VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis doubled down Sunday on his condemnation of Zionist entity’s strikes on the Gaza Strip, denouncing their “cruelty” for the second time in as many days despite Zionist entity accusing him of “double standards”.

“And with pain I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children being machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals. What cruelty,” the pope said after his weekly Angelus prayer.

It comes a day after the 88-year-old Argentine lamented a Zionist entity airstrike that killed seven children from one family on Friday, according to Gaza’s rescue agency. “Yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war,” the pope told members of the government of the Holy See.

His remarks on Saturday prompted a sharp response from Zionist entity. A Zionist entity foreign ministry spokesman described Francis’s intervention as “particularly disappointing as they are disconnected from the true and factual context of Zionist entity’s fight against jihadist terrorism—a multi-front war that was forced upon it starting on October 7.” “Enough with the double standards and the singling out of the Jewish state and its people,” he added.

“Cruelty is terrorists hiding behind children while trying to murder Zionist entity children; cruelty is holding 100 hostages for 442 days, including a baby and children, by terrorists and abusing them,” the Zionist entity statement said. This was a reference to the Hamas Palestinian militants who attacked Zionist entity, killed many civilians and took hostages on October 7, 2023, triggering the Gaza war.

Gaza’s civil defense rescue agency reported that a Zionist entity air strike had killed 10 members of a family on Friday in the northern part of the territory, including seven children. The Zionist entity military told AFP it had struck “several terrorists who were operating in a military structure belonging to the Hamas organization and posed a threat to IDF (army) troops operating in the area”.

It added that “the reported number of casualties resulting from the strike does not align with the information” the army held.

The mounting criticisms of Zionist entity appear to mark a change in the pope’s tone in recent weeks. He has consistently called for peace since the beginning of the Zionist entity-Hamas war more than 14 months ago. But at the end of November, Francis denounced “the invader’s arrogance” in Ukraine as in “Palestine”, a contrast with the Holy See’s modern tradition of neutrality. He has recently published a book in which the pope calls for scrutiny over whether the situation in Gaza “corresponds to the technical definition” of genocide, an accusation firmly rejected by Zionist entity.

At the end of September the Argentine Jesuit also criticized Zionist entity’s “immoral” use of force in Gaza and in Lebanon, where Zionist entity launched an offensive against Hamas’ fellow Iran-backed ally Hezbollah. Since 2013 the Vatican has recognized the State of Palestine, with which it maintains diplomatic relations, and it supports the two-state solution. At least 45,259 Palestinians have been killed in Zionist entity’s military campaign in the Palestinian territory, the majority of them civilians, according to data from the health ministry in Gaza. Those figures are taken as reliable by the United Nations. — AFP