Pope Francis’ Condemnation of Gaza “Genocide” Reflects Traditional Catholic Doctrine

Pope Francis has made headlines in recent months for expressing increasing concern about the death toll in Israel’s 16-month military incursion into Gaza, even invoking the specter of “genocide,” a term that has been used for many months now by international tribunals, jurists, U.N. officials, Holocaust historians, and human rights groups to describe Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza.

Francis’ statements are no less valid now that a temporary and fragile ceasefire has been declared between Israel and Hamas, the principal ruling party in Gaza. Israeli soldiers have continued to kill Palestinians in Gaza and now are effectively cutting off all humanitarian aid to the area, while launching a new and brutal invasion of the West Bank, where more than three million Palestinians live. Meanwhile, President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu threaten a new invasion, while Francis continues to speak personally to the Catholics of the area from his hospital bed. 

Many English-speaking Catholics may be inclined to look askance at the stance taken by Pope Francis, given his well-established reputation for expressing sympathy with political causes associated with socialist or leftist political ideologies. Large numbers of Catholics in the United States now habitually (and often unthinkingly) place themselves under the vague rubric of “conservative,” a largely secularist and Americanist ideology that is currently dominated by unquestioning pro-Israel sentiment, bolstered by a constant barrage of propaganda in social media. 

However, Catholics should be aware that, whatever his personal motives, Francis’ position on Israel and Gaza is not founded on leftist ideological premises but traditional Catholic doctrine dating back centuries on the natural law principles regarding the doctrine of just war and the treatment of foreign nations by superior powers. They also represent the Church’s clear teachings on war found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Pope urges investigation into genocide

In a new book based on interviews with the pope announced on November 17, Francis speaks about the plight of refugees, particularly “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.” 

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

Francis’ statements, the strongest he had made to date, were consistent with repeated expressions of concern about the sky-high civilian death toll in Gaza dating back to the earliest weeks of the war. However, he has recently shown a new determination to push the point, despite expressions of outrage from neoconservative publications like The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Israeli government and radical Zionist organizations. 

Francis doubled down repeatedly during December. On the 7th, Pope Francis was publicly presented with a Nativity scene as a gift from two Palestinian artists. The scene features the baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh, a traditional scarf used by Palestinians. During the inaugural of the scene in the Paul VI Hall, Francis urged believers to “remember the brothers and sisters, who, right there [in Bethlehem] and in other parts of the world, are suffering from the tragedy of war.” He added, “Enough war, enough violence!”

During his annual Christmas Address to the cardinals on December 21, Francis noted bitterly that Israel was continuing to harm the Palestinian Christian community as well as the rest of the civilian population of Gaza. “Yesterday the [Latin] Patriarch [of Jerusalem] was not allowed into Gaza, as had been promised, and yesterday children were bombed,” said Francis. “This is cruelty! This is not war. I wanted to tell you this because it touches my heart.”

Israel responded the following day by allowing the Patriarch into Gaza, while claiming that it had never prohibited his entry. 

Then, during the Christmas Eve Angelus, Francis again denounced the cruelty of Israel’s policy in Gaza. “With sorrow I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children machine-gunned, the bombing of schools and hospitals,” said the pope. “So much cruelty!”

Francis is personally aware of what is happening in Gaza—and particularly the fate of Christians there—because, according to him, he speaks “every day” with Gaza’s only Catholic parish, Holy Family, which has been devastated by deadly direct attacks by the Israeli military. 

“They tell me ugly things, difficult things” about what is happening there, the pontiff said in a recent press conference. “Please, when you see the bodies of killed children, when you see that, under the presumption that some guerrillas are there, a school is bombed, this is ugly,” he added. 

On January 9, in an audience with the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See—and despite bitter push-back from the State of Israel for his earlier comments—Francis again decried the mass killing of civilians in Gaza and the destruction of its vital infrastructure. 

Calling for a return of hostages and a ceasefire, Francis noted, 

War is always a failure! The involvement of civilians, especially children, and the destruction of infrastructures is not only a disaster, but essentially means that between the two sides only evil emerges the winner. We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians or the attacking of infrastructures necessary for their survival. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.

Elderly Catholic parishioners targeted by Israeli snipers

Holy Family Parish made headlines in late 2023 when Israeli snipers shot and killed an elderly Catholic parishioner, Nahida Anton, who was sheltering in the parish. They then shot her daughter Samar when she attempted to save her mother by dragging her back into the parish church. 

