Children in Gaza ask children in the world for prayers

Mother María Vargas

Source: Vatican News

Around 7,000 children from 84 countries will be gathering in Rome today, Monday, 6 November, to meet Pope Francis at the Paul VI Hall in the Vatican.

The pilgrimage is part of the 'Learning from Children' event organized by the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education. Pope Francis announced the gathering after the Angelus on October 1. The young pilgrims, aged between 7 and 12, will share with him their hopes and concerns for the future.

Their peers at the Holy Family Catholic Parish in Gaza will join them online, to pray for peace.

Mother María Vargas, a Peruvian Sister of Charity of the Incarnate Word who serves in the parish, has recorded a short video message ahead of the event. In the film, the yougsters thank Pope Francis for his ongoing prayers, and ask the children at the meeting in Rome to pray for them, and all the children unable to leave Gaza.

Since the outbreak of the war Pope Francis has repeatedly expressed his closeness and prayers to the 1000-strong Christian community in Gaza, most of whom are Greek Orthodox.

Over the past four weeks he has regularly phoned Holy Family parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, who is currently stuck in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, to his vicar, Father Yusuf Asad and to the nuns who are supporting the IDPs in Gaza.

The parish compound is presently sheltering some 700 displaced people, mostly Christians, some of whom come from the adjacent St Porphirios Greek Orthodox Church, where 18 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on October 19. so far, the Holy Family Church hasn't been hit , though bombs have fallen nearby, shaking the building.

A previous video sent to Pope Francis last week, shows the Gazan children in the church praying the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Sub Tuum Praesidium prayer while the sound of falling bombs is heard in the background.s

Children, including new-born babies, along with women in Gaza, are disproportionately bearing the burden of the ongoing escalation of hostilities between the Israeli forces and Hamas, both in terms of casualties and of reduced access to health services, UN agencies warned again on Friday in a joint statement.

As of 3 November, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health 2,326 women and 3,760 children had been killed in the Gaza Strip, representing 67 per cent of all casualties, while thousands more had been injured. This means that 420 children are killed or injured every day, some of them only a few months old.

In their joint statement, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency (UNFPA), and the World Health Organization (WHO) said there are an estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, with more than 180 giving birth every day.

These women are unable to access the emergency obstetric services they need to give birth safely and care for their new-borns. With 14 hospitals and 45 primary health care centres closed, some women are having to give birth in shelters, in their homes, in the streets amid rubble, or in overwhelmed healthcare facilities, where sanitation is worsening, and the risk of infection and medical complications is on the rise.

Despite the lack of sustained and safe access, UN agencies have managed to dispatched some life-saving medicines and equipment to Gaza, including supplies for newborns and reproductive health care. However, they say, much more is needed to meet the immense needs of civilians. They, therefore, have called once again for an immediate humanitarian pause "to alleviate the suffering and prevent a desperate situation from becoming catastrophic."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netaniahu again rejected the call for a humanitarian pause after meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday.