U.S. Jewish Groups Urge Pope to Avoid "Incendiary" Comments About Israel's War Against Hamas
In a letter to Francis, the groups say his comments fuel antisemitism and "distort Israel's legitimate military campaign."
By Gary Gately
A coalition of more than 50 major U.S. Jewish organizations called on Pope Francis to stop making “incendiary” comments about Israel’s war against Hamas, saying they “distort Israel’s legitimate military campaign and fuel antisemitism and unjust targeting of the Jewish state.”
In a letter to Francis, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations referred to Francis’ recent comments accusing the Israeli military of gunning down children and bombing hospitals and schools.
“This narrative does not acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself in the aftermath of the October 7 [2023] massacre where Hamas murdered 1,200 innocent civilians and took 251 hostages, 101 of whom still remain captive,” said the letter, signed by William C. Daroff, the group’s CEO, and Harriet P. Schleifer, its chair. “Further, it does not acknowledge Hamas’ use of human shields and civilian infrastructure for terror purposes, putting the entire population of Gaza at risk.”
The letter noted that in the year after the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel ignited the Israel-Hamas war, worldwide cases of antisemitism have soared — and hit a record high in the U.S.
“The American Jewish community calls on you to refrain from making incendiary comments and to build bridges between our two peoples,” the Jewish conference said in its letter to Francis.
The 88-year-old Jesuit pontiff has repeatedly denounced Israeli strikes on Gaza in recent weeks while calling for a ceasefire, the release of hostages and delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid to the territory.
After his Angelus prayer on December 22 at the Vatican, Francis said: “And with pain, I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children being machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals. What cruelty.”
That came a day after the pope lamented an Israeli airstrike that Gaza’s health ministry said killed at least 25 Palestinians in Gaza, including a family of 10, seven of them children.
“Yesterday, children were bombed,” Francis told cardinals at the Vatican. “This is cruelty; this is not war. I wanted to say this because it touches the heart.”
The comments prompted a sharp response from Israel’s Foreign Ministry, which accused the pope of bias and ignoring the broader context of Israel’s conflict with Hamas following its October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel.
The Foreign Ministry accused Francis of employing “double standards” and “singling out the Jewish state and its people” and asserted that Hamas has used children as “human shields” to protect members of the group. The ministry also denied that the Israeli military targets civilians.
In a December 21 post on X (formerly Twitter), the Foreign Ministry said: “In response to the Pope’s statement today: Cruelty is terrorists hiding behind children while trying to murder Israeli children; cruelty is holding 100 hostages for 442 days, including a baby and children, by terrorists and abusing them…. The Pope’s remarks are particularly disappointing as they are disconnected from the true and factual context of Israel’s fight against jihadist terrorism — a multi-front war that was forced upon it starting on October 7” — a reference to the 2023 terrorist attack when Hamas killed 1,200 people and abducted about 250 Israeli and foreign hostages.
At least 34 of the estimated 100 hostages remaining in Gaza have been confirmed dead, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The Vatican has not commented publicly on criticism of the pope’s comments from Israel or Jewish organizations.
Before Francis’ latest criticisms of Israel, relations between the Vatican and Israel have been strained since late September over some of Francis’ comments. Among them:
During a September 29 press conference aboard the papal plane heading back to the Vatican from Belgium, Pope Francis denounced Israel’s attacks in Gaza and Lebanon as “immoral” and disproportionate and said they went beyond the rules of war.
On the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel, Francis released a letter to Catholics in the Mideast in which he quoted a passage from the Gospel of John used to justify antisemitism for centuries.
Then in mid-November, the Vatican released excerpts of a forthcoming book in which Francis said allegations that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza should be “carefully investigated.”
Two weeks ago, an Israeli minister sharply criticized Francis’ suggestion that the international community should investigate whether Israel committed genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
“As a people who lost six million of its sons and daughters in the Holocaust, we are particularly sensitive to the trivialization of the term 'genocide' — a trivialization that comes dangerously close to Holocaust denial," Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs, wrote in an open letter in the Italian newspaper Il Foglio.
And Orthodox Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg, a member of Beth Tfiloh Congregation in suburban Baltimore, expressed shock and dismay over Francis’ recent comments.
“What the pope is now saying is absolutely mind-boggling,” said Wohlberg, who in 1987 co-founded what is now the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies and joined a delegation of rabbis who met with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in 2005. “This is not simply insensitivity. Pope Francis is using the most loaded words when it comes to this conflict — words like cruelty, genocide, shooting children and bombing hospitals.”
While criticizing Israel, Francis has often condemned antisemitism and met at the Vatican in April with relatives of hostages held by Hamas and in November with Israelis who had been held hostage in Gaza and their relatives. At a news conference after the April meeting, a hostage’s relative told reporters that Francis had described Hamas as “evil.”
The 2023 Hamas terrorist attack ignited the Israel-Hamas war in which more than 45,500 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed, according to Gaza’s health ministry. (The health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its tally.)
Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW), have accused Israel of carrying out a “genocide” in Gaza, and the United Nations reports that the humanitarian crisis worsens by the day as the territory endures rampant hunger, shortages of water and medication and inadequate healthcare. Five babies died of hypothermia in the cold in Gaza in the week ending December 30 as the war pushed Palestinians into tent camps, the territory’s health ministry said.
