Pope Francis calls on Hamas to release all hostages seized during its incursion and expresses grave concern over ‘total’ Israeli siege imposed on Gaza
- The Pope said: ‘I continue to follow, with pain and apprehension’
- Israel Palestine news LIVE: IDF continues to strike Gaza with air strikes as troops massed on the border ‘prepare to execute mission’
Pope Francis has called on Hamas to release all hostages seized during its incursion and expressed grave concern over the ‘total’ Israeli siege imposed on Gaza.
The militant group, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, is threatening to execute hostages kidnapped in Israel, including young people captured during the Nova music festival on Saturday, where around 270 died.
‘I ask that the hostages be released immediately,’ the 86-year-old head of the worldwide Catholic Church said at the end of his weekly audience at the Vatican in his strongest comments since the start of the conflict in Gaza.
Speaking in a sombre voice at the end of his weekly general audience to thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, he expressed grave concern over Israel’s siege imposed on Gaza.
‘I continue to follow, with pain and apprehension, what is happening in Israel and Palestine. So many people killed, and others wounded. I pray for those families who saw a feast day turn into a day of mourning, and I ask that the hostages be immediately released,’ he said.
Pope Francis, standing between Italian priest Monsignor Leonardo Sapienza and Argentinian priest Monsignor Luis Maria Rodrigo Ewart, leads the weekly general audience in Saint Peter’s Square, Vatican City, on October 11
A man carries a wounded Palestinian girl at the site of Israeli strikes on houses, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip October 11, 2023
A man reacts outside a burning collapsed building following Israeli bombardment in Gaza City on October 11, 2023
Referring to Israel’s response to Hamas, Francis said: ‘It is the right of those who are attacked to defend themselves, but I am very worried about the total siege in which the Palestinians live in Gaza, where there have also been many innocent victims.
‘Terrorism and extremism do not help reach a solution to the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, but fuel hatred, violence, revenge and only make both sides suffer.
‘The Middle East does not need war but peace, a peace built on justice, dialogue and the courage of fraternity.’
The death toll from five days of ferocious fighting between Hamas and Israel rose sharply overnight as Israel kept up its bombardment of Gaza today.
In Israel, the death toll from Saturday’s shock cross-border assault by Hamas militants rose to 1,200, making it the deadliest attack in the country’s 75-year history.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Israel’s military response to Saturday’s attack is only the start of a sustained war to destroy the Islamist group and ‘change the Middle East’.
Pope Francis has twice called the priest who leads Gaza’s tiny Catholic community to offer his prayers following fighting sparked by a Hamas attack on Israel, the Vatican said yesterday.
‘The pope called me a few minutes ago… he expressed his closeness and offered his prayers,’ Father Gabriel Romanelli told Vatican News, the Vatican’s media outlet.
This picture taken on October 11, 2023 shows an aerial view of buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza
This picture taken on October 11, 2023 shows an aerial view of buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza Cit
Smoke billows during Israeli strikes on Gaza City on October 10, 2023
Palestinian men carry away the body of a person killed by Israeli bombardment along a debris-littered street in al-Karama district in Gaza City on October 11, 2023
Explosions illuminate the sky during Israeli strikes on Gaza City on October 10, 2023
He said he thanked the Pope for his comments on Sunday, when Francis called for ‘peace in Israel and Palestine’ and for ‘the attacks and the weapons’ to cease, saying ‘terrorism and war do not lead to a solution’.
‘The pope also called yesterday,’ Romanelli added, saying that Francis wanted to know how the people in the parish were doing.
The priest said he was stuck in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank after leaving Gaza to collect some medicines, and was now unable to return.
The Pope’s message today came as Palestinians in the sealed-off Gaza Strip scrambled to find safety, as Israeli strikes demolished entire neighborhoods, hospitals ran low on supplies and a power blackout was expected within hours, further deepening the misery of a war sparked by a deadly mass incursion of Hamas militants.
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Airstrikes smashed entire city blocks to rubble in the tiny coastal enclave and left unknown numbers of bodies beneath mounds of debris.
