Pope renews call for immediate Gaza ceasefire
'I once again call for an immediate end to the barbarity of this war and for a peaceful resolution to the conflict,' the pontiff said at the end of his Sunday Angelus prayer from his summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo.
Leo also expressed his 'deep sorrow' for the Israeli attack on the only Catholic church in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, which killed three people and wounded 10 others, including the parish priest.
'I appeal to the international community to observe humanitarian law and respect the obligation to protect civilians as well as the prohibition of collective punishment, the indiscriminate use of force, and the forced displacement of populations,' the Pope added.
The shelling of the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza also damaged the church compound, where hundreds of Palestinians have been sheltering from the Israel-Hamas war, now in its 21st month.
Israel expressed regret over what it described as an accident and said it is investigating.
'We need to dialogue and abandon weapons,' the Pope said earlier today, after presiding over Mass at the nearby Cathedral of Albano.
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'The world no longer tolerates war.'
Gaza
The bodies of Palestinians who were killed while attempting to access aid trucks entering northern Gaza through the Zikim crossing with Israel are brought to a clinic in Gaza City.
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Pope Leo's call for a ceasefire comes as at least 73 people have been killed while attempting to access aid at locations across Gaza, the health ministry in the Palestinian territory has said.
The largest toll was in the northern part of the territory, where 67 Palestinians were killed while trying to reach aid entering through the Zikim crossing with Israel.
More than 150 people were injured, with some of them in a critical condition, hospitals said.
Seven Palestinians were also killed while sheltering in tents in Khan Younis, including a five-year-old boy, according to the Kuwait Specialised Field Hospital, which received the casualties.
It was not immediately clear whether they were killed by the Israeli army or armed gangs, or both. But some witnesses said the Israeli military shot at the crowd.
The Israeli military said soldiers had shot at a gathering of thousands of Palestinians in northern Gaza who posed a threat, and that it was aware of some casualties. But it said the numbers being reported by teams in Gaza were far higher than the military's initial investigation found.
The military added it is attempting to facilitate the entry of aid, and blamed Hamas militants for fomenting chaos and endangering civilians.
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RTÉ News
34 minutes ago
- RTÉ News
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The relationship between Israel and the United Nations has always been strained. But the war in Gaza has pushed it to breaking point. Now as pressure grows on UN agencies in Gaza, so do fears over the permanent bypassing of the United Nations. Will that deal a blow to the multilateral system, at a time when the UN is already reeling from severe financial crisis, not to mention questions over its very relevance? "Israel's sidelining of UN agencies in Gaza – particularly in the delivery of aid – offers a chilling glimpse of what a world without a functioning United Nations might look like: starving people being shot while queueing for food and malnourished medical staff too weak to treat civilians," Christine Ryan, director of the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity Project at New York's Columbia University, told RTÉ News. For nearly eight decades, the United Nations has been engaged on the issue of Israel and Palestine. 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Irish Times
34 minutes ago
- Irish Times
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Irish Times
34 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Words like ‘humanitarian' have lost all meaning. Let the images speak instead
Chapin Fay is the spokesperson for an organisation called – in one of the many grossly Orwellian inversions of language and meaning we have come to associate with the Israeli war on Gaza – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. An American operation based in Delaware and backed by Israel , GHF – which has no experience in humanitarian aid distribution – has been entirely responsible for it in Gaza since May. The United Nations and major aid groups have refused to co-operate with GHF because they say it prioritises Israeli military objectives over the safe delivery of aid. As such, until a ceasefire holds and the safe flow of aid resumes, GHF has been the only thing standing between 90,000 already seriously malnourished women and children and imminent death by starvation. According to his online biography, Fay is 'one of the best media strategists and Republican operatives in the state' and a 'crisis management expert with a track record of helping Fortune 500 companies'. 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But I'd like to point out that actually, the most violent incidents, the highest casualties have been linked to the UN or other humanitarian convoys. That's a fact.' [ Doctors report wave of hunger deaths in Gaza as US envoy arrives to 'push for ceasefire' Opens in new window ] As words like 'fact' and 'humanitarian' have lost all meaning – have been so violently divorced from their normal use as to now infer precisely the opposite – we may need to start inventing new ones. Like inhumanitarian. Binyamin Netanyahu wants to ethnically cleanse the population of Gaza, removing survivors to an inhumanitarian city. US president Donald Trump wants to create an inhumanitarian transit area . Or we can take the approach of Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, and use the names we already have for these kind of places: concentration camps . Whatever words we use, none can occlude the reality of what is happening in Gaza. No words can adequately capture it either. 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Babies normally have dimples at their elbows, but he has the wizened limbs and loose skin of an old man, of someone close to death. Muhammad, you understand instantly from the picture, is very close to death. The images coming in on the wire services from Gaza used to show children playing in the rubble of what was formerly their home. They were very distressing. But the pictures we are now getting are unfathomable: emaciated small bodies who no longer have the strength to stay upright. Children with horribly protruding ribs, hollow eyes, scabbed lips and noses, distended bellies and far off, vacant stares. Toddlers whose features are scarcely recognisable as belonging to children. [ Seeing Israel use hunger as a weapon of war is monstrous to me as someone with a Holocaust legacy Opens in new window ] In the 48 hours before Muhammad's picture was published in this newspaper, 12 children and 21 adults had died of starvation in the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza health ministry. Fay recommends we don't believe the ministry, because it is run by Hamas. Who, then, do we believe? Who does the EU choose to believe? Whose words will be enough for the United Nations Security Council to intervene? What about the evidence of researchers from University of London, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Princeton, Stanford, Peace Research Institute Oslo and Université Catholique de Louvain and the first independent study of the number of people killed as a result of Israel's military campaign in Gaza? The study was based on household surveys and found that at least 75,200 Palestinians were killed between October 2023 and January 2025. Another 8,540 died due to starvation, disease and the collapse of healthcare systems. The researchers say the Gaza health ministry's figures are, in fact, far too conservative. Do we believe the AFP when it warns that the 10 freelance journalists it has left in Gaza face death by starvation? Do we believe the 109 aid organisations that wrote a letter this week begging Israel to end the blockade? Do we believe the evidence of our own eyes? Or do we believe the Newspeak of Chapin Fay, of Binyamin Netanyahu's government and of Donald Trump, when they insist that freedom is slavery, that concentration camps are humanitarian cities, and that the babies starving to death in front of us are Hamas propaganda?