In July, HRW also accused Hamas’ military wing and at least four other armed Palestinian groups of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during its October 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. In addition, the human rights group said in July that Hamas’ practice of filming and releasing hostage videos is inhumane and amounts to a war crime.
Israel has repeatedly said that its attacks on Gaza are a justifiable and necessary response to protect Israeli citizens from terrorism and violence at the hands of Hamas, which is backed by Iran and designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S., the European Union and others.
The IDF says it targets Hamas military infrastructure, including tunnels, weapons stockpiles and command centers, often embedded in civilian areas. The Israeli military also asserts that it seeks to minimize civilian casualties by, for example, launching precision strikes on terrorist targets and issuing warnings to civilians before doing so.
Israel, with the stated goal of eradicating Hamas, points out that the group does not recognize its right to exist and that it claims that Palestinians have the right to occupy all the territory that currently constitutes the state of Israel.
On Friday, Rik Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization representative for the West Bank and Gaza, told the UN Security Council that Gaza’s healthcare system faces critical shortages of medical supplies, equipment and personnel.
“The health sector is being systematically dismantled,” he said.
The WHO called on Israel to release the hospital’s director from detention.
Peeperkorn pointed to Israel’s December 27 raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital, North Gaza's main healthcare facility, which was severely damaged, forcing critical patients to be transferred to the Indonesian Hospital, which lacks essential supplies.
Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, called the destruction of hospitals a “human rights catastrophe” which “continues to unfold in Gaza before the eyes of the world.”
Türk told the Security Council that his office had documented strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities in Gaza. The strikes, he said, caused “significant death and injury among doctors, nurses, medical staff and other civilians and damaged or destroyed many of the buildings targeted.”
“The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times,” Türk said.
More than 1,000 healthcare workers in Gaza have been killed since October 2023, according to the UN.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in an X post Thursday that it targeted Kamal Adwan because the hospital harbored a “Hamas command center” and that the IDF arrested 240 terrorists at the hospital, including 15 who participated in the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack.
The Foreign Ministry said it had “safely evacuated civilians from the hospital area” but that the area remained an active combat zone rigged with Hamas booby traps and explosives.
On Sunday, Hamas told Reuters that it had approved a list of 34 Israeli captives to be released as part of a potential ceasefire and prisoner-swap deal. But Israel said it had not received the list as indirect negotiations via mediators continued in Doha, Qatar.
Meanwhile, Israel's Health Ministry said in a new report submitted to the UN last week that Hamas subjected hostages in Gaza to torture, including brandings with hot irons and whippings; sexual and psychological abuse; solitary confinement in dark, filthy conditions with their hands and feet bound; and denial of food, water and essential medical care.
On several occasions, captors forced females of all ages to undress while others, including their captors, watched, the report said. Some women reported that their captors sexually assaulted them or tied them to beds and stared at them, according to the report.
Hamas released a video on Saturday of Liri Albag, one of the Israelis taken hostage by the group during its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Albag, 19, had served in the Israeli military as a lookout charged with monitoring possible threats along the border with Gaza.
“The video released today tore our hearts apart,” her family said in a statement Saturday evening. “This is not the same daughter and sister that we know. She is in bad condition, and her difficult mental state is evident. We saw our heroic Liri survive and beg for her life. She is several dozen kilometers from us, and for 456 days we have been unable to bring her home.”
In the year following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, global antisemitism has soared.
In the U.S., antisemitic incidents rose to 10,000 in the year following the October 2023 Hamas terrorist attack, more than double the number in the same period a year earlier, and the highest since the Anti-Defamation League began tracking such incidents in 1979, the ADL said. The incidents included antisemitic bomb threats against synagogues, assaults against Jewish students on college campuses where anti-Israel protests have erupted and harassment of Jews in communities across the U.S. and online.
A survey found that about a third of the U.S. Jewish population had been the target of some form of antisemitism in the year ending October 7, 2023. During that period, fear of antisemitism prompted many U.S. Jews to change their behavior, according to the survey, by the global organization Combat Antisemitism Movement. Its survey of nearly 1,110 American Jews showed that 27% avoided displaying their Jewish identity in the workplace; 25% of those affiliated with a Jewish organization or synagogue reported that their institution has been targeted with graffiti, threats or attacks; 21% said local businesses have been targeted by antisemitic vandals; and 18% felt uncomfortable or unsafe in the workplace because of their Jewish identity.
The London-based Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, reported 5,583 anti-Semitic incidents in the UK from October 7, 2023 through September 30, 2024. That marks the highest number of antisemitic incidents since the organization began tracking them in 1984. The incidents included antisemitic threats, hate speech, violence and damage to Jewish institutions and property.
Antisemitism also surged in Germany in the year after October 7, 2023, according to RIAS, which tracks antisemitic incidents in that country. The incidents rose to an average of 32 per day compared with seven during the same period a year before, RIAS said, and have included graffiti on homes, anti-Jewish slogans at demonstrations and open hostility on the streets, as well as arson attacks and assaults.