This story has been updated.
By Gary Gately
Pope Leo XIV expressed hope Sunday that peace negotiations would lead to the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza, a ceasefire and an end to the war that has inflicted “immense suffering” on the more than 2 million people in the war-ravaged territory.
Leo’s comments at the close of a Mass in St. Peter’s Square came on the eve of talks in Egypt among delegations from the U.S., Israel and the militant Islamist group Hamas on President Donald J. Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan.
Israel, however, continued unleashing ferocious attacks on Gaza, killing 24 Palestinians Sunday and 57 Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry reported, bringing the total death toll in the enclave to more than 67,100, including about 20,000 children, since the war began on October 7, 2023, and nearly 170,000 have been injured. Israeli government spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian told reporters Sunday that “while certain bombings have actually stopped inside of the Gaza Strip, there’s no ceasefire in place at this point in time.”
At the Mass on a rainy morning in Rome, Pope Leo told about 40,000 people: “I continue to be saddened by the immense suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza.” But two days after Hamas agreed to release the remaining Israeli hostages, Pope Leo noted “significant steps forward in peace negotiations” and said he’s hopeful they will “put an end to the war and lead us towards a just and lasting peace.”
The leader of the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church, who during his general audience at the Vatican Wednesday had invited the faithful to pray a daily Rosary throughout October for peace in the world, renewed that request Sunday in “solidarity with those people tormented by war.”
Leo also expressed his concern about the surge in “antisemitic hatred” in the world, following the terrorist attack at a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Thursday, during Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Trump said on social media Sunday that delegations from Israel, Hamas and the U.S. set to meet in Cairo tomorrow would “work through and clarify the final details” of the Gaza peace plan and told reporters he expected the talks to “last a couple of days.”
In his social media post, Trump wrote: “I am asking everyone to MOVE FAST. I will continue to monitor this Centuries old ‘conflict.’ TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE OR, MASSIVE BLOODSHED WILL FOLLOW — SOMETHING THAT NOBODY WANTS TO SEE!”
The U.S. president told CNN in a text Sunday that Hamas will face “complete obliteration” if the group refuses to cede control of Gaza.
Trump had posted on social media Friday night Hamas’s agreement to release the remaining 20 hostages Israel believes are alive as well as the bodies of 28 others being held by the group in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. But the U.S.-designated terrorist group did not respond to other key elements of the Gaza peace plan, including demands that Hamas disarm and assume no role in a post-war Gaza government.
Netanyahu repeated his insistence that Hamas not remain in Gaza. “This will happen either diplomatically, according to Trump’s plan, or militarily — at our hands,” he said in a televised speech Saturday night. “This will be achieved the easy way or the hard way, but it will be achieved.”
On Saturday, Trump told Axios that he had called Netanyahuu Friday to tell him about Hamas’s response. Using the prime minister’s his nickname: Trump said: “I said, ‘Bibi, this is your chance for victory.’ He was fine with it. He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.”
This certainly isn’t the first time Trump has pledged to end the war in Gaza, which began after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack in which Hamas-led Islamist militants invaded southern Israel and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 others. And the latest ceasefire lasted only two months before ending, when Israel launched airstrikes on Gaza on March 18.
A month ago, Trump said Hamas had agreed to release all remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners as part of a deal to end the war after the president posted on social media: “Tell Hamas to IMMEDIATELY give back all 20 hostages… and things will change rapidly” in the Israel-Hamas war. “IT WILL END!”
Netanyahu has faced international condemnation, including among longtime Israeli allies like Germany, France and Canada, and mass protests at home and across the world since Israel launched its military takeover of Gaza City in August. But world leaders have universally praised Trump’s Gaza peace plan, and a poll conducted by an Israeli television channel the day after its release found that 72% of respondents in the nation support the plan and only 8% opposed it, while 20% remained undecided.
In Israel, more than 120,000 demonstrators seeking an end to the war and a deal to return the hostages still held in Gaza rallied Saturday night in Tel Aviv, pinning their hopes on Trump’s plan. The rally’s organizer, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing many families of the hostages, unfurled a huge black banner printed with the yellow hostage memorial ribbon reading, in white and red letters, “It’s now or never.”
Liran Berman, brother of twin hostages Gali and Ziv Berman, told the crowd:“President Trump, we stand with you. Do not stop. It is now or never.”
In the U.S., meanwhile, a New York Times/Siena University released Monday revealed that American voters’ support for the war and Israel has declined precipitously. The poll found that more than half of U.S. voters now oppose sending additional economic or military aid to Israel, which has been the biggest recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its 1948 founding. About 6 in 10 voters said Israel should end its military offensive in Gaza even if the remaining Israeli hostages were not released or Hamas were not eliminated, and nearly 40% believe Israel was intentionally killing civilians in Gaza, nearly double the number of voters who agreed with that statement in the 2023 poll.
