Pope calls for investigation of Gaza ‘genocide’ charges in Jubilee book

“It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits the technical definition of genocide formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

The Pope called for an investigation into allegations of genocide in Gaza in a book published this week.

“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” Pope Francis wrote in Hope Never Disappoints, a book for the 2025 Jubilee. “It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

Excerpts from the book appeared in the Italian daily La Stampa last weekend. The comments reportedly emerge from a discussion of the search for hope amid international crises, including the war and humanitarian disaster in the Holy Land.

“In the Middle East, where the open doors of nations like Jordan or Lebanon continue to be a salvation for millions of people fleeing conflicts in the region,” he writes. “I am thinking above all of 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.”

In a response posted on social media, the Israeli Ambassador to the Holy See said his country had suffered “a genocidal massacre” on 7 October 2023.

“Since then, Israel has exercised its right of self-defence against attempts from seven different fronts to kill its citizens,” wrote Yaron Sideman. “Any attempt to call it by any other name is singling out the Jewish state.”

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Israel’s mission impossible

Earlier last week the Pope received a group of 16 Israelis – 10 women, four men, and two children – abducted by Hamas in the 7 October attack. Some of the participants at the meeting on 14 November held signs displaying the faces and names of their missing or captive family members.

Pope Francis touched each image as a gesture of blessing and paused in silent prayer. The Israeli Embassy to the Holy See described the encounter as “moving”, adding that it “showed the Pope’s closeness to the victims of that horrible day and his commitment to their release”.

The Israel Defence Force (IDF) has said that continued airstrikes on Gaza are to prevent Hamas from regrouping in areas that have been cleared in previous rounds of combat. Palestinian health officials report an overall death toll since last October of 43,922.

IDF strikes on Lebanon and Syria have increased in recent weeks. “At night, and during the day, we wake up or hear Israeli raids that are increasingly frequent here in Damascus, as in other places in Syria,” reported Cardinal Mario Zenari, the apostolic nuncio to Syria, last week.

“They have also struck the main access routes to Lebanon, which for us represented an umbilical cord for air and road travel,” he said. At least 15 people were killed in IDF strikes on residential buildings in Damascus last weekend. Zenari described widespread “tragedy” in Syria.

“There is the tragedy of internally displaced persons, about seven million, plus the refugees in the surrounding countries, about six million, and many of these people have been displaced several times because they move from one bombed out location to another, with huge difficulties in finding housing.”

He said that around half a million Syrians who previously fled to Lebanon were now returning, while many young Syrians chose to emigrate. “We have had an exodus of Christians,” he said. “About two thirds of those who have left or are leaving in recent weeks, are young people.”

An IDF strike on Beirut killed Hezbollah’s media chief Mohammed Afif.  There were also reports of strikes in several other areas of Lebanon, including the port city of Tyre, where the Lebanese health ministry said 11 people were killed and 48 wounded last weekend.

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Israel needs the United Nations

Rabbis for Human Rights last week reported renewed settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, as the group’s members tried to support famers during the olive harvest season. Bedouin from Umm Al-Hiran have been ordered to move to Hura, a town Israel created to confine Bedouin families divorced from their agricultural way of life.

There are more than 11,700 Palestinians detained in the occupied West Bank including Layan Nasir, a 23-year-old Palestinian Anglican who was taken at gunpoint from her parents’ home in the West Bank in the town of Birzeit in April without an arrest warrant or charges.

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