Cardinal Pizzaballa decries Israelis’ ‘continuous aggression’ in West Bank

(LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, used the closing day of Italy’s Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini to issue one of his starkest public assessments of the West Bank, describing the territory as “a lawless land” where violence continues “without any effective security or legal restraints.”

Speaking first to journalists and later in a dialogue with young people titled “Gazing at the Sky of Jerusalem,” the patriarch said tensions between Israeli settlers and Palestinians were rising “almost everywhere,” as reported by ANSA. “It has become a no-man’s land, or rather, a lawless land, where everything that happens remains, unfortunately, unrestrained from the standpoint of security and legality.”

He added “the fact that there is a situation of continuous aggression by (Israeli) settlers is well established” after his visit to the besieged Christian town of Taybeh just two weeks ago.

Home to around 1,500 residents and referred to in the Gospel of John as Ephraim — the place where Jesus Christ withdrew with his disciples before his Passion — Taybeh has endured over a year of escalating systematic attacks from Jewish terrorists living in “settlements” and “outposts” all deemed illegal under international law.

Israeli strategy of ‘pressuring Palestinian families into leaving their land’

Father Bashar Fawadleh, the Latin parish priest of Christ the Redeemer Catholic Church, has characterized the ongoing assaults as “a deliberate strategy of harassment” designed “to create a climate of fear and pressure Palestinian families into leaving their land.”

Since at least July 2025, the Christians of Taybeh have been subjected to regular raids of aggression by heavily armed Israeli settler terrorists who have committed acts of arson to Palestinian Christian agricultural fields, including igniting a fire near the fifth-century Church of St. George and its cemetery, hurling Molotov cocktails at homes and attempting to ignite a gas station.

They have set many vehicles ablaze and written threatening graffiti across private property, brought their livestock to graze on private Christian Palestinian lands, roamed the streets heavily armed terrorizing residents, with reports of gunfire upon Christian citizens, and more, all in a climate of impunity provided by the occupying Israeli army.

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In a change of events earlier this month, Israel designated Taybeh a “closed military zone,” ostensibly to protect the residents from the settler occupiers. However, local Christian officials and residents characterized the action as “an attempt to further tighten the noose on villagers” and “ethnically cleanse” Taybeh “in silence” without witnesses.

READ: Israel shuts down Christian village terrorized by Jewish settlers

Offering the Holy Mass on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Pizzaballa consoled his congregation in Taybeh, assuring them that “however powerful evil may appear, its power is not absolute.”

He encouraged all to remain rooted in faith and hope even when the future appears difficult or impossible, keeping “our hearts” free from contamination, and remaining “a community that gives birth to life, without giving up or abandoning our rights, our right to life. So be courageous. Do not be afraid.”

Gaza ‘deteriorated enormously, very devastated’

During his comments in Rimini on Wednesday, the Franciscan cardinal addressed the devastation in Gaza, distinguishing political talk from human wreckage.

The situation “has deteriorated enormously” and remains “very devastated from a human point of view,” yet is “more stable from a certain perspective” because “politically, there is a great deal of discussion,” he said, according to Vatican News.

READ: Equivalent of 13 atomic bombs dropped on Gaza, over 366,000 estimated dead

This is Gaza City, filmed by the @AP.

Complete destruction. This is what Israel, and its backers in the US, UK, and Germany, call “targeting bombing.”

Gaza will one day recover.

The West’s moral standing, however, will not. pic.twitter.com/9y1jCbGBBZ

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) December 2, 2025

Pizzaballa told the audience not to confuse hope with the slogan that “everything will be fine” or with an imminent political fix. Hope, he said, “arises from within,” through Israelis and Palestinians, Jews, Muslims and Christians who “refuse to dehumanize the other.”

Young people at Gaza’s public university, still eager to study and live, were for him “a source of hope,” he said.

Netanyahu, Israeli government defy virtually unanimous world consensus in favor to two-state solution

Pizzaballa went on to press Western governments to “raise its gaze,” create political perspective, and “calm this continuing downward spiral through ever greater diplomatic efforts.” Diplomacy, “despite all its weakness,” remained “the only way to try to resolve the conflict while avoiding the use of weapons, violence and military force.”

And the end-goal for such diplomacy must be the two-state solution, recently reaffirmed by Pope Leo, as it “is the only way to recognize the right of Israelis and Palestinians to have a home in their own land,” the cardinal said.

With the Holy See, 157 of 193 (81%) national governments in the UN formally recognize the State of Palestine. And around 185 nations (96%) call for a two-state-solution at least implicitly recognizing the illegality of Israel’s 59-year military occupation and colonial settlement enterprise in the West Bank.

Defying this near-unanimous world consensus is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has often echoed the formal position of his Likud Party that “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river,” the precise region internationally recognized, by virtually the entire world, as Palestinian territory.

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