Vatican: Israel targeting defenseless Gazans as world fails to stop ‘ongoing massacre’

The Vatican's top diplomat says the Israeli regime has, over the past two years, targeted the defenseless Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip amid the international community's failure to put a halt to the occupying regime’s “ongoing massacre” in the blockaded territory.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state and one of Pope Leo's top deputies, made the statement on the second anniversary of Operation al-Aqsa Flood— a large-scale retaliatory attack by the Gaza-based Palestinian resistance movement Hamas on the Israeli-occupied territories on October 7, 2023.

The Israeli regime’s barbaric military campaign in the Gaza Strip has since claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinians, including women and children, razing to the ground the coastal strip’s civil and health infrastructure, also spreading unprecedented famine across the territory.

"The war waged by the Israeli army to eliminate Hamas disregards the fact that it is targeting a largely defenseless population, already pushed to the brink, in an area where buildings and homes are reduced to rubble," Parolin told Vatican's media outlet.

"It is ... clear that the international community is, unfortunately, powerless and that the countries truly capable of exerting influence have so far failed to act to stop the ongoing massacre," he added.

The Vatican's top diplomat also called for global actions against Israeli crimes in Gaza and an end to arms shipments to the regime.

"It's not enough to say that what is happening [in Gaza] is unacceptable and then continue to allow it to happen,” Parolin said. “We must seriously ask ourselves about the legitimacy ... of continuing to supply weapons that are being used against [Palestinian] civilians.”

Pope Leo, elected in May after the death of Pope Francis, has been stepping up criticism of Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza.

The pontiff urged Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza in a meeting with the occupying regime’s president, Isaac Herzog, in September.

UNICEF says 'nowhere is safe' in Gaza amid Israel’s genocidal war

UNICEF has issued a grave warning stating that there is no safe haven in the besieged Gaza Strip as the Israeli regime presses ahead with its genocidal war.

Last month, the International Association of Genocide Scholars also said that the Israeli regime’s atrocities in Gaza meet the legal definition as laid out in the UN Genocide Convention.

Across a three-page resolution, the IAGS confirmed that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza, especially since October 2023, violate all five conditions outlined in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Since the Israeli regime launched its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, it has killed at least 67,160 Palestinians and injured 169,679 others, most of them women and children.

Experts believe the true number of casualties is significantly higher, as thousands remain unaccounted for or lie buried under rubble.

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