Israel and the Vatican staged a protest on Wednesday after the deputy pope described the events in Gaza as “carnage” brought on by an out-of-control Israeli military reaction to Hamas.
It’s a dismal assertion. The Israeli embassy to the Holy See said in a statement that determining the legitimacy of a war without considering all pertinent facts and evidence invariably results in incorrect conclusions.
Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin restated the “request that Israel’s right to defense, which has been invoked to justify this operation, be proportionate, and certainly with 30,000 deaths, it is not” the day before.
“I believe we are all outraged by what is happening, by this carnage, but we must have the courage to move forward and not lose hope,”
A Wednesday editorial in the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, reinforced the message.
“No one can define what is happening in the (Gaza) Strip as ‘collateral damage’ in the fight against terrorism. The right to defense, Israel’s right to bring the perpetrators of the October massacre to justice, cannot justify this carnage,” it said.
At least 1,200 Israelis were killed and around 250 were taken hostage in a raid by Hamas militants on southern Israel on Oct. 7, prompting Israel to retaliate. At least 28,576 Palestinians have since been killed in Israeli strikes, the health ministry in Gaza said on Wednesday.
Noting that Hamas uses hospitals and schools as shields and suggesting that most of Gaza’s population “actively” supports the group, Israel’s embassy insisted Hamas bears all the blame for the death and destruction in the Palestinian enclave.
The pope, who has issued multiple pleas for peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, has faced previous criticism from Jewish groups over Vatican positions on the Israeli-Gaza conflict.
In November, a messy dispute broke out over whether Francis used the word “genocide” to describe events in Gaza, with Palestinians who met with him insisting that he did, and the Vatican saying he did not.
