Cardinal Matteo Zuppi led a prayer vigil on August 14 honoring the thousands of children killed by Hamas and Israel since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023.
"We pronounce their names one by one," Cardinal Zuppi said at the beginning of the vigil. The vigil was held on the eve of the Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary.
"They ask us all to commit ourselves to finding or pursuing the path to peace with greater intelligence and passion, starting with a ceasefire and offering the conditions for doing so, from the release of hostages to not taking an entire people hostage," he said.
The cardinal and others then read the names and ages of the 16 Israeli children killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the 12,211 Palestinian children who have been killed since the war began.
The document was 469 pages, and the names of the Palestinian children were acquired from the Gaza Ministry of Health.
The prayer vigil was held in Marzabotto, a town in the Metropolitan City of Bologna. Cardinal Zuppi is the archbishop of Bologna.
The town is famous because of a wartime massacre. During World War II, Nazi troops massacred 1,830 civilians in the town in what is known as the "Marzabotto massacre" or the "massacre of Monte Sole." It was the deadliest mass shooting in Italian history.
The vigil itself was organized by a monastery that tends to the maintenance of the area.
"This is to remember, to pay attention, from this place which is a place of suffering and that has since always been a place to remember all victims," said Cardinal Zuppi.
Famine declared in Gaza City
On Friday, August 22, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared, for the first time, that famine conditions are present in Gaza City.
For a famine to be declared, three conditions have to be met, says the IPC's website.
These are "at least 20% of households facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30% of children suffering from acute malnutrition, and two people for every 10,000 dying each day due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the report an "outright lie" and denied that a famine is occurring in Gaza City.