Pope Francis doubled down Sunday on his condemnation of Israel's strikes on the Gaza Strip, denouncing their "cruelty" for the second time in as many days despite Israel 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 pope lamented an Israeli 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.
Gaza's civil defence rescue agency reported that an Israeli air strike had killed 10 members of a family on Friday in the northern part of the territory, including seven children.
The mounting criticisms of Israel appear to mark a change in the pope's tone in recent weeks.
He has consistently called for peace since the beginning of the Israel-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.
At the end of September the pope also criticised Israel's "immoral" use of force in Gaza and in Lebanon, where Israel launched an offensive against Hamas's fellow Iran-backed ally Hezbollah.
Since 2013 the Vatican has recognised the State of Palestine, with which it maintains diplomatic relations, and it supports the two-state solution.
Pope Francis leads the Angelus prayer from the chapel of his Santa Marta residence due to a cold which stopped him from appearing at his window overlooking St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, on Sunday. Vatican Media/Simone Risoluti/Handout via REUTERS
