People search for survivors at the site of an Israeli strike that targeted the Abu Samra family home in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on December 22, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP)
VATICAN CITY, Holy See — Pope Francis doubled down Sunday on his condemnation of Israel’s strikes on the Gaza Strip, denouncing their “cruelty” for the second time in as many days despite Israel accusing him of “double standards”.
“And with pain I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children being machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals. What cruelty,” the pope said after his weekly Angelus prayer.
It comes a day after the 88-year-old Argentine lamented an Israeli airstrike that killed seven children from one family on Friday, according to Gaza’s rescue agency.
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“Yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war,” the pope told members of the government of the Holy See.
His remarks on Saturday prompted a sharp response from Israel.
An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman described Francis’s intervention as “particularly disappointing as they are disconnected from the true and factual context of Israel’s fight against jihadist terrorism — a multi-front war that was forced upon it starting on October 7.”
“Enough with the double standards and the singling out of the Jewish state and its people,” he added.
“Cruelty is terrorists hiding behind children while trying to murder Israeli children; cruelty is holding 100 hostages for 442 days, including a baby and children, by terrorists and abusing them,” the Israeli statement said.
This was a reference to the Hamas Palestinian militants who attacked Israel, killed many civilians and took hostages on October 7, 2023, triggering the Gaza war.
Gaza’s civil defence rescue agency reported that an Israeli air strike had killed 10 members of a family on Friday in the northern part of the territory, including seven children.
The Israeli military told AFP it had struck “several terrorists who were operating in a military structure belonging to the Hamas terrorist organisation and posed a threat to IDF (army) troops operating in the area”.
It added that “the reported number of casualties resulting from the strike does not align with the information” the army held.
Hardened tone
The mounting criticisms of Israel appear to mark a change in the pope’s tone in recent weeks.
He has consistently called for peace since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war more than 14 months ago.
But at the end of November, Francis denounced “the invader’s arrogance” in Ukraine as in “Palestine”, a contrast with the Holy See’s modern tradition of neutrality.
He has recently published a book in which the pope calls for scrutiny over whether the situation in Gaza “corresponds to the technical definition” of genocide, an accusation firmly rejected by Israel.
At the end of September the Argentine Jesuit also criticised Israel’s “immoral” use of force in Gaza and in Lebanon, where Israel launched an offensive against Hamas’s fellow Iran-backed ally Hezbollah.
Since 2013 the Vatican has recognised the State of Palestine, with which it maintains diplomatic relations, and it supports the two-state solution.
The October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people on the Israeli side, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
That toll includes hostages who died or were killed in captivity in the Gaza Strip.
At least 45,259 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in the Palestinian territory, the majority of them civilians, according to data from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
Those figures are taken as reliable by the United Nations.