The bombardment raged on even though militants are holding an estimated 150 people – soldiers, men, women, children and older adults – who were dragged into Gaza during the weekend attack.
Hamas said two of its top officials had been killed, while Israel’s military said the bodies of roughly 1,500 Hamas infiltrators had been found.
Meanwhile Gaza officials reported more than 900 people killed as Israel pounded the territory with air strikes.
Israel has vowed unprecedented retaliation against the Hamas militant group ruling the Palestinian territory after its fighters stormed through the border fence on Saturday and gunned down hundreds of Israelis in their homes, on the streets and at an outdoor music festival.
The war, which has already claimed at least 2,100 lives on both sides, is expected to escalate – and compound the misery of people living in Gaza, where basic necessities and electricity were already in short supply.
On Monday, Hamas warned it would start killing its hostages every time Israel launches a strike on a civilian target in Gaza without warning. French President Emmanuel Macron called the threat ‘unacceptable blackmail.’
At least 30 people were killed and hundreds wounded as Israel pounded the Gaza Strip with hundreds of air strikes overnight, a Hamas government official said on Wednesday.
Hamas terrorists beheaded babies and gunned down entire families in their homes in a small kibbutz in Israel, Israeli soldiers have claimed
A mourner reacts while burying the body of a Palestinian child of al-Agha family, who was killed in Israeli strikes, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip October 11, 2023
Men stand through debris and destruction littering a street in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City on October 11, 2023
The strikes destroyed several buildings of the Hamas-linked Islamic University in Gaza City, a university official said.
The Israeli military confirmed it had hit dozens of Hamas targets during the night.
It said fighter jets destroyed ‘advanced detection systems’ that Hamas used to spot military aircraft.
They also hit 80 Hamas targets in the Beit Hanoun area of the northeastern Gaza Strip, including two
Israel has been left reeling by Hamas’s unprecedented ground, air and sea assault, likening it to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
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Israel has stopped the entry of food, water, fuel and medicine into the territory – a 40-kilometer-long strip of land wedged among Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea that is home to 2.3 million Palestinians.
The sole remaining access from Egypt was shut down Tuesday after airstrikes hit near the border crossing.
As Palestinians crowded into UN schools and a shrinking number of safe neighbourhoods, humanitarian groups pleaded for the creation of corridors to get aid in, warning that hospitals overwhelmed with wounded people were running out of supplies.
Gaza’s power authority says its sole power plant will run out of fuel within hours, leaving the territory without electricity after Israel cut off supplies. Palestinians there have long relied on generators to power homes, offices and hospitals, but have no way of importing fuel for those either.
The U.N.’s World Health Organization said that supplies it had pre-positioned for seven hospitals have already run out amid the flood of wounded.
The head of the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said surgical equipment, antibiotics, fuel and other supplies were running out at two hospitals it runs in Gaza.
In one, ‘we consumed three weeks worth of emergency stock in three days, partly due to 50 patients coming in at once,’ Matthias Kannes, the aid group’s head of mission in Gaza, said today.
He said the territory’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, only has enough fuel for three days.
Israel has mobilized 360,000 reservists and appears increasingly likely to launch a ground offensive into Gaza, with its government under intense pressure from the public to topple Hamas.
A Palestinian walks through destruction in Gaza City’s al-Karama neighbourhood on October 11, 2023
An Israeli army self-propelled howitzer fires rounds near the border with Gaza in southern Israel on October 11, 2023
Smoke from Israeli bombardment is pictured over the Gaza City seaport on October 11, 2023
That goal was considered unachievable in the past because it would require a reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, at least temporarily.
‘We will not allow a reality in which Israeli children are murdered,’ Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a meeting with soldiers near the southern border on Tuesday. ‘I have removed every restriction – we will eliminate anyone who fights us, and use every measure at our disposal.’
Exchanges of fire over Israel’s northern borders with militants in Lebanon and Syria, meanwhile, pointed to the risk of an expanded regional conflict.
U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned other countries and armed groups against entering the conflict.
