The bombing occurred during one of the most intense phases of Sri Lanka's civil war. On April 19, 1995, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam broke the existing ceasefire by destroying two Sri Lanka Navy gunboats, the SLNS Sooraya and SLNS Ranasuru. The government responded with Operation Leap Forward, launched on July 9 - the first stage of a major offensive to retake the Jaffna Peninsula from LTTE control. The operation brought heavy artillery shelling and aerial bombardment to a densely populated region. Civilians were caught between two armed forces, neither of which could guarantee their safety. The leaflets advising people to shelter in places of worship came from the military itself, a detail that would become one of the most agonizing facts of what happened next.

Several hundred people were inside the Church of St. Peter and Paul and in the surrounding grounds when the bombs fell. The church stood well away from the front lines of fighting - a fact later emphasized by Daya Somasundaram, a senior professor of psychiatry at the University of Jaffna, who called the attack a war crime. Sasiraj Chandrasekaran was five years old, at his family's home adjacent to the church, when he saw aircraft circling the area. 'Before I could run bombs began falling,' he recalled years later. He woke up in a hospital, permanently blinded. His mother was killed. Inside the church, the scene was catastrophic. Families who had come seeking safety found none. The wounded who survived the initial blast faced a second crisis: the Jaffna Teaching Hospital was overwhelmed and could not treat the volume of casualties arriving by ICRC ambulance.

The International Committee of the Red Cross broke the news - they were the only international aid agency operating in the Tamil areas at the time. ICRC teams helped evacuate the wounded to the hospital and documented what they found. Marco Altherr, the ICRC head in Sri Lanka, confirmed that bombs had struck the area, citing eyewitness accounts from civilians and a priest from a neighboring church. The Red Cross protested the attack publicly. That protest was short-lived: staff members involved were summoned to the Foreign Office and pressured to stop. On July 11, President Chandrika Kumaratunga expressed 'sorrow at the loss of lives' and ordered an investigation. A week later, the military acknowledged the church had been badly damaged but stated it could not confirm the origin of the bombs. No one was held accountable.

The church was rebuilt. A memorial now stands at the site, bearing the names of the dead. Every year, survivors and families gather to remember - though even commemoration has not come easily. During the 25th anniversary in 2020, uniformed Sri Lankan police pushed back Tamil mourners who were trying to light candles. Some families of the victims received compensation of 15,000 rupees - a sum so small it functions less as restitution than as insult. The bombing of Navaly remains one of the most documented and least resolved atrocities of the civil war, alongside massacres at Aranthalawa and other sites where civilians paid the price of a conflict fought over their heads. The people who sheltered in the Church of St. Peter and Paul were not combatants. They were families who did what they were told - sought refuge in a house of God - and were killed for it.