Pope Francis has made headlines in recent months for expressing increasing concern about the death toll in Israel’s 16-month military incursion into Gaza, even invoking the specter of “genocide,” a term that has been used for many months now by international tribunals, jurists, U.N. officials, Holocaust historians, and human rights groups to describe Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza.
Francis’ statements are no less valid now that a temporary and fragile ceasefire has been declared between Israel and Hamas, the principal ruling party in Gaza. Israeli soldiers have continued to kill Palestinians in Gaza and now are effectively cutting off all humanitarian aid to the area, while launching a new and brutal invasion of the West Bank, where more than three million Palestinians live. Meanwhile, President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu threaten a new invasion, while Francis continues to speak personally to the Catholics of the area from his hospital bed.
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Many English-speaking Catholics may be inclined to look askance at the stance taken by Pope Francis, given his well-established reputation for expressing sympathy with political causes associated with socialist or leftist political ideologies. Large numbers of Catholics in the United States now habitually (and often unthinkingly) place themselves under the vague rubric of “conservative,” a largely secularist and Americanist ideology that is currently dominated by unquestioning pro-Israel sentiment, bolstered by a constant barrage of propaganda in social media.
However, Catholics should be aware that, whatever his personal motives, Francis’ position on Israel and Gaza is not founded on leftist ideological premises but traditional Catholic doctrine dating back centuries on the natural law principles regarding the doctrine of just war and the treatment of foreign nations by superior powers. They also represent the Church’s clear teachings on war found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Pope urges investigation into genocide
In a new book based on interviews with the pope announced on November 17, Francis speaks about the plight of refugees, particularly “those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has struck their Palestinian brothers and sisters given the difficulty of getting food and aid into their territory.”
“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” Francis continues in Hope Never Disappoints. “It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”
Francis’ statements, the strongest he had made to date, were consistent with repeated expressions of concern about the sky-high civilian death toll in Gaza dating back to the earliest weeks of the war. However, he has recently shown a new determination to push the point, despite expressions of outrage from neoconservative publications like The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Israeli government and radical Zionist organizations.
Francis doubled down repeatedly during December. On the 7th, Pope Francis was publicly presented with a Nativity scene as a gift from two Palestinian artists. The scene features the baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh, a traditional scarf used by Palestinians. During the inaugural of the scene in the Paul VI Hall, Francis urged believers to “remember the brothers and sisters, who, right there [in Bethlehem] and in other parts of the world, are suffering from the tragedy of war.” He added, “Enough war, enough violence!”
During his annual Christmas Address to the cardinals on December 21, Francis noted bitterly that Israel was continuing to harm the Palestinian Christian community as well as the rest of the civilian population of Gaza. “Yesterday the [Latin] Patriarch [of Jerusalem] was not allowed into Gaza, as had been promised, and yesterday children were bombed,” said Francis. “This is cruelty! This is not war. I wanted to tell you this because it touches my heart.”
Israel responded the following day by allowing the Patriarch into Gaza, while claiming that it had never prohibited his entry.
Then, during the Christmas Eve Angelus, Francis again denounced the cruelty of Israel’s policy in Gaza. “With sorrow I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children machine-gunned, the bombing of schools and hospitals,” said the pope. “So much cruelty!”
Francis is personally aware of what is happening in Gaza—and particularly the fate of Christians there—because, according to him, he speaks “every day” with Gaza’s only Catholic parish, Holy Family, which has been devastated by deadly direct attacks by the Israeli military.
“They tell me ugly things, difficult things” about what is happening there, the pontiff said in a recent press conference. “Please, when you see the bodies of killed children, when you see that, under the presumption that some guerrillas are there, a school is bombed, this is ugly,” he added.
On January 9, in an audience with the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See—and despite bitter push-back from the State of Israel for his earlier comments—Francis again decried the mass killing of civilians in Gaza and the destruction of its vital infrastructure.
