Jabalia

Pope Francis calls Israel’s bombing of Gaza children a “great cruelty”

Spread the love

Original article by Aseel Saleh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Pope Francis before the “Nativity of Bethlehem 2024” in the Paul VI Hall. Photo: Vatican News

Israel continues to commit massacres in Gaza, and has launched attacks on Pope Francis for speaking up in defense of the Palestinian people.

Pope Francis issued a sharp condemnation of the ongoing Israeli genocidal aggression on the Gaza strip this past weekend, just ahead of Christmas. His statements came after the Gaza Civil Defense rescue agency reported the killing of 12 people from the same family, including seven children, in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s northern city of Jabalia on Friday, December 20.

The Pontiff lamented the bombing of children in Gaza with deep sorrow during his traditional address to the cardinals, bishops, priests and lay people of the Roman Curia at the Vatican on Saturday, December 21.

“This is cruelty. This is not war. I want to say this because it touches the heart,” Pope Francis said. He also pointed out that the airstrikes had prevented the highest representative of the Catholic church in the Holy Land, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, from entering Gaza the previous day.

Following Pope Francis’s Saturday address, the Israeli authorities allowed Pizzaballa to enter Gaza on Sunday, December 22, where he celebrated mass in the small Christian community of the Holy Family parish in Gaza City.

During a midday Angelus on Sunday, December 22, Pope Francis reiterated his repudiation of Israel’s continuous massacring of children in Gaza. “With sorrow I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty; of the children machine-gunned, the bombing of schools and hospitals…So much cruelty!”, the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State said.

On December 8, Pope Francis had issued an appeal addressing political leaders and the international community to reach a ceasefire on “all war fronts” by Christmas. “I appeal to Governments and the International Community that a ceasefire may be reached on all war fronts by the Christmas celebrations,” the appeal reads.

One day earlier, Pope Francis unveiled the annual nativity scene at the Vatican featuring baby Jesus draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, which highlighted the Holy Family’s connection to the occupied Palestinian city of Bethlehem and served as a poignant nod to the Palestinian struggle.

Last November, Pope Francis urged that allegations of a genocide in Gaza should be “carefully investigated”. “According to some experts…what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the Pontiff writes in a forthcoming book. “It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies,” he writes.

Pope Francis also calls the leader of the Catholic Church in Gaza every night to check on them and hear news of how they are surviving which inevitably gives him an intimate look into the immense suffering and difficulties faced by the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The nativity scene and Pope Francis’s call for an investigation into the Israeli genocide in Gaza were slammed by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and “Combating Antisemitism” Minister Amichai Chikli, who accused the Catholic leader of “deliberately adopting the Palestinian narrative.”

“Two weeks ago, you took part in a display that echoes the Palestinian narrative, portraying Jesus as a Palestinian Arab,” Chikli wrote in a strongly-worded letter sent to Pope Francis on Thursday, December 19. “Had this been a one-time matter, I would not have written. However, in a more severe expression, you recently insinuated that the State of Israel ‘might be’ committing genocide in Gaza,” the Israeli minister added. Chikli even went further by saying: “It is a well-known fact that Jesus was born to a Jewish mother, lived as a Jew and died as a Jew.”

Chikli’s statements once again reveal the paradox of the Israeli rhetoric, as people of the Christian community were among the first civilians to be crushed by the Israeli war machine in Gaza. In October 2023, St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City, which is believed to be the third oldest church in the world, was bombed by Israeli warplanes while providing shelter for an estimated 500 Palestinians, most of whom were Christians. 16 Palestinian Christians were killed and dozens others injured in the assault, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip.

In May 2024, the Palestinian State Minister of Foreign Affairs Varsen Aghabekian Shahin revealed during her meeting with a delegation from Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) that 3% of Gaza’s Christians were killed in the Israeli genocidal aggression on Gaza since October 7, 2023.

“The Israeli war has resulted in the death of 3% of Gaza’s Christians and the destruction of churches amid restrictions (on Christians) in the West Bank,” Shahin stated. Meanwhile, Gaza’s government media office estimated that at least three churches were destroyed in Israeli attacks in Gaza during the ongoing genocide.

Israel’s targeting of Christians and their holy sites is yet another evidence of its systematic ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous Palestinian people regardless of their faith.

For the second year, Palestinians are canceling Christmas celebrations to show solidarity with Gaza. “We chose to restrict Christmas celebrations to prayers as a stand against the oppression faced by Gaza and all of Palestine”, Bethlehem Mayor Anton Salman said a couple of days prior to the Christmas eve.


