By Joshua McElwee
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis on Saturday again denounced Israeli air strikes in Gaza, a day after an Israeli government minister publicly condemned the pontiff for suggesting that the international community should examine whether a military attack there constitutes genocide of the Palestinian people.
Francis opened his annual Christmas address to Catholic cardinals leading various Vatican departments with what appeared to be a reference to Israeli air strikes on Friday that killed at least 25 Palestinians in Gaza.
“Yesterday, children were bombed,” the Pope said. “This is cruelty. This is not war. I wanted to say this because it touches the heart.”
The Pope, as the leader of the 1.4 billion-member Roman Catholic Church, is usually cautious about taking sides in conflicts, but he has recently become more outspoken about the Israeli military campaign against the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
In excerpts from a book published last month, the Pope said that some international experts said that “what is happening in Gaza bears the characteristics of genocide.”
Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Shikli strongly criticized those comments in an unusual open letter published by the Italian newspaper Il Foglio on Friday. Chikli said the Pope's comments amounted to “belittling” the term genocide.
Francis also said on Saturday that the Catholic bishop of Jerusalem, known as the patriarch, tried to enter the Gaza Strip on Friday to visit Catholics there, but was denied entry.
The Patriarch's office told Reuters that it could not comment on the Pope's statements regarding preventing the Patriarch from entering.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that the Patriarch's entry had been approved and that he would enter Gaza on Sunday unless he faced any major security problems. The army said that aid from the Patriarch's office entered last week.
An army statement said that Israel allows clerics to enter Gaza and “is working in cooperation with the Christian community to make things easier for the Christian population who remain in the Gaza Strip – including coordinating their removal from the Gaza Strip to a third country.” .
The war began when Palestinian militants led by Hamas attacked southern Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking more than 250 hostages to Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.
The Israeli retaliatory campaign, which it says is aimed at eliminating Hamas, has killed more than 45,000 people, most of them civilians, according to authorities in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. The campaign displaced almost the entire population and left much of the enclave in ruins.
Israel says at least a third of those killed were militants, and says it is trying to avoid harming civilians but is fighting militants whom it accuses of infiltrating residents in crowded urban areas. Hamas rejects this.