Calling for a return of hostages and a ceasefire, Francis noted,
War is always a failure! The involvement of civilians, especially children, and the destruction of infrastructures is not only a disaster, but essentially means that between the two sides only evil emerges the winner. We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians or the attacking of infrastructures necessary for their survival. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.
Elderly Catholic parishioners targeted by Israeli snipers
Holy Family Parish made headlines in late 2023 when Israeli snipers shot and killed an elderly Catholic parishioner, Nahida Anton, who was sheltering in the parish. They then shot her daughter Samar when she attempted to save her mother by dragging her back into the parish church.
“Around noon today, December 2023, 16, a sniper of the IDF murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza, where the majority of Christian families have taken refuge since the start of the war,” stated the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in a press release at the time. “Nahida and her daughter Samar were shot as they walked to the Sister’s Convent. One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety.”
Apart from the two women, “seven more people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others inside the church compound,” reported the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem later. “No warning was given, no notification was provided. They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents.” The Convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa, which was staffed by nuns caring for disabled patients, was also hit by a rocket attack by an Israeli tank, rendering the mission home “uninhabitable” and damaging the electrical generator.
Over a year after the Latin Patriarchate’s protest, the Israeli government hasn’t offered an explanation for the shootings and bombing, which are far from unique; in fact, they are only one of many thousands of similar cases of sniper attacks on women and children, Muslim and Christian, that have been reported throughout the Gaza Strip on a daily basis during Israel’s 16-month incursion.
The New York Times, a publication with a documented history of pro-Israel bias in its journalism, has collected testimonies and radiographic evidence from dozens of non-Palestinian doctors who treated numerous children in Gaza who were shot in the head and chest with high-power sniper rifles. The Israeli government has permitted almost no international journalists to enter, and Arab journalists have been repeatedly targeted by the military, so documenting such cases has been difficult. However, they are very much reflective of the murderous and genocidal rhetoric that has been repeatedly voiced by militant West Bank settlers, who are amply represented in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, as well as by Netanyahu himself.
Disturbing statistics
According to statistics published by Gaza health authorities (whose estimates are generally accepted by Israeli intelligence sources), almost 58,000 Gazans, the majority women and children, have been either directly killed or are missing under the rubble following Israel’s 2023 invasion. However, a study published in the British medical journal TheLancet estimates that as of June 19, 2024, the indirect death toll caused by the destruction and blockades of food, water, electricity, and other goods had minimally reached 189,000. If the same factor of indirect deaths to direct deaths is applied to the current estimated direct death toll, the total number of deaths would now be well over 200,000, with countless more wounded, maimed, and traumatized.
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The civilian population has been subject to embargoes of food and medicine resulting in countless deaths. All of the major hospitals in northern Gaza have been shut down, their patients force-marched out in freezing weather after being stripped down to their underwear, and their doctors taken off to prisons where they have been tortured, a fate that has also befallen countless other Palestinians taken prisoner by Israeli troops. The director of northern Gaza’s last hospital to be shut down, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician whose teenage son was killed at the gates of the hospital by an Israeli drone strike in October, was taken off to such a prison in December. According to his lawyer, Abu Safiya has been subjected to torture and denied medical care.
Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign has targeted apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals with 2,000-pound bombs, with an estimated total of over 75,000 tons of explosives, the equivalent of multiple atomic bombs, resulting in the damage or destruction of 90 percent of the housing, which proportionally exceeds the Allied bombing of Germany by a factor of nine, and also far exceeds the Allied bombing of Japan. “It is heartbreaking that many times more bombs were dropped on Gaza than on Tokyo in massive US air raids during World War II,” Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was quoted as saying by Japan’s NHK news service in October of last year.
Such figures are the latest and worst of a long series of atrocities and injustices against Arab Palestinians, both Christian and non-Christian, that have been denounced by the Latin Patriarchate for decades, with little interest shown from English-speaking Catholics.
