There are wars that seem to never want to end. In Gaza, life is suspended between the rubble, the curtains, the common pits. Every day you dig with your hands under the rubble, you look for water with empty tanks, the children are removed from the drones who buzz over the heads. Nineteen months after 7 October 2023, the strip is an open -air hell. And the world now seems addicted to pain.
Since the beginning of the war unleashed by Israel in response to the attack of Hamas, over 52,000 Palestinians have lost their lives, mostly civilians. More than 1.9 million people have been forced to leave their homesoften more than once, and more than half a million risks hunger due to the blocking that prevents the entry of aid.
In this inhuman scenario, the appeal of the Ambrosian Catholic Action, the ACLI of Milan, Monza and Brianza and the Ambrosianeum cultural foundation is strong. “We look at Gaza with despair – they write – and we ask, with Pope Leo XIV, that we intervene to end the humanitarian emergency”.
The three Catholic realities describe the tragedy ongoing with lucidity: “We witness astonished and discouraged to what is happening in the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of people are in miserable conditions, without adequate food aid and with the nightmare of continuous military attacks from the sky”.
The recent statements by Israeli Premier Netanyahu are particularly serious: “Our dismay only grows in the face of the statements of Israeli Premier Netanyahu, who explicitly spoke of forced movements of the entire population in small portions of the territory, with the idea that many then choose to definitively abandon the territory of Gaza”.
The recall is to international legality, but also to humanity: “Respect for the most elementary human rights of people is foreseen in all international treaties and is also sanctioned in the right that regulates wars. In Gaza it seems to us that we have gone beyond all limit and the condition of the population cannot leave us indifferent».
“The reasons for the contrast to terrorist and defense violence and the safety of their territory – continues the text – cannot trample the right to life and a life worthy of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women and children”.
In the text we remember the cry of peace of Pope Francis, who accompanied the fate of Gaza to the last day of his pontificate, and relaunches the appeal of his successor: “We join the pleas that Pope Francis has raised until the last day of his earthly life and relaunch the words of Pope Leo XIV, just elected, who invoked “a disarmed peace and a disarming, humble and persevering peace” and yesterday in St. Peter’s Square shouted “never the war”, Adding: “I deeply grieve me what happens in the Gaza Strip. Take the fire immediately! Humanitarian aid to the exhausted civilian population and all the hostages are freed” “.
The press release closes with an exhortation to international institutions and a prayer: “We ask that international institutions, starting from the European Union, move to stop the humanitarian emergency that becomes heavier every day”.
“We pray – they conclude – Because peace gets a road and thisting weapons in the Middle East and in the many other theaters of warand so that the Israeli and Palestinian people can live in peace in a land that is sacred for the great monotheistic religions ».
