A Gaza memorial exhibition at Leeds Minster has been closed after Jewish community representatives said a tapestry on display included the names of at least 25 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.
The Bishop of Leeds, the Rt Rev Dr Toby Howarth, ordered the removal of the exhibition after receiving a dossier from the Leeds Jewish Representative Council (LJRC). The memorial, titled Stitch Their Names Together, had been due to remain on display until Sunday.
It featured at least 90 panels bearing 16,800 names taken from a list of those reported killed in Gaza by the Hamas-run health ministry. Researchers from the LJRC said the names included members of armed groups responsible for the October 7 2023 attack on Israel.
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad led the assault, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed and about 250 hostages were taken.
Leeds Minster’s rector, Canon Paul Maybury, apologised after the exhibition was closed, saying he condemned all violence, “particularly the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages by Hamas on October 7, 2023”.
But footage that emerged on Saturday night showed Canon Maybury telling Jewish protesters that “history is complex” when he was asked to condemn the kidnapping and killing of civilians.
The 36-second video shows him being questioned specifically about Ariel Bibas, four, his nine-month-old brother Kfir, and their mother Shiri, 32. The family was seized from a kibbutz in southern Israel on October 7 and later died in Hamas captivity.
When pressed further, Canon Maybury replied “no comment” and walked away. The Church of England did not comment on his remarks.
Names of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members
Among those identified on the tapestry was Hatem Suleiman Abu Sharia, 28, a member of the Mujahideen Brigades. The group, described in the dossier as one of the smaller terrorist organisations in Gaza, kidnapped the Bibas family before handing them to Hamas.
Abu Sharia was killed in May 2024 and was said to have been a senior figure on the group’s military council. He had been released from an Israeli prison only months before the October 7 attacks.
Other names included Salah Shaaban Ismail, 50, who led Islamic Jihad’s sniper unit and was killed in May. Online tributes by the group described him as a “martyr commander”.
Hamdi Saeed Yousef Toulan, 39, was also listed. He was described as a Hamas field commander who was killed in December 2024.
Hamas social media posts referred to Toulan as a “martyr” and “a company commander in the Artillery Battalion of the Northern Brigade”. A photograph showed him wearing Hamas combat dress.
Other Hamas fighters named by researchers included Mohammed Sami Awad Ghurab, 20, and Salem Mohammed Salem Jouda, 43. Both were described as “martyrs” on social media, where photographs showed them in military fatigues.
Itai Galmudy, of anti-Semitism campaign group Stop The Hate, said Leeds Minster’s decision to host the exhibition had been “an appalling betrayal of the Church’s own values”.
“That a senior church leader then described Hamas’s murder of children as ‘complex’ is beyond belief,” he said. “There is nothing complex about the slaughter of innocent children. The Church should be a voice of moral clarity, not an apologist for terrorism.”
Leo Brosh, Yorkshire manager of the Jewish Leadership Council, welcomed the closure but said questions remained over how the exhibition had been approved.
“Serious questions remain about how they failed to do the most basic due diligence on such a sensitive issue,” he said. “Without an appropriate response, this episode risks damaging the relationship between British Christians and British Jews at a time of growing antisemitism in the UK.”
Heidi Bachram, a British anti-Semitism campaigner whose husband lost family members in the October 7 attacks, said it was “shocking” that the church had staged the exhibition after being told that terrorists were included.
“Paul Maybury’s deeply insensitive response to the kidnapping of the Bibas children was inhuman,” she said. “How can it be that terrorists get more empathy than the innocent children they murder?”
The dispute comes days after Archbishop of Canterbury Dame Sarah Mullally withdrew an award presented to Muslim cleric Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi after it emerged that he had praised Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
