POPE LEO XIV URGES ISRAEL TO ALLOW HUMANITARIAN AID INTO GAZA

Wed 21 May 2025:

The newly selected head of the Catholic Church called the situation in the Palestinian enclave “yet more worrying and saddening”.

“I renew my appeal… to allow for the entry of fair humanitarian help and to bring to an end the hostilities, the high price of which is paid by children, the elderly and the sick,” the pope said during his weekly general audience in St Peter’s Square.

Pope Leo XIV called Wednesday for sufficient humanitarian aid to be allowed into war-ravaged Gaza, where humanitarian agencies say a total blockade has sparked critical food and medicine shortages. Israel has, under massive pressure from the U.S. and other allies, started to allow more aid into Gaza this week, but it has not eased its military operations, and aid agencies say the amount of humanitarian goods entering the strip is nowhere near enough to meet the urgent needs of a battered civilian population.

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The United Nations announced Monday that it had been cleared to send in aid for the first time since Israel imposed a total blockade on March 2, sparking severe shortages of food and medicine.

“The situation in the Gaza Strip is worrying and painful,” the pope said during his first weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square. “I renew my heartfelt appeal to allow the entry of sufficient humanitarian aid and to put an end to the hostilities, the heartbreaking price of which is paid by children, the elderly, the sick.”

Leo, who was elected on May 8 to be the Catholic Church’s first U.S. pope, has made peace an early theme of his papacy, calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

The amount of aid Israel has started to allow into war-ravaged Gaza is not nearly enough and is “a smokescreen to pretend the siege is over,” the MSF aid group said Wednesday.

“The Israeli authorities’ decision to allow a ridiculously inadequate amount of aid into Gaza after months of an air-tight siege signals their intention to avoid the accusation of starving people in Gaza, while in fact keeping them barely surviving,” said Pascale Coissard, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) emergency coordinator in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. “The current authorization for 100 [trucks] per day, when the situation is so dire, is woefully inadequate.”

“Meanwhile, evacuation orders are continuing to uproot the population, while Israeli forces are still subjecting health facilities to intensive attacks,” Coissard said.

Israel said 93 trucks had entered Gaza from Israel on Tuesday, but the United Nations said the aid had been held up.

The Israeli army has stepped up its offensive in Gaza in recent days, with the enclave’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health saying some 600 people have been killed over the last week alone.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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