(OSV News) — A network of Catholic priests with more than 2,200 members worldwide has joined growing calls to describe the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip as genocide, citing widespread civilian deaths, displacement and destruction in the Palestinian enclave.

The international network Priests Against Genocide said policies and actions of the government of Israel in Gaza constituted a genocide.

“We believe that the policies and actions of the Government of Israel in Gaza constitute genocide,” the statement said.

“A particularly horrifying feature of this genocide is that, for the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s population, there has been no reliable route to safe refuge — only repeated displacement within a closed territory, from one unsafe place to another,” the statement said, signed by 10 prelates, including Cardinal Stephen Brislin of Johannesburg.

“To order people to flee when there is no safe place to flee to is not protection,” the priests lamented.

The prelates launched the network in August 2025.

Israel denies accusation

Signatories of its Aug. 21 statement said that human rights organizations such as B’Tselem — the Israel Information Center for Human Rights, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and the U.K.-based Amnesty International have each concluded that “Israeli policies toward Palestinians amount to apartheid.”

“We cannot condemn apartheid in our history and refuse to recognise these patterns inflicted upon Palestinians,” the priests wrote.

In 2024, the International Court of Justice, based in the Netherlands, found Israeli measures maintain a “near-complete separation” between Palestinian and settler communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israel at the time has rejected the accusations brought by South Africa to The Hague, calling claims that genocide is committed in the enclave “absurd.”

According to an Aug. 24 report by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 73,000 people, including 21,283 children, have died in Gaza amid Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. The report added that roughly 1.98 million people — about 94% of the population — are displaced, while an estimated 637,475 school-age children lack sustained access to formal education.

Accusation not antisemitic

In their statement, to which Israel did not respond, according to Religious News Service, Priests Against Genocide said that their condemnation is directed at the government of Israel “and the policies and actions for which it is responsible — not at Jews or Judaism. We reject antisemitism and Islamophobia alike.”

While also condemning atrocities committed by Hamas Oct. 7, 2023, when 1,200 people, including 48 Americans, were killed, and Hamas took 254 hostages, the priests said those crimes did not diminish Israel’s obligations under international law, nor did they justify genocide or collective punishment.

Father Nicholas Makau, a Consolata Missionary in Nairobi, told OSV News, “We have no other way to say or to look at it. It is genocide. I say this with confidence, looking at my experience, knowledge of information of two genocides that have happened before,” he said, referring to genocides in Rwanda in 1994 and in Cambodia from 1975-1979.

Once a ‘crime without a name’

The term “genocide” had been coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin — a Polish Jewish jurist who lost 49 members of his own family in the Shoah (the preferred Hebrew term for the Holocaust) — to describe what had previously been, as the U.K.’s World War II Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, “a crime without a name.”

Lemkin’s creation of the legal term led to the United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ratified so far by 153 nations, including the U.S.

According to the convention, “genocide” means acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group by killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to its members, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Fredrick Nzwili writes for OSV News from Nairobi, Kenya.