“Around noon today, December 2023, 16, a sniper of the IDF murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza, where the majority of Christian families have taken refuge since the start of the war,” stated the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in a press release at the time. “Nahida and her daughter Samar were shot as they walked to the Sister’s Convent. One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety.”

Apart from the two women, “seven more people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others inside the church compound,” reported the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem later. “No warning was given, no notification was provided. They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents.” The Convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa, which was staffed by nuns caring for disabled patients, was also hit by a rocket attack by an Israeli tank, rendering the mission home “uninhabitable” and damaging the electrical generator.

Over a year after the Latin Patriarchate’s protest, the Israeli government hasn’t offered an explanation for the shootings and bombing, which are far from unique; in fact, they are only one of many thousands of similar cases of sniper attacks on women and children, Muslim and Christian, that have been reported throughout the Gaza Strip on a daily basis during Israel’s 16-month incursion.

The New York Times, a publication with a documented history of pro-Israel bias in its journalism, has  collected testimonies and radiographic evidence from dozens of non-Palestinian doctors who treated numerous children in Gaza who were shot in the head and chest with high-power sniper rifles. The Israeli government has permitted almost no international journalists to enter, and Arab journalists have been repeatedly targeted by the military, so documenting such cases has been difficult. However, they are very much reflective of the murderous and genocidal rhetoric that has been repeatedly voiced by militant West Bank settlers, who are amply represented in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, as well as by Netanyahu himself. 

Disturbing statistics

According to statistics published by Gaza health authorities (whose estimates are generally accepted by Israeli intelligence sources), almost 58,000 Gazans, the majority women and children, have been either directly killed or are missing under the rubble following Israel’s 2023 invasion. However, a study published in the British medical journal The Lancet estimates that as of June 19, 2024, the indirect death toll caused by the destruction and blockades of food, water, electricity, and other goods had minimally reached 189,000. If the same factor of indirect deaths to direct deaths is applied to the current estimated direct death toll, the total number of deaths would now be well over 200,000, with countless more wounded, maimed, and traumatized.

The civilian population has been subject to embargoes of food and medicine resulting in countless deaths. All of the major hospitals in northern Gaza have been shut down, their patients force-marched out in freezing weather after being stripped down to their underwear, and their doctors taken off to prisons where they have been tortured, a fate that has also befallen countless other Palestinians taken prisoner by Israeli troops. The director of northern Gaza’s last hospital to be shut down, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician whose teenage son was killed at the gates of the hospital by an Israeli drone strike in October, was taken off to such a prison in December. According to his lawyer, Abu Safiya has been subjected to torture and denied medical care.  

Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign has targeted apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals with 2,000-pound bombs, with an estimated total of over 75,000 tons of explosives, the equivalent of multiple atomic bombs, resulting in the damage or destruction of 90 percent of the housing, which proportionally exceeds the Allied bombing of Germany by a factor of nine, and also far exceeds the Allied bombing of Japan. “It is heartbreaking that many times more bombs were dropped on Gaza than on Tokyo in massive US air raids during World War II,” Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was quoted as saying by Japan’s NHK news service in October of last year.

Such figures are the latest and worst of a long series of atrocities and injustices against Arab Palestinians, both Christian and non-Christian, that have been denounced by the Latin Patriarchate for decades, with little interest shown from English-speaking Catholics. 

Outrage from Israel and its supporters in the US corporate media

The response by Israel and its supporters to the pope’s words have been to position Israel as a victim fighting back in self-defense, invoking the specter of anti-Semitism and the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, in which 797 civilians and residents, and 379 police and soldiers were killed by foot soldiers from the militant wing of Gaza’s ruling party, Hamas, as well as other opportunistic attackers.

The October 7 attack was the biggest massacre of Israeli civilians in the history of the country, although its death toll is dwarfed by that of Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” campaign in Gaza nine years earlier, in which the Israeli military killed over 1,460 Palestinian civilians and 780 soldiers in the space of about seven weeks. Moreover, from 2008 to October 6, 2023, Israel had killed over 6,400 Palestinians in toto, while Israel had lost 355 citizens, a little less than half of whom were soldiers, mostly on the West Bank where both Israeli civilians and their military supporters continue to aggressively colonize the land and push out the Palestinian inhabitants. 

“Pope Francis Turns on Israel” screamed The Wall Street Journal editorial board’s headline on Francis’ statement, which they then followed up with every rhetorical trope from the standard arsenal of the Israeli lobby. “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 board repeated the familiar claims of “human shields” and made a not-very-thinly-veiled threat to bring up the long-refuted anti-Catholic falsehoods about Pope Pius XII and “the complicated papal history with the Nazis during World War II.”

Israel’s ambassador to the Holy See, Yaron Sideman, responded by claiming that, while the October 7 Hamas massacre was a “genocide” against Israel, its response in the Gaza Strip was nothing more than “self-defense” and accused Francis of “singling out the Jewish state,” implying the pontiff is acting on anti-Semitic motives. 

Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli, then upped the anti-Semitism ante in a bizarre inversion of the pope’s remarks, accusing him of flirting with “holocaust denial” for his objections to the mass killing of Arab Palestinians. 

“As a people who lost six million of its sons and daughters in the Holocaust, we are particularly sensitive to the trivialisation of the term ‘genocide’—a trivialisation that comes dangerously close to Holocaust denial,” Chikli wrote in an open letter to the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. 

Catholic News Agency, one of the few Catholic news outlets in English to do its own coverage of Francis’ remarks, used the opportunity to give a platform to an extremist Zionist organization, the Combat Antisemitism Movement, that accused Francis of “a possible opening of an eighth front” of “annihilation” against the State of Israel, and repeated the Israeli ambassador’s accusation of discrimination against Jews.

The group’s CEO, Sacha Roytman, added, 

The Catholic Church has a very troubling history of investigations into the conduct of Jews, which were frequently called Inquisitions…It would behoove Pope Francis to choose his words more carefully because they bring to mind a horrific and bloody history of Catholic religious leaders attacking Jews.

Finally, on January 9, in apparent response to Francis’ remarks to the diplomatic corps, Rabbi Eliezer Simcha Weisz, a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council of Israel, issued an angry response accusing him of creating a “deliberate distortion that serves to delegitimize Jewish connection to our ancestral homeland.”

“In an age where images and messages circle the globe in seconds, depicting Jesus in a keffiyeh and Israeli soldiers as Herod’s men isn’t just bad theology, it’s dangerous incitement with immediate, worldwide impact,” wrote Weisz, who also claimed that Francis’ remarks “embolden those who attack Jewish communities.” 

Francis’ position based on traditional Catholic doctrine and international law

All of the bluster and outrage notwithstanding, Pope Francis’ recent observations on the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza are well-founded and not at all unjustified. Although Francis hardly has a reputation for Catholic orthodoxy, his statements are very much in keeping with the facts, Catholic moral teaching, and the historic views of the popes. They are also reflective of what jurists, international legal bodies, and human rights groups have been saying for many months. 

The indiscriminate destruction in Gaza is often justified on the grounds that the United States and its allies in World War II acted similarly toward the Axis powers, although it exceeds even that example. But whatever the case may be, the Church has always condemned the killing of innocent people in wartime or peacetime. 

Specifically, the Catechism of the Catholic Church unequivocally condemns the kinds of terror-bombing committed in World War II and subsequent wars, stating in paragraph 2314 that, “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” 

Paragraph 2313 of the same catechism is also very applicable to Israel’s offensive in Gaza, condemning “actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles” as crimes, adding that “the extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority must be condemned as a mortal sin. One is morally bound to resist orders that command genocide.”

Israel’s brutal military dictatorship over the occupied territories, which is now in its 58th year, was decried by Pope John Paul II, who entered into official relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization in 2000. In his visit to the Holy Land that year, he declared to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat that “no one can ignore how much the Palestinian people have had to suffer in recent decades.”

“Your torment is before the eyes of the world, and it has gone on too long,” the pope added. “My prayers are with those Palestinians—Muslims and Christians—who are still without a home of their own, their proper place in society and the possibility of a normal working life.” In his visit to the Dheisheh refugee camp outside of Bethlehem, John Paul spoke of 

the degrading conditions in which refugees often have to live; the continuation over long periods of situations that are barely tolerable in emergencies or for a brief time of transit; the fact that displaced persons are obliged to remain for years in settlement camps: these are the measure of the urgent need for a just solution to the underlying causes of the problem.

Pope John Paul’s description of the plight of Palestinian refugees is one with which few Americans are familiar. They are unaware of the nightmarish reality experienced by both Muslim and Christian Palestinians on a daily basis in the occupied territories, where they live in barbed wire enclosures under military supervision, forced to pass through one military checkpoint after another. They are prohibited from building homes in refugee camps where they have lived for multiple generations, and the homes they manage to build may be bulldozed without notice. Women and children as young as 12 may be arrested arbitrarily, without charges, and taken off to a prison by soldiers. Human rights and charitable organizations like Save the Children say they are often tortured in these prisons. 

