A growing number of Catholic priests and bishops, most of them in Italy, have signed a petition denouncing what they describe as Israel’s ongoing “genocide” in Gaza, charging the government with war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

 The initiative, launched under the banner “Christ Died in Gaza,” was presented during a virtual press conference on September 15 by a coalition calling itself “Priests Against Genocide”. Its spokesmen framed the campaign not in political terms but as a pastoral response to human suffering.

“We see the presence of Christ in the people of Gaza, exhausted, and in the Palestinian people living under occupation,” said Father Pietro Rossini, a Xaverian missionary and one of the group’s leading voices. “We speak not as politicians, but as shepherds. We cannot remain silent before this tragedy.”

By the end of last week, the petition had gathered 1,164 signatures from clergy across 28 countries, including endorsements from 11 bishops. Among them is Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, the Jesuit archbishop of Rabat, Morocco.

A plea grounded in international law

The petition demands that world leaders uphold international law, United Nations resolutions, and recent rulings of the International Criminal Court. In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war.

The clergy statement further emphasizes the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to lands confiscated since 1948 and condemns violations of recognized borders. While acknowledging the brutality of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, the signatories insist Israel’s response has been “disproportionate,” marked by indiscriminate violence against civilians.
 

Echoes of Pope Leo XIV’s call for disarmament

The group’s appeal aligns itself with Pope Leo XIV’s oft-repeated call for a “disarmed and disarming peace.” In that spirit, the petition urges Western governments to suspend arms sales to Israel and prays for “the disarmament of the State of Israel to prevent further deaths of innocent people.”

The campaign also advocates for independent, transparent investigations into the events of October 7 and their aftermath. Critics of the official Israeli narrative, including some Israeli journalists and international commentators, have argued that misleading accounts of atrocities were used to justify the devastation of Gaza.

Earlier this week, a United Nations Human Rights Council commission concluded that Israel’s actions meet the legal definition of genocide—a finding echoed by Israeli human rights groups, Holocaust scholars, and a widening spectrum of global voices.

Addressing the charge of antisemitism

The organizers took pains to distance their position from any form of antisemitism. The statement stresses the Church’s debt to Jewish tradition and explicitly rejects “hatred, discrimination, and violence against Jews for being Jews.” Instead, it frames criticism of Israeli policy as a matter of justice and fidelity to the Gospel.

“According to even the definition used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance,” the document states, “our critique of Israel’s political decisions does not constitute antisemitism.”