And even many American Jews now strongly disapprove of Israel’s Gaza war, with about 60% saying Israel has committed war crimes 40% saying it inflicted genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza, according to a Washington Post poll released Saturday.
Netanyahu’s leadership received a “poor” rating from 48% of U.S. Jews, a 20 percentage-point increase from a Pew Research Center poll five years ago. But more than 3 in 4 American Jews still believe Israel’s existence is vital for the future of the Jewish people, and 58% say they have some or a lot in common with Israeli Jews.
Over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of people rallied in major European cities over the weekend to protest Israel’s offensive in Gaza and its military’s interception of a flotilla as it sought to deliver humanitarian aid to the famine-stricken territory. World leaders also decried the Israel naval forces interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla Thursday about 75 miles off the coast of Gaza and the arrests of 450 activists, including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg.
The 70-year-old Pope Leo has mostly avoided direct criticism of Israel, in sharp contrast to his predecessor, the late Pope Francis, who had repeatedly denounced Israel’s attacks on Gaza and suggested in a late 2024 book that Israel should be investigated to determine whether it had committed genocide in the enclave.
But Leo has steadily stepped up his criticisms of Israel since a July telephone conversation with Netanyahu after an Israeli military strike on Holy Family Church killed three people and injured 10 others, including its priest, Gabriel Romanelli. During the call, the Vatican said, Leo “again expressed his concern about the tragic humanitarian situation of the population in Gaza, whose children, elderly, and sick are paying an agonizing price.”
Other Catholic leaders have expressed hope that the new Gaza peace plan would finally end the war in Gaza.
Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, delivered a message of hope Saturday to his diocese, which includes Holy Family Church, Gaza’s only Catholic parish, where more than 500 displaced people have taken shelter since the war began. Pope Francis had called the parish every evening from the start of the war in Gaza until he died in April.
“For two years, the war has absorbed most of our attention and energy. “By now,” Cardinal Pizzaballa said in the message to his flock, “everyone is sadly aware of what has happened in Gaza: continued massacres of civilians, starvation, repeated displacement, limited access to hospitals and medical care, lack of hygiene, without forgetting those who are being held against their will.
“We await the moment to rejoice for the families of the hostages, who will finally be able to embrace their loved ones. We hope the same for Palestinian families, who will be able to embrace those returning from prison. We rejoice above all for the end of hostilities, which we hope will not be temporary and will bring relief to the inhabitants of Gaza. We rejoice for all of us, because the possible end of this horrible war, which now seems very close, will finally mark a new beginning for everyone-not only Israelis and Palestinians, but also the whole world.”
Pizzaballa reaffirmed the decision to remain at Holy Family to care for the displaced Palestinians, many of them children and elderly, sick and disabled people. About 250 displaced Palestinians have also taken shelter during the war at the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrios, and ahead of Israeli’s military takeover of Gaza City in late August, Pizzaballa and Theophilos III, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, said in a joint statement that the leaders of the two churches had decided to remain to care for the displaced people sheltering at the compounds.
In Saturday’s message, Pizzaballa said: “Together with Jesus, as a Christian community, we want to gather the many tears of these two years: the tears of those who have lost relatives or friends who were killed or kidnapped, those who have lost their homes, jobs, countries, or lives — innocent victims of a conflict whose end is not yet in sight.”
But, he added: “We know that evil and death, though powerful and present in us and around us, cannot eliminate that sense of humanity that survives in every heart. Christ’s empty tomb — at which, more than ever in these past two years, our hearts have paused in anticipation of resurrection — assures us that pain will not last forever, that waiting will not be in vain, and that the tears watering the desert will make the Easter garden bloom.”
For his part, Bishop A. Elias Zaidan, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, said in a statement Wednesday that the peace plan “recognizes the reality of the region’s interconnectedness,” adding: “I am especially hopeful of the plan’s ‘interfaith dialogue process,’ which is intended to create a greater sense of community between Israelis and Palestinians ‘based on the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence.’”
Zaiden, who leads the Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles, quoted Pope Leo’s reminder Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice (“Hundredth Year of the Pope”) Foundation — established by John Paul II in 1993 to study and make known the Church’s social doctrine — that “the deepest purpose of the Church’s social doctrine’ is a contribution to peace and dialogue in the service of building bridges of universal fraternity.”
A native of Lebanon who served there for two years in the mid-1980s as a priest with Congregation of the Lebanese Maronite Missionaries, Zaiden said: “Any peace plan will involve challenges that will require the utmost effort and cooperation from all sides. However, as an international community and people of faith who deeply care for all our brothers and sisters who live in the land of Christ’s life, death, and glorious resurrection, we cannot lose this opportunity for peace.”
