Over 200 Italian Jews have signed an appeal condemning Israel's "ethnic cleansing" in the Palestinian territories, sparking strong media reactions and divisions within Italy's Jewish community.
Writers, academics, philosophers and journalists were among the 220 signatories of the text, which was published in daily newspapers La Repubblica and Il Manifesto.
It claimed that U.S. President Donald Trump "wants to expel Palestinians from Gaza. Meanwhile in the West Bank the violence of the Israeli government and settlers continues."
"Italian Jews say no to ethnic cleansing. Italy must not be an accomplice," they added.
The call aims to "bring out a clear and strong Jewish voice of disapproval," said the Jewish Antiracist Laboratory, a group of young Jewish-origin Italians that is behind the petition.
The organization said it was "opposed to the annexation of Palestinian territories by Israel and all forms of anti-Semitism."
One of the newspaper's journalists, Federico Fubini, signed the appeal and wrote on X that he was "against ethnic cleansing in Gaza and oppression in the West Bank."
Both were "very close to my heart," he added. "But in no way does this endorse Hamas, obviously, nor the many forms of explicit, insidious and hypocritical anti-Semitism that we see everywhere, including in Italy."
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, previously said there were clear indications that Israel had violated three of the five acts listed under the U.N. Genocide Convention.
Albanese, an independent expert appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council but who does not speak on behalf of the United Nations, said she had found "reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of ... acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met."
The report, entitled "Anatomy of a Genocide," listed those acts as: "killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group's members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
