A week after the Church of England approved a Palestinian manifesto labeling Israel a genocidal Jewish supremacist entity, a global association of Catholic priests is urging Ireland’s government to press the European Union to end what it calls a “genocide” in Gaza.
Priests Against Genocide, a coalition of over 2,400 priests, 26 bishops, and two cardinals, wrote to Ireland’s prime minister and lawmakers on July 20, 2026, attaching Amnesty International’s statement asking the European Union to act against Israel for its “genocide” in Gaza.
The statement accuses Israel of “apartheid against Palestinians,” “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank, “unlawful occupation” of Palestinian territory, and “war crimes” in Lebanon. It asks the European Union to suspend its Association Agreement with Israel, the legal basis for European Union trade with Israel.
[Amnesty’s statement] asks the European Union to suspend its Association Agreement with Israel, the legal basis for European Union trade with Israel.
Ireland, a traditionally Catholic country currently witnessing unprecedented levels of Holocaust denial, as per a January 2026 survey, re-assumed the presidency of the European Union Council from July 1. Irish Catholics are almost 80 percent less likely to support Israel than Protestants, an earlier December 2024 survey found, with “medieval” religious antisemitic attitudes highest among Catholics.
“Ireland has already demonstrated to the world what principled leadership looks like. In the 1980s, Ireland became the first European country to ban the import of goods from apartheid South Africa,” the Priests Against Genocide statement wrote in its anti-Israel petition.
While the Church of England backed the Kairos II manifesto justifying Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre as the consequence of Israeli occupation, experts accuse Amnesty International of “genocide inversion.” Its December 2024 report states: “On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the Gaza Strip (Gaza) of unprecedented magnitude, scale and duration.”
In a peer-reviewed article, International Law expert Avraham Shalev argues that it is actually Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israelis, combined with its statements of intent to exterminate Jews, that meets the legal threshold for genocide.
Citing historian of antisemitism Robert Wistrich’s identification of “eliminationist” or “genocidal antisemitism” as the defining feature of Hamas, Shalev warns that “Islamists of every stripe openly proclaim at every opportunity that the eradication of Israel is a divine commandment.”
“Recently captured documents demonstrate that on October 7th, Hamas believed that Israel’s destruction was a goal they could achieve,” Shalev writes. Hamas’s motivation was its intent to destroy Jews “as a distinct ethnic, racial, and national group,” he explains.
Shalev argues that a “distinctive feature” of Hamas’s October 7 pogrom is how its “perpetrators and allies have simultaneously accused its victims of the same crime” by deploying the rhetorical shield of “genocide inversion” to “deflect attention from Hamas’s own genocidal actions.”
Following Amnesty International’s lead, Priests Against Genocide continues to portray Israel as the genocidal aggressor while tempering its denunciation of Hamas. Priests Against Genocide spokesman Father Pietro Rossini earlier condemned Hamas’s massacre but said that the coalition “condemn[s] even more strongly” Israel’s “disproportionate response” and Israel’s “genocide” against the Palestinians.
Priests Against Genocide clerics, who rally under the revisionist banner of “Christ died in Gaza,” have also preached falsehoods against Israel. Addressing an anti-Israel rally outside the Irish Assembly building in June, Father Pat Colgan claimed that the Israel Defense Forces joined settlers in setting fire to the last Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank.
“They’ve already destroyed the olive groves, they’ve torn down the church, they’re trying to burn out the last Christian,” Colgan asserted. “This is another part of the genocide that we don’t hear about: that the Christian community is also being sent fleeing along with their Muslim brothers and sisters.”
Priests Against Genocide clerics, who rally under the revisionist banner of “Christ died in Gaza,” have also preached falsehoods against Israel.
Analyzing the accusations of arson on the Taybeh church, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) explained that the church remains “entirely undamaged” because a nearby fire never reached the church.
While footage of the incident reportedly does exist, it shows “several young men from the adjacent Jewish farm … running up the hill with fire extinguishing equipment and reflective vests, attempting to put out the flames—not start them,” CAMERA reported.
When asked if the coalition has protested other genocides, including the ongoing genocide against the Amhara people in Ethiopia, the Sudan genocide, the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds from Afrin, or the slaughter of Christians in Biafra, Priests Against Genocide-USA chair Father John Heagle said Priests Against Genocide is “concerned about genocide any place in the human community” but was founded “as a direct response to the ongoing genocidal conditions in Palestine.”
However, there is no mention whatsoever of any other genocide in Priests Against Genocide’s public documents. The group concedes that priests founded it solely for taking a stand against the “genocide in Gaza.”
