JTA — Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday renewed his calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, decrying suffering there and evoking the image of parents in Gaza who “clutch the lifeless bodies of their children.”
“From the Gaza Strip,” Leo said in an audience at the Vatican, “rising ever more insistently to the heavens, the cries of mothers and fathers who clutch the lifeless bodies of their children, and who are continually forced to move about in search of a little food and water and safer shelter from bombardments.”
He added, “I renew my appeal to the leaders: Cease fire, release all hostages, fully respect humanitarian law.”
Since his election earlier this month, Leo has repeatedly called for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the Israeli hostages held there by Hamas and allied terror groups.
The statements follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Pope Francis, who, in addition to meeting with hostages and calling for the captives’ immediate release, and regularly calling Christian civilians in the Strip, also repeatedly condemned Israel’s military campaign in the enclave, and called for an investigation into whether it constituted a genocide.
Leo’s statement is significant because it is one of the first signals of his approach to Catholic-Jewish relations as well as relations between the Holy See and Israel. In addition to the ceasefire calls, Leo has promised to pursue Catholic-Jewish dialogue and reaffirmed a key church document rejecting antisemitism.
“I pledge to continue and strengthen the church’s dialogue and cooperation with the Jewish people in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate,” he wrote to Rabbi Noam Marans, the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligious and intergroup relations, earlier this month.
While some of Francis’ statements on Israel and Gaza, including the “genocide” remark, concerned Jewish leaders, Marans said in an interview Wednesday that he was taking a wait-and-see approach with the new pope.
“I do not expect major policy changes from Pope Francis to Pope Leo including regarding the situation in Gaza,” said Marans, who recently met with Leo. “We are watching and waiting to see how he continues to approach Catholic-Jewish relations positively while feeling the need to comment on the challenges that the Gazan population is experiencing.”
During the address, Leo also made an appeal for peace in Ukraine, and repeated the statements on Gaza in a post on X Wednesday.
Leo is one of a growing number of world leaders to issue recent calls for the war to end. In his first Sunday address earlier this month, Leo said he was “deeply pained” by what was happening in the Gaza Strip, and called for a ceasefire, freeing of the hostages and delivery of humanitarian aid for civilians.
Last week, Leo wrote another post on X calling for aid to enter Gaza, two days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a “basic quantity of food” to enter Gaza after blocking all entry of humanitarian assistance for two months.
“The situation in the Gaza Strip is increasingly worrying and painful,” that post read. “I renew my heartfelt appeal to allow the entry of dignified humanitarian aid and to bring an end to the hostilities, whose heart-rending price is borne by children, the elderly, and the sick.”
A new and controversial US-Israeli mechanism for distributing aid began operations this week. Israel has said it means for the new mechanism to take over aid operations, to prevent Hamas from siphoning off supplies that are supposed to go to the general population.
The UN and other international organizations have withheld backing for the new system, saying it fails to fulfill the principles of humanitarian work, won’t be able to meet the needs of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, and allows Israel to use food as a weapon to control the population. They have also warned of the risk of friction between Israeli troops and people seeking supplies.
Israel launched the war in Gaza after the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage.
Times of Israel staff and AP contributed to this report.