Human rights organizations and aid organizations have demanded that Israel allow unrestricted access to desperately needed humanitarian aid and decried the Israel Defense Forces’ continued, relentless attacks on Gaza City, including intensified airstrikes on already overcrowded neighborhoods and refugee camps, destruction of high-rise residential high-rises.
On Wednesday, two days after the release of the peace plan, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz posted on X: “This is the last opportunity for Gaza residents who wish to do so to move south and leave Hamas terrorists isolated in Gaza City itself face-to-face against IDF action which continues at full intensity. Those who stay in Gaza [City] will be considered terrorists and terror supporters. The IDF is prepared for all possibilities and is determined to continue its operations—until all hostages are returned and Hamas is disarmed, on the path to ending the war.”
That drew outrage from Erika Guevara Rosas, senior director of Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns at Amnesty International, who said in a statement Friday: “By threatening that the hundreds of thousands who remain in Gaza City will be treated as ‘terrorists’ and ‘terror supporters,’ Israel’s defense minister is effectively giving a green light for war crimes, including the targeting of civilians and imposition of collective punishment. States must uphold their obligations under international law to bring Israel’s genocide against Palestinians to an end.”
Katz said on Sunday that the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza City had displaced roughly 900,000 million Palestinians.
“The decision to occupy Gaza, the collapse of multi-story buildings, and the intensity of IDF operations in the city have led to the evacuation of roughly 900,000 residents to the south, creating immense pressure on Hamas and the countries that support it,” Katz said in a speech in Jerusalem.
Before the start of the military assault in late August, the UN estimated that about 1 million people had lived in Gaza City, the territory’s largest urban center.
On Thursday, the World Health Organization warned that nearly 42,000 people in Gaza now endure life-changing injuries they suffered during the war and that over 15,000 of them, including 3,800 children, need specialist treatment outside Gaza, where the health system has collapsed.
Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO representative in the West Bank and Gaza, speaking to journalists via a video link from Gaza, stressed the urgent need for fuel and medical supplies, including prosthetics and assistive devices for the more than 5,000 Palestinians who have suffered amputations or severe arm, leg and the spinal cord injuries. Peeperkorn also said it’s critical to provide emergency medical evacuation, mental health services to treat widespread trauma and protection of health workers.
And on Wednesday, more than 150 American physicians, surgeons, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and midwives who have volunteered in Gaza since the start of the war urged the Trump administration to end its support for Israel’s war on the besieged enclave.
“It is imperative that the United States immediately end its military, economic, and diplomatic support for the ongoing destruction of Gaza, and support an international arms embargo on all warring parties,” the health workers wrote in a letter to Trump. “This is the right thing to do, and we believe it is required under both American and international law.”
“President Trump, we wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since returning from Gaza: scenes of malnourished children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them. Today we beg you to hear the cries of Gaza’s children that our consciences will not let us forget. We cannot fathom why our government continues arming Israel while its armed forces kill children en masse.”
The letter said the Israeli attack on Gaza’s healthcare system “is simply unprecedented in world history” and that the IDF has launched hundreds of attacks on hospitals and clinics and killed more than 1,581 healthcare workers as of July 16, 2025. “Our healthcare colleagues have been murdered in cold blood with bombs and bullets, oftentimes within the halls of the hospitals where they spent their lives saving others,” the healthcare workers wrote. “These are crimes of the highest order. Our own government’s support for them is intolerable.”
Israel has claimed Hamas operatives have operated out of Gaza hospitals and medical clinics, but humanitarian groups and the UN have said Israel has not provided no evidence to substantiate its claims.
The Brown University’s Costs of War Project reports that the U.S. approved at least $17.9 billion in security assistance for Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere from Oct. 7, 2023, through September 2024.
“What is happening in Gaza is not a war,” the letter stated. “In war, children who are still learning to walk are not regularly shot in the head. In war, homeless, starving civilians are not enticed into death traps using rice and lentils as bait. In war, two dozen doctors, nurses, paramedics, rescue workers, and firefighters are not killed every week for nearly two years straight.”
The healthcare workers also said that since May, when Israel replaced the vast UN aid distribution network with the American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), that they “have witnessed a new and shocking form of violence: the mass killing by shooting, shelling, and bombing of people seeking food for their starving families.”
In August, a Doctors Without Borders report denounced what it called the “orchestrated killing” of starving Palestinians as they seek food at GHF distribution sites. In Doctors Without Borders’ nearly 54 years of operation, Raquel Ayora, its general director, said: “Rarely have we seen such levels of systematic violence against unarmed civilians. The GHF distribution sites masquerading as ‘aid’ have morphed into a laboratory of cruelty — children shot in the chest while reaching for food, people crushed or suffocated in stampedes, and entire crowds gunned down at distribution points. This must stop now.”
