Pope Francis Accuses Israel of ‘Cruelty’ in Gaza Strikes

ROME — Pope Francis said Saturday that Israel’s recent airstrikes in Gaza go beyond warfare and constitute “cruelty.”

Speaking off the cuff to members of the Roman Curia in his annual Christmas address, the pontiff made reference to Israeli airstrikes on Friday that killed at least 25 Palestinians in Gaza, including 7 children.

“Yesterday, children were bombed. This is cruelty. This is not warfare,” Francis said. “I want to say this because it moves the heart.”

The pope’s sharp criticism of Israeli conduct in the ongoing conflict is the latest in a string of similar rebukes, including calling for an inquiry into whether Israel is guilty of “genocide” of the Palestinian people.

On Friday, an Israeli government minister published an open letter to the pope in the Italian daily Il Foglio, reproaching him in a piece titled, “Dear Pope, battling Hamas is a right and moral duty.”

Suggesting that Israel’s military tactics against Hamas could constitute genocide is a “trivialization” of the term, wrote Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli.

“As a people who lost six million of its sons and daughters in the Holocaust, we are particularly sensitive to the trivialization of the term ‘genocide’ — a trivialization that comes dangerously close to Holocaust denial,” Chikli said.

In late November, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board accused Pope Francis of picking “sides” against Israel in the ongoing conflict.

The pope “has taken a side in the Hamas-Israel war. The headlines all have ‘pope,’ ‘Israel,’ and ‘genocide’ in them—a great victory for anti-Israel forces,” the board declared in a pointed op-ed.

As Breitbart News reported, in a book-length interview with Hernán Reyes Alcaide titled Hope Never Disappoints: Pilgrims Towards a Better World, Francis called for a “careful investigation” by international experts to see whether Israel’s military actions in Gaza meet “the technical definition” of genocide.

“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the pontiff stated in the book.

The pope had already described Israel’s military incursions in Gaza as “terrorism” and a “massacre,” but ramped up his rhetoric by suggesting that Israel’s actions may constitute genocide.

“There is something disturbing about a pope accusing Jews — the victims of genocide themselves — of genocide while they are fighting for survival on several fronts against enemies aiming to destroy them,” the Journal’s op-ed stated.

“Especially after the barbarous Oct. 7 massacre of unarmed Israeli civilians that started the war, and the follow-up Hamas strategy of using innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields,” it said.

An Italian Holocaust survivor has also rebuked the pope for suggesting that Israel’s actions in Gaza could be considered “genocide.”

“Genocide is something else. When a million children are burned to death, then you can talk about genocide,” said 93-year-old Edith Bruck in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica.

A Hungarian-born Jew and survivor of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen, Bruck said that the bloodshed in Gaza is a “tragedy that concerns us all,” but insisted that Israel is not attempting to eliminate the entire Palestinian population.

That is rather “something Hamas wants to do,” she said, noting that Hamas has said it “wants to wipe out all the Jews in the entire world.”

The risk of using the word “genocide” too easily is that it diminishes “the gravity of real genocides, using the word when it is not appropriate. Genocides are something else,” she stated.

“The Armenian genocide was a genocide. The million children burned in the ovens of Auschwitz was a genocide, along with the other five million Jews, who also burned in the concentration camps,” she said.

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