An Open Letter to Rev. Sara Ofner-Seals, Associate Pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana

Dear Rev. Ofner-Seals,

In your July 29 op-ed, you painted a bleak portrait of pre-war Gaza. You supported your argument with verifiable facts and correctly attributed quotes. Yet you offered readers a cropped photograph—one that hides half the frame, shows nothing false, and still isn’t the truth. What you cropped out is the context that could have turned a collection of facts into an honest picture.

You paint Egypt and Israel’s pre-war blockade of Gaza as proof that Gaza was and is a “concentration camp”—an egregious and offensive weaponization of Holocaust imagery to make your political point. The Fort Wayne Jewish community would do well to take note of language like yours, which feeds the growing normalization of antisemitism in public discourse. In any case, you cropped the photograph by never addressing why there was a blockade.

Israel ended its presence in Gaza in 2005. Shortly thereafter, Hamas took over in a bloody coup. It quickly became clear that rather than investing in public projects that could have helped Gazans, the terror organization was building a rocket arsenal and a tunnel network using smuggled cement and steel—materials that could have been used to build hospitals, schools or civilian infrastructure. Israel and........

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