The U.S. is already rushing munitions and military equipment to Israel and has deployed a carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean as deterrence.
Israeli airstrikes late on Tuesday struck the family house of Mohammed Deif, the shadowy leader of Hamas’ military wing, killing his father, brother and at least two other relatives in the southern town of Khan Younis, senior Hamas official Bassem Naim told The Associated Press.
Deif has never been seen in public and his whereabouts are unknown.
In a new tactic, Israel is warning civilians to evacuate neighbourhood after neighborhood, and then inflicting devastation, in what could be a prelude to a ground offensive.
The Hamas-run Interior Ministry said Israeli airstrikes destroyed the entire al-Karama neighborhood in Gaza City, with a ‘large number’ of people killed or wounded. It said medical teams were unable to reach the area because all roads to it were destroyed. Rescue officials say they have struggled to enter other areas as well.
In another neighborhood, Palestinian Civil Defense forces pulled Abdullah Musleh out of his basement together with 30 others after their apartment building was flattened.
On Tuesday afternoon, Hamas fired barrages of rockets toward the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon and Tel Aviv. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
On Tuesday night, a group of militants entered an industrial zone in Ashkelon, sparking a gunbattle with Israeli troops, the military said. Three militants were killed, and troops were searching the area for others.
Four previous rounds of Israel-Hamas fighting between 2008 and 2021 all ended inconclusively, with Hamas battered but still in control.
‘The objective is for this war to end very differently from all of the previous rounds. There has to be a clear victory,’ said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel. ‘Whatever has to be done to fundamentally change the situation will have to be done,’ he said.
A man gestures as a firefighter sprays a hose to extinguish a blaze in a burning collapsed building following Israeli bombardment in Gaza City on October 11, 2023
An Israeli army soldier walks past a Merkava battle tank as a column of tanks is amassed in the upper Galilee in northern Israel near the border with Lebanon on October 11, 2023
Hamas officials have said they planned for all possibilities, including a punishing Israeli escalation.
Desperation has grown among Palestinians, many of whom see nothing to lose under unending Israeli military occupation and increasing settlements in the West Bank, a 16-year-long blockade in Gaza and what they see as the world’s apathy.
Days of clashes between rock-throwing Palestinians and Israeli forces in the West Bank have left 15 Palestinians dead, but Israel has clamped down heavily on the territory, preventing movement between communities.
The violence also spread into east Jerusalem, where Israeli police said they killed two Palestinians who hurled stones at police late Tuesday.
The Israeli military said more than 1,200 people, including 155 soldiers, have been killed in Israel, a staggering toll unseen since the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria that lasted weeks.
In Gaza, 950 people have been killed, including 260 children and 230 women, according to authorities there. Israel says hundreds of Hamas fighters are among them. Thousands have been wounded on both sides.
The bodies of roughly 1,500 Hamas militants were found on Israeli territory, the military said. It wasn’t clear whether those numbers overlapped with deaths reported by Palestinian authorities.
In Gaza, more than 250,000 people have fled their homes, the U.N. said, the most since a 2014 air and ground offensive by Israel uprooted about 400,000.
The vast majority are sheltering in schools run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. Damage to three water and sanitation sites have cut off services to 400,000 people, the U.N. said.
Tens of thousands of people in southern Israel have been evacuated since Sunday.
Biden condemned the Hamas attacks as ‘sheer evil’, and Netanyahu said the militants committed ‘savagery never seen since the Holocaust’, including the beheading of soldiers.
Condemnation from Western leaders contrasted with some pro-Palestinian demonstrations in support of ‘resistance’ to Israel.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said today that the Palestinian militant group Hamas’s killing of Israeli civilians was a cold-blooded act of war and reflected an ‘ancient evil’.
‘We have to be clear in defining this kind of horror,’ she said. ‘And there can only be one response to it. Europe stands with Israel. And we fully support Israel’s right to defend itself.’
Addressing the start of a meeting of European commissioners, von der Leyen also supported a full review of the EU’s multi-million-euro financial support for Palestinian projects.
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