Vatican City, Oct 11, 2023 / 06:13 am (CNA).
Pope Francis appealed for the immediate release of more than 100 hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza on Wednesday and expressed concern for the safety of Palestinian civilians living in the Gaza Strip.
“I pray for those families who saw a feast day transformed into a day of mourning, and I ask that the hostages be immediately released,” Pope Francis said on Oct. 11.
Some 130 Israeli hostages were taken by the militant Islamist group Hamas during its attack on Israel last weekend. The terrorist group has threatened to kill one hostage every time that Israel’s military bombs civilian targets in Gaza “without warning,” according to the Associated Press.
Speaking to thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square for his Wednesday morning audience, the pope underlined that “terrorism and extremism do not help to reach a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, but they fuel hatred, violence, revenge, and only make both suffer.”
The pope said that he has been following “what is happening in Israel and Palestine with tears and apprehension.” After Hamas’ attack on Israel killed 1,000 people, the Israeli government vowed retaliation and launched airstrikes on the blockaded Gaza Strip.
Francis said: “It is the right of those who are attacked to defend themselves, but I am very worried about the total siege in which the Palestinians live in Gaza, where there have been many innocent victims.”
“The Middle East does not need war, but peace, a peace built on justice, dialogue and the courage of fraternity,” he added.
The appeal was the second time that Pope Francis has spoken publicly about the war in Israel since the surprise attack last weekend.
On Sunday, the pope prayed for peace between Israel and Palestine and expressed sorrow that “violence has exploded even more ferociously” between the two, words that drew criticism from Israel’s Embassy to the Holy See who issued a statement warning against “the use of linguistic ambiguities and terms that allude to a false symmetry.”
The pope also spoke over the telephone with a Catholic priest who serves the only Catholic Church in Gaza on Oct. 9, according to the news agency of the Italian bishops’ conference.
The priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, who is currently stranded in Bethlehem, told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Oct. 9 that the situation “continues to be very bad” and that his Gaza parish is sheltering more than 80 Christians and Muslims amid Israeli airstrikes.
Families of the victims taken hostage by Hamas are desperately waiting to find out if their missing loved ones are safe. An American woman, Abbey Onn, whose five relatives in southern Israel were taken hostage, told CBS News that she had seen a video on social media on Sunday of her 12-year-old relative in the hands of Hamas.
“These are civilians who are being terrorized and we want them brought home,” she said.
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Israel may not attack Palestinian civilians because of this hostage situation.
Israel has no recourse to methods and effects of terrorists. It may not attack civilians because terrorists or alleged terrorists attacked Israeli civilians. There is no such allowance for arbitrary action whether retaliatory or something else. The whole international community is obliged to denounce the means chosen by Israel so far to deal with the terrorism; as well as denounce the Netanyahu-coalition’s plans afoot amounting to the same thing. The Palestinians and the rest of the world deserve collaboration from Israel in isolating these crimes and those who perpetrate them, whether the criminals are Hamas or ISIS or infiltrators of whatever description into these groups. I recall that less than 3 years ago Netanyahu and his agendas were in trouble precisely because he was no longer trusted on his outlooks for war.
Israel is obliged to accept the burden of responsibility for the Palestinian peace and the two state solution.
Do Palestinians possess any obligation to renounce the all consuming genocidal mania that led them to abandon their homelands to initiate a complete war of annihilation against the Jews in the first place, a genocidal commitment so obsessive and venomous they have never relinquished it in the slightest even while sacrificing the welfare of their own people, even using them as shields, towards this end?
Can you argue against the reality that if Muslim terrorists laid down their arms, a virtual impossibility, but if they did, peace would finally exist in the Middle East? And if Israel committed to unilateral laying down its arms, is it not the case that it would begin the instantaneous process of extermination of every single Jew in the State of Israel by Muslim forces of all factions?
I had made comment about that here.
You can not be bombing civilians and hospitals and schools and killing reporters. You can not say, o dear us we had a security breach and therefore now we can bomb civilians at length to our satisfaction until it suits us because Hamas is at war and we will change everything around in the Middle East.
Israel in particular ALSO has claims on land that are incompatible with 2-state. And in addition there are the Zionists that intend on one result. Until these are addressed rationally forthrightly everything else is smokescreen.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/10/08/pope-francis-jerusalem-patriarch-react-to-violence-between-israel-and-hamas/