Dominican Priest who Survived Rwanda's Genocide says it's the Duty of Christians to Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza - EXCLUSIVE

As of publication of this article, least 31,184 people, including over 13,400 children in Gaza have been killed and 72,889 wounded by Israeli attacks on the strip since October 7. (news reports)
In this exclusive, a Dominican Priest who Survived Rwanda's Genocide prophetically says it's the Duty of Christians to Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza:

It is the duty of Christians to call for a ceasefire in Gaza:

On 7 October 2023, a catastrophe befell the people of Israel, particularly those living in the

vicinity of the Gaza Strip. Armed militants from the Hamas group, in a coordinated attack followed
by a disorderly mob movement of some civilians, crossed the borders of the Gaza Strip and
poured into surrounding kibbutz, military establishments and a rave attended by several young
people from all over. A few days later, the world learned with horror that more than 1,200 people
had been killed and hundreds kidnapped, taken into the Gaza Strip. No Catholic in good faith
would remain insensitive to this catastrophe.
While the attack on 7 October 2023 was heart-wrenching, and nothing like it had happened to
the nation of Israel since its independence, what followed was beyond barbaric. Some
Catholics, as well as people from other traditions, and even those who do not claim to belong to
any religious tradition, often talk about the Holy Land according to their own inclinations, often in
a partisan way. I will take here a partisan Catholic tradition learned from Christ himself: the
preferential option for the poor and the weakest. 

This outcry for Gaza is not about me or about any other Catholic, it is rather addressed to me and to other Catholics. For once, let's forget ourselves and our left-right, progressive-conservative leanings, and put the suffering people of Gaza back at the center of it all.

What began on 8 October (after the attack on 7 October), was not a war in the sense of
conventional warfare. The announced intention - I paraphrase - was to decimate Hamas from
the face of the earth and to free the hostages. These two objectives were contradictory (it is
absurd to imagine Hamas releasing all the hostages knowing that the next step is its total
annihilation.) and, if we examine the strategies used by the Israeli army, the second goal
disappeared from the list of achievable objectives from the very first day of the reprisals. The
intensive bombardment of Gaza, from north to south, including residential areas, facilities of the
United Nations and other international organisations, schools, churches, mosques, cultural
heritage buildings and hospitals, did not seem to consider for a second that the hostages would
perish under the rubble or executed by their captors.

Since then, horrific images have reached the entire world: entire neighbourhoods decimated by

bombardments, thousands of children and adults crushed by the rubble of buildings flattened to

the ground, IDF soldiers celebrating the cruelty inflicted on an entire people. Added to this were

statements made by certain leaders of the Israeli government that left no doubt as to the

intention to reduce the number of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to a strict minimum, or even to

the total absence of Palestinians. In other eras, including during the genocide against the Tutsi

in my country, these kinds of statements by government leaders were taken very seriously.

Once again, no Catholic in good faith and with a normally functioning consciousness would

remain insensitive to this catastrophe.

Regardless of what the Israeli government may announce as its next intentions, and given the
devastation of Gaza, as well as the fact that its already aggrieved population is about to be hit
by an unprecedented famine, it is almost late, but not yet, for every Catholic institution and
individual capable of doing so, to call for a permanent ceasefire. Many times, generations after
most of the monstrosities were committed against defenseless peoples, the Catholic Church
has come back to apologize and ask forgiveness for standing by and watching, and sometimes,
as in the case of my country's genocide against the Tutsi, for the active participation of some of
its leaders in the ignominious act. 

Many Catholics have understood that, beyond our duty as Christian believers, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza is matter of sanity. 

Some Catholic groups and institutions have already called for a permanent ceasefire: Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, was one of the first to call for a ceasefire. The group Pax Christi USA has also invited President Biden to call for a ceasefire. Indeed, it can never be justifiable to starve an entire population while continuously bombing them. The Pope has repeatedly called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. This was not out of ignorance or an unjust partisan view of

the situation: he was speaking as Christ's Vicar on Earth, and calling on us to do what Christ
would have done. It is time for Catholic institutions and individual believers to call for a
permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the remaining hostages.
Special to Catholic News World by Fr. Gustave Ineza OP

Fr. Gustave Noel Ineza, OP, is a doctoral student at St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology. Born and raised in Rwanda, he lived through the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and went into exile for a month in what was then Zaire. His family left the refugee camps and returned to Rwanda after three members of his family developed cholera. He studied in the minor seminary and joined the Dominican Order in 2002. He studied Philosophy in Burundi, and Theology in South Africa (SJTI/Pietermaritzburg) and the UK (Blackfriars/Oxford). Ordained in 2014, he worked for Domuni (www.domuni.eu) and was a chaplain to university and high school students. In 2018, he came to Canada to pursue studies in Christian-Muslim dialogue. He is currently reading on post-colonial approaches to the taxonomies assigned to religious traditions (Muslims and Christians) by colonial powers in Rwanda.