Following in John Paul II’s footsteps, Pope Francis recognized the State of Palestine in 2015 and initiated diplomatic relations, just as 75 percent of the United Nations’ member states have done.   Following in John Paul II’s footsteps, Pope Francis recognized the State of Palestine in 2015.Tweet This

International institutions and human rights organizations affirm Francis’ concern

Pope Francis’ mere suggestion that the possibility of genocide be investigated is nothing more than a very tame expression of what has already been stated repeatedly by the highest authorities in international law, as well as major Israeli and international human rights organizations. 

Only a few days after Francis’ reference to “genocide” in November, the International Criminal Court indicted both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes. The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, had asked for the warrant many months before, but the court’s leadership appears to have been afraid to issue it in the wake of threats made against a chief prosecutor by Israel’s Mossad, as well as other political pressures. President Donald Trump has now retaliated against Khan by prohibiting his entry into the United States and freezing his assets—and threatening other court personnel with the same thing.

The International Court of Justice, or “World Court,” a principal organ of the United Nations which is charged with overseeing conventions on international law, found that a plausible case had been made by South Africa in its accusations of genocide against Israel as early as January 2024. In July, it declared that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is unlawful under international law. 

The United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, which has existed since 1968 to address Israel’s perpetual military dictatorship over Gaza and the West Bank, issued a statement shortly before Francis’ statement declaring that “Israel’s warfare in Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians there.”

“Since the beginning of the war, Israeli officials have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain life—food, water, and fuel,” the committee added. “These statements along with the systematic and unlawful interference of humanitarian aid make clear Israel’s intent to instrumentalize lifesaving supplies for political and military gains.”

The International Court of Justice declared in July of 2024 that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank are illegal, repeating what the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory had already opined in 2022, adding that states are obligated to work to bring it to an end. The U.N. General Assembly and European Union have been calling for an unconditional ceasefire for over a year. Even Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, human rights outfits that have tended to downplay Israel’s atrocities in the past, are now calling the country’s Gaza incursion a “genocide.” 

The consensus is reinforced by historians of genocide as well as Holocaust survivors. Barry Trachtenberg, a Jewish Holocaust historian from Wake Forest University, recently testified in court that a consensus exists among Holocaust historians that Israel’s Gaza incursion is a genocide. Amos Goldberg, Jonah M. Machover Chair in Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says it’s a genocide. Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, says it’s a genocide. Even a former Israeli defense minister and IDF chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, says that war crimes and ethnic cleansing are being committed in Gaza.

The consensus in this regard is even reflected in constituencies that are almost invariably supportive of Israel in its conflicts with Palestinians. 

A majority of Jewish Americans supported President Biden’s decision to withhold arms from Israel’s campaign in Gaza in May of last year, and 30 percent called the campaign “genocide,” according to a poll by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The same poll indicated that about sixty percent of American Jews supported the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, a goal opposed both by the Israeli government and the U.S. government.

The tendency was even stronger with regard to Jewish-American teens between the ages of 14 and 18 years of age. According to a November survey by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, 36.7 percent of American-Jewish teens either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” to the statement, “I sympathise with Hamas.” Forty-one percent said the Gaza campaign was a “genocide.”

These numbers are reflective of overall opinion in the United States. Already in March of last year, 55 percent of Americans said they disapproved of Israel’s Gaza campaign, while only 36 percent approved, according to a Gallup poll taken at that time.

Clearly, one doesn’t have to be a left-wing fanatic to oppose the mass killing of civilians by a brutal military occupier in the name of “self-defense.” In fact, it just suffices to be a Catholic who is faithful to the Gospel of Christ, the Church’s perennial just war doctrines, and the Spirit of divine charity. Catholic moral and political doctrine is neither “left-wing” nor “right-wing; the Church takes the straight and narrow path through the natural law and the supernatural duty of charity. 

Pope Pius XII has been criticized for decades now in a smear campaign regarding his purported “silence” during the Holocaust, when in fact he boldly spoke out against it on international radio in December of 1942, while the U.S. State Department and U.S. media were still down playing the scale of the atrocities. Pope Francis’ words, although comparatively weak and tentative in the face of so much horror, should be supported by English-speaking Catholics, lest we become truly guilty of our own silence in the face of a genocide supported by our own tax dollars and lauded by our own politicians.