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CARDINAL ZUPPI READS THE NAMES OF PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI CHILDREN KILLED IN THE CONFLICT

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Monte Sole  ||  | 14 August 2025
Iniziative (EN) - Maison de la Paix (EN)

A delegation from the “United States of the World” and the “Mediterranean Foundation” took part in an initiative organised by Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna and President of the Italian Episcopal Conference: the reading - in a highly symbolic location, the scene of the Nazi massacre - of 12,000 names belonging to the 16 Israeli victims under the age of 12 killed by Hamas in the pogrom of 7 October 2023 and the more than 12,000 killed by the Israeli army during the almost two years of genocide in Gaza. 
'Ours is an invocation,“ said Cardinal Zuppi, 'we are not entering into the merits of the case, we are facing a greater pain. The absurdity of what is happening is now evident”.
‘For this moment of prayer and reading, we have chosen the place where a tragedy took place, a place close to all those bathed in the blood of Abel,’ said Cardinal Zuppi.
More than 12,000 names were read, taking official data from Israel and Gaza.
"We want to remember each name individually to rescue them from anonymity. No one is a number; every person has a name, an identity. The suffering of children speaks volumes about the dramatic consequences of war and the need to achieve a ceasefire, to end the conflict without causing further innocent victims. As Dostoevsky wrote, “no war can ever be worth even a single child's tear”," concludes Zuppi.
Cardinal Matteo Zuppi opens the relay of 12,000 names of young Israeli and Palestinian victims in the church of Casaglia in Monte Sole, the site of the 1944 massacre, with the monks of the Small Family of Annunziata.

There are 469 pages, 12,211 Palestinian children killed according to the Gaza government, 16 declared by Jerusalem on 7 October two years ago, when Hamas attacked Israel. Today, at the church of Casaglia di Monte Sole, where hundreds of defenceless people, all civilians, including many children, were massacred by the Nazi-Fascists in September 1944, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi kicked off the relay of recitations of all those under the age of twelve killed in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. A message of peace, read together with the monks of the Piccola Famiglia dell'Annunziata, which places the children who died on both sides of the conflict on the same dramatic level. Children are people, not numbers, says the president of the CEI.
Twelve thousand two hundred and eleven names of Palestinian children and sixteen Israeli children occupy the physical space of five blue binders filled with transparent laminated sheets. As they are read one by one, they take up an enormous amount of space. Each letter carries the weight of what they have suffered, of the death that has been imposed on them by adults through war. Twelve thousand are the names of Palestinian children between the ages of zero and twelve who died in the Gaza Strip between 7 October 2023 and 15 July this year; sixteen are those of Israeli children who died on the same date.
This is the comment by Secretary General Michele Capasso:
"When we read hundreds of names of war victims with UN Secretary-General Miguel Angel Moratinos in Naples on 7 June 2025, and the 8,372 names of victims of the genocide thirty years ago in Srebrenica on 11 July 2025, we were overcome by a sense of loneliness caused by the indifference of most people, who seemed almost annoyed by it all.
At a time when memory risks becoming a mere formality, reading the names of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of wars and conflicts restores the deepest and most political meaning to commemoration: taking on the irreducible pain, not to expose it, but to preserve it as the living conscience of humanity.
Eighty years after Hiroshima, we cannot limit ourselves to remembering. We must choose. And the choice is “not to forget”, to ALWAYS remember our brothers and sisters killed by absurd wars fuelled only by petty power games and money.
Giving space, as a universal invocation, to the reading of the names of the victims of war means recognising those who have paid the highest price in history and affirming - with courage - that peace is not an abstraction, but a concrete, daily, radical commitment. A commitment that begins by giving a voice to those who have lost it, remembering their names and, with them, their identity as human beings.
In recent months, not a Sunday has gone by without Francis and Leo XIV calling for an end to the war. We must do our small part to put their wish into practice, including through this type of remembrance that is relevant to our times: not ritualistic, but responsible; not celebration, but choice.