Original article by Aseel Saleh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingPope Francis calls Israel’s bombing of Gaza children a “great cruelty”

‘Jabalia Is Being Wiped Out’: Gaza Pleads for Help as Israel Intensifies Assault

Spread the love

Original article by Jake Johnson republished form Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

People mourn over the body of a victim of an Israeli attack on northern Gaza on October 7, 2024. (Photo by Abdul Rahman Salama/Xinhua via Getty Images)

One Palestinian journalist said that “the situation in the north is horrific and very dangerous” and implored people to “please share what’s happening.”

Israel’s latest dayslong assault on besieged northern Gaza intensified Tuesday as the nation’s tanks advanced deeper into the Jabalia refugee camp, where terrified residents reported being fired on by the Israeli military as they tried to flee.

Citing eyewitness accounts, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other news outlets reported that Israeli forces opened fire indiscriminately at people in Jabalia, who are under Israeli evacuation orders. Residents are being told to move to Al-Mawasi, a badly overcrowded so-called “humanitarian zone” in southern Gaza that Israel’s military has attacked repeatedly.

“Drones were firing at everyone passing by on the road,” 28-year-old Mohammad Sultan, whose family fled their home in Jabalia, toldCNN on Tuesday. Sultan said he and other civilians came under Israeli fire when he returned to grab food, water, and blankets.

“Three people were shot right in front of me,” he said. “My brother and I tried to help the injured get to the hospitals, but a little girl was shot in the neck, and her father was also injured.”

Reuters reported that the warning “Jabalia is being wiped out” was “repeated in many messages posted on social media by residents of Gaza” as Israeli forces assailed the refugee camp and nearby areas, killing dozens of people over the past several days.

“Jabalia is being bombed as if the war has just begun and the world is blind about it,” a 60-year-old father of five told Reuters.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said Tuesday that “the threat of yet another massacre in northern Gaza is very real.”

” Israel must be ordered to stop assaulting the Palestinians trapped there and withdraw immediately from the occupied Palestinian territory, as already decided by the [International Court of Justice],” she added.

Hossam Shabat, a Palestinian journalist reporting from northern Gaza, wrote on social media Tuesday that “the situation in the north is horrific and very dangerous; there are currently hundreds of thousands trapped, and the shelling is nonstop.”

“Please share what’s happening in the north,” he added.

The northern part of Gaza has been utterly devastated by the Israeli military’s yearlong assault, carried out with the support of the United States and other world powers. The United Kingdom-based humanitarian group Christian Aid said Monday that mothers in northern Gaza have reported “losing up to 30kg of weight” as the region faces famine conditions fueled by Israel’s suffocating blockade and relentless airstrikes.

“We often survive on one meal a day if we can find one,” one mother told Christian Aid’s partners in Gaza. “My children cry and fall asleep hungry, and I spend nights crying because I am helpless and heartwrenched as their tears of hunger feel like a knife cutting through me, even though I always prioritized them over myself.”

Al Jazeera reported Tuesday that at least 56 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli airstrikes over the past 24 hours, while noting that “the number of deaths reported by sources vary” given the difficulties of counting casualties under Israeli bombardment.

Al Jazeera‘s Abu Azzoum said the Israeli army is “systematically working to empty northern Gaza.”

Such an effort would be consistent with reported Israeli proposals to “liquidate northern Gaza.” As +972 Magazinereported last month, prominent Israeli officials including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have “called on the military to carry out mass extermination in northern Gaza.”

“For some, it might be easy to write off Israeli proposals to ‘finish the job’ in northern Gaza as genocidal bombast, unlikely to be carried out,” the magazine added. “Regardless of what happens over the coming months, the very fact that open proposals to starve and exterminate hundreds of thousands of people are up for debate demonstrates precisely where Israeli society stands today.”

Original article by Jake Johnson republished form Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue Reading‘Jabalia Is Being Wiped Out’: Gaza Pleads for Help as Israel Intensifies Assault

‘The World Must Not Stay Silent!’: Fresh Israeli Bombings Amid Humanitarian Hellscape in Gaza

Spread the love

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under a CC licence.

Gazans, including children, walk past rubble and leaked sewage at Bureij camp after Israeli attacks in Deir al Balah, Gaza on June 20, 2024.
 (Photo by Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

As the IDF stepped up attacks in Gaza City, one resident said, “We are being starved… with no hope that this war is ever ending.”

