“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” Francis says in the book Hope Never Disappoints. Pilgrims towards a Better World.
The book is to be released for Jubilee 2025 and had some excerpts published in newspaper La Stampa.
“It should be investigated carefully to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international organisations,” the pontiff continued.
The volume, edited by Hernán Reyes Alcaide, will be released on Tuesday in Italy, Spain and Latin America, and will then be published in various other countries.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says 43,846 people, many of them women and children, have been killed in the Strip in an Israeli assault since the October 7, 2023, attacks.
Those attacks, by Islamist militants in southern Israel which killed 1200 people and took 250 hostages, is the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
In the book, the 87-year-old Argentine pontiff also says that people are becoming inhumane in the face of today’s migration.
Faced with the challenge of migration, Francis says, “no country can be left alone, and no one can think of addressing the issue in isolation through more restrictive and repressive laws”.
“Sometimes [these anti-immigration policies are] approved under the pressure of fear or in search of electoral advantages.
“Just as we see that there is a globalisation of indifference, we must respond with the globalisation of charity and cooperation, so that the conditions of emigrants are humanised.”
ANSA
