accessing the network. “It’s a death sentence for a number of Gazans who need things like dialysis and cancer treatment,” he said. “In the past, the U.S. has not only insured access but funded the network.”

Mr. McCarthy thinks that a restoration of funding for E.J.H.N. “has a pretty viable chance at getting some traction in Congress across different parties.” He is less certain about funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. That is “going to be a little more challenging,” he said. “There is certainly pretty broad support across Congress for ensuring humanitarian aid, but there is still notable resistance in the U.S. Congress against U.N.R.W.A.”

While U.N.R.W.A. still operates in Gaza, the suspension of U.S. funding represented a significant blow to its ability to provide aid. The Biden Administration halted funding for the agency in 2024 following allegations from Israel that a dozen employees were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel led by Hamas that resulted in over 1,200 dead and hundreds of people taken as hostages. Israeli officials charged in March that hundreds of agency employees were members of Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups. U.N.R.W.A. counters that these accusations are “unsubstantiated.”

On April 30, 2026, the U.S. Agency for International Development Office of Inspector General released a statement claiming to have “found evidence linking four additional current or former” U.N.R.W.A. staff “to participation” in the attack on Oct. 7. That investigation is ongoing.

Mr. McCarthy noted that U.N.R.W.A. “has passed the different standards and benchmarks to demonstrate [its] neutrality,” adding that all other major governments have resumed their funding of the organization.

The coalition’s third demand, that U.S. arms sales to Israel be halted, is “the most challenging and also one of the most critical,” Mr. McCarthy said. “We have members of Congress who have pointed out that military assistance to Israel at this time doesn’t comply with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the ‘Lahey Laws,’ which require that countries that receive our weapons meet certain human rights and humanitarian standards. It’s clearly not happening with Israel.”

Democratic support for blocking military aid to Israel has increased recently, with 36 Democrats voting against the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel earlier this year. Those numbers were not enough to overcome unanimous Republican support for the weapons transfer. Still, while Congress may not soon accede to this emerging opposition to the status quo regarding arms sales and aid to Israel, Mr. McCarthy is optimistic that shifts in public opinion will eventually “leverage some pressure on the administration and on Israel.” He also believes changing public opinion on what had been essentially uncritical support for Israel will play a role in upcoming elections, especially in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.

Americans’ views on Israel have soured considerably over the past few years. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in late March found that 60 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of America’s Middle Eastern ally compared to 42 percent in 2022. That number is higher for younger Americans, with 70 percent of people 18-49 having a “somewhat” or “very unfavorable” view of Israel.

Support has even dropped among white Protestant evangelicals, long considered stalwart supporters of Israel, partially for eschatological reasons, with 50 percent under the age of 50 now expressing a negative view.

The summit also drew attention to the plight of Palestinian Christians in the region. “We had a particular focus on Taybeh, which is a Christian village in the West Bank that has been facing immediate attacks the last few days,” Mr. McCarthy said. He added that Christian communities and leaders in southern Lebanon have similarly faced violence and the destruction of property by Israeli forces occupying the region.

Beyond the summit, the coalition is promoting “a Complicit Corporation campaign to expose, boycott and divest from Chevron and Palantir for their role in enabling the Israeli military,” Mr. McCarthy said. “A broad coalition of Palestinian Christians have been asking Christians in the U.S. to support such strategies.”

“This is a really, really important issue for Christians, and particularly Catholics,” he said. “Taybeh is struggling right now. We need a lot of attention and advocacy around that or they are going to lose their entire village”

Mr. McCarthy also highlighted Pope Leo XIV’s call for a “disarmed peace and a disarming peace.”

“I want to invite, particularly Catholics, but also more broadly Christians, to lean into that,” he said on May 7, “particularly with Palestine, but also with Lebanon right now, so that we can be the peacemakers—the nonviolent peacemakers—that Jesus modeled and called us to be.”

Edward Desciak is an O'Hare Fellow at America Media.