Residents of Gaza City’s Shujayea neighborhood found themselves on Thursday among the main targets of new Israeli military operations, with thousands of people fleeing as they were “hunted by tanks and planes,” as one Palestinian man told Reuters—even as Israel claimed the “intense” phase of the war was over.

Al Jazeera reported that the Israel Defense Forces targeted five residential homes in the Shujayea and Sabra neighborhoods in the early morning hours of Thursday, killing at least five people in the former area and three in the latter.

Evacuation orders from the IDF came about 30 minutes after the shelling began in Shujayea, according to Al Jazeera, with families rushing to move west after receiving text messages and leaflets from the military. The IDF published a map showing that certain blocks of the residential neighborhood were now part of a combat zone where tanks were moving in.

“We were suddenly and intensively bombarded by Israel,” one man fleeing the area on foot told Al Jazeera. “We came out and we don’t know where to go.”

Artillery attacks were also reported in the Zeitoun, Hawa, and Sheikh Ijlin neighborhoods of Gaza City. Shujayea was a key target of the IDF in the first weeks of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza last October.

As Israel claims to be drawing down its attacks while rejecting a permanent cease-fire agreement, “the world must not stay silent” about the ongoing assault on Gaza, said researcher and academic Nour Naim.

The Gaza Health Ministry reported Thursday that the people who were killed in Gaza City overnight were among 47 Palestinians killed across the enclave in the past 24 hours. Fifty-two people were reported wounded in the same time period—the latest of dozens each day who are taken to hospitals where doctors struggle to treat people with severely limited supplies due to continued humanitarian aid delays and blockades.

“There are moments when anesthesia is not available, but in order to save the lives of citizens, we resort to amputation, and this causes severe pain for the wounded,” a surgeon at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, told AFP. “Every day, there are attacks that result in amputations of legs or arms for children, adults, and women.”

Six people were killed overnight in an Israeli attack in Jabalia, northern Gaza, and an attack on a family home killed one person in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.

In southern Gaza, women and children were among those killed in an attack on a school where displaced people have been staying, and Israeli ground forces “systematically demolished residential buildings in the west of the city” of Rafah, Al Jazeera reported.

As the IDF has stepped up attacks in Gaza City and continued its bombardment of other areas across the enclave, doctors, humanitarian workers, and civilians described the realities of daily life in Gaza, where aid blockades and the disruption of sanitation services and water treatment have all contributed to “grim living conditions” and heightened health risks.

Joanne Perry, a doctor working with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), described to the Associated Press living conditions that have caused concern that a cholera outbreak could soon take hold.

“The crowded conditions, the lack of water, the heat, the poor sanitation—these are the preconditions of cholera,” Perry told the AP.

Israeli attacks since October have destroyed Gaza’s wastewater treatment plants, water desalination plants, sewage pumping facilities, and wells, and have killed government workers who have tried to repair the infrastructure, leading Palestinians to rely on contaminated and “salty” water.

“We found worms in the water. I had been drinking from it,” 21-year-old Adel Dalloul told the AP. “It was salty, polluted, and full of germs… I had gastrointestinal problems and diarrhea, and my stomach hurts until this moment.”

The World Health Organization has reported 485,000 cases of diarrhea—the third-leading cause of death in young children worldwide—since October, and has warned of at least one outbreak of Hepatitis A, which is spread through the consumption of water and food contaminated with fecal matter.

A mother of six in Khan Younis told Reuters that her family is relying on a charity kitchen’s daily visits to their U.N.-run shelter, as 12 million pounds of food aid and other supplies have been held up since June 9, according to U.S. officials.

“If the charity kitchen did not come here for one day, we would wonder about what we will eat that day,” Umm Feisal Abu Nqera told Reuters. “We are living the worst days of our lives in terms of famine and deprivation… Today, your son looks at you and you bleed from within, because you cannot provide him with his most basic rights and the simplest needs for his life.”

A girl died of malnutrition on Thursday at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, bringing the official death toll from malnutrition and dehydration among children to 31.
“We are being starved in Gaza City,” 25-year-old Mohammad Jamal toldReuters as the renewed Israeli offensive took hold, “with no hope that this war is ever ending.”

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under a CC licence.

Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted "I support Zionism without qualification." He's asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.

Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Continue Reading‘The World Must Not Stay Silent!’: Fresh Israeli Bombings Amid Humanitarian Hellscape in Gaza