YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – Jesuit Father David Mark Neuhaus, a German-Israeli, says Israel’s actions in Gaza count as a “genocide.”

Neuhaus is superior of the Jesuit community at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem, and is a member of the Jesuit Institute of South Africa. From 2009 to 2017, he also served as patriarchal vicar for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

The current Gaza conflict broke out on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militant groups launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, including 815 civilians, and taking 251 people hostages.

Israel retaliated, invading Gaza on October 27, 2023, with the stated objectives of destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages.

But Israel’s response has been characterized as genocide by various international human rights bodies, the United Nations and academics.

On December 5, 2023, Amnesty International said its research had “found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.”

“Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

On May 7, 2025, the UN Human Rights High Office of the Commissioner issued a statement accusing Israel of “massacring the surviving population with impunity.”

“No one is spared – not the children, persons with disabilities, nursing mothers, journalists, health professionals, aid workers, or hostages,” it said, but didn’t out rightly call it genocide.

Neuhaus told Crux that there was no denying the fact that Israel was carrying out genocide in Gaza.

“Unfortunately, those who commit genocides believe that the people they are exterminating constitute an existential threat to them. That is why they need to be removed,” he told Crux, referencing Israel’s argument that its war is meant to root out Hamas and so remove an existential threat to Israel’s very survival.

Neuhaus said his thoughts on Israel’s “genocidal” violence in Gaza is also informed by his family history. Although he was born into apartheid in South Africa, and then received his formation in the same country, his family came from Nazi Germany, and these experiences “have certainly profoundly influenced my awareness of what is going on in Palestine/Israel.”

“I am indeed an Israeli and I am part of a Jewish family that escaped the horrors of Nazi Germany,” the priest told Crux.

“My family’s origins in Nazi Germany and my own birth and formation in Apartheid South Africa have certainly profoundly influenced my awareness of what is going on in Palestine/Israel,” he said.

Neuhaus recalled that when he arrived in Israel at the age of 15, he “noticed similarities in the way the Israeli state established an ethnocentric form of administration where Jews are privileged, and Palestinians are marginalized.”

“Within the state of Israel, Palestinian citizens face endemic discrimination. In the territories that Israel conquered in 1967, a military occupation was put in place that made sure that Palestinians did not enjoy even basic rights – the right to family life, the right to property, the right to movement, the right to employment. Seeing all this with eyes that were formed within my family which had experienced horrific discrimination in Germany and within Apartheid South Africa, it was easy to see the signs,” he explained.

The Jesuit priest said that the lived realities of the Palestinians can be best explained by examining closely what has happened over the past one hundred years, since Jews from Europe began migrating to Palestine.

“Believing that this was their God-given homeland, they ignored the presence of the natives of the country, the Palestinians,” he told Crux, and drew parallels with European colonization of other parts of the world.

“Most of these Jewish migrants had no intention of living with the Palestinians and integrating into the region. Rather they sought to replace them, removing them from their land, destroying their society and building a Jewish society in its place,” Neuhaus explained.

He said Palestinian resistance to this plan has been brutally crushed, and Israeli leadership in recent years has become “more radical and thus more determined to uproot the Palestinians from their homeland.”

The October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas therefore only served as fodder for a long-standing plan, and Israel found a complicit partner in the United States that offered, and has continued to offer, what Neuhaus describes as “blanket support.”

“The consequences are a war on the Palestinians, killing men, women and children, militants and non-militants and destroying their homes resulting in what is now being termed genocide,” he said.

Neuhaus agrees with critics who have pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uses war to shield his failed regime from criticism.

“Netanyahu is a warmonger and his wars are smokescreens,” Neuhaus said.