Days after the release of that report, UN Human Rights Council-appointed experts said that nearly 1,400 people had been killed and more than 4,000 wounded by “open indiscriminate fire” while seeking food in and around GHF sites since late May. Expressing “grave concern” over GHF operations, the experts said, called for the immediate dismantling of GHS and a “full arms embargo on Israel due to its multiple violations of international law.”
“In this case,” they added, “we are leaving a state accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in charge of feeding the population affected by the genocide without oversight and with impunity…. Without clear accountability, the very idea of humanitarian relief may ultimately become a casualty of modern hybrid warfare.”
Israel and the U.S. have strongly denied the claims.
With aid crossings to Gaze remaining closed, Palestinians have resorted to burning plastic and cardboard to cook and stay warm, causing the spread of pneumonia, asthma and other respiratory diseases from toxic fumes, doctors warned Tuesday.
Dr. Khalil Al-Daqran, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health in Gaza, said the diseases have spread across the territory, but hospitals cannot treat patients due to shortages of medicines and basic medical supplies.
“This situation requires urgent intervention from the international community and international organizations to pressure Israel to allow the entry of essential medicines, medical supplies, fuel and food,” Al-Daqran said.
Aisha al-Ra’i told UN News that she already has several children and is pregnant again. She says she must keep her clay oven in her tent burning every day, despite suffering from chronic illness. Early each morning, her daughters help her collect the plastic and cardboard scraps for fuel.
“We pray that this ordeal will be lifted from us so that we can return to our lives,” she says.
Juliette Touma — communications director at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), describes the humanitarian calamity she has witnessed since the war began in an interview published Wednesday by Democracy in Exile, the online journal of DAWN, which seeks to expose human rights violations and reform U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa.
Since Israel’s aid blockade began in March, UNRWA has been banned by the Israeli authorities from bringing to Gaza any supplies, including food, but also medicines and hygiene kits and other basic necessities. The ban, Touma says, came after a campaign to discredit and defund UNRWA led by Israel and the United States after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, terrorist attack, which culminated in a new law passed by Israel’s parliament in early 2025 that formally bans the agency from operating on Israeli territory. “The agency has been under an unprecedented attack, and what’s behind it is plans to strip Palestinian refugees of their refugee status,” Touma says.
Before the war, she says, UNRWA operated 183 schools throughout Gaza, for nearly 300,000 students, but bombings forced most of the schools to close and become makeshift shelters when the war began. Most of the buildings have since been bombed. More than 370 UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza, the highest death toll for aid workers in a single conflict in UN history.
“When the Israelis continue to claim that there is a humanitarian zone, they would bomb that humanitarian zone,” she said. “There’s no such thing as a humanitarian zone in Gaza because no place is safe in Gaza. No one is safe. No one has been spared. Nothing has been spared — not hospitals, not schools, not people’s homes, not markets, not shelters for the displaced.”
Children have suffered severe trauma, she says: Many of them have lost loved ones and friends and family members, and been severely injured themselves. Some have been disabled for life. They have lost limbs and now face a third year without education. Touma says other conflicts have demonstrated that the longer children stay out of school, the higher the risk of them falling prey to exploitation, including child marriage and recruitment into armed groups.
“I wish I had the words that could do any justice to what the Palestinian people in Gaza have been going through for nearly two years now,” Touma says.“I don’t know how they do it. When you pause for a minute and think about it, it’s the love of life that drives them and that keeps them going. They’ve gone through what no human being should go through. There have been many attempts to describe the situation — hell on earth, a graveyard for children, the graveyard for international humanitarian law. There have been all these debates about whether to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide or not….
“The more people are suffering totally unnecessarily and the closer we inch towards losing our collective humanity. Gaza is not just about the Palestinian people. Gaza is about our collective humanity and about safeguarding values, about safeguarding international humanitarian law, because every red line, including the thick red lines, have been crossed in the context of the Gaza Strip, and that must stop. To do that, the first thing that needs to happen is a ceasefire, and then comes accountability.”
Touma says world leaders must unite to rebuild Gaza and bring on an organization like UNRWA, which has qualified teachers in the territory, to re-establish schools, and doctors, nurses, who can reopen health clinics.
“Now, what Gaza will also need after this vicious war is finally over is beyond the brick and mortar, is the rebuilding of people’s souls — people overcoming their grief and their loss. The international community, including the U.N., must do whatever we can to support the Palestinians in Gaza to overcome what they’ve seen and what they’ve been going through for the past two years.”