Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a Christmas message on Sunday, Christmas Eve, thanking Christians around the world for their support for the Jewish state during its war against Hamas terror.

Netanyahu said:

To our Christian friends around the world, Merry Christmas.

Christmas is supposed to be a time of good will to all men and peace on Earth. Well, we don’t have peace on Earth, not in our part anyway, and we certainly don’t see good will to all men.

We’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, who raped and beheaded women, who burned babies alive, who took babies hostages.

This is a battle, not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism. And I know in this that we have your support.

I want to thank you for your support. I want to thank you for your prayers. And I want to assure you, that as we stand together, we will also prevail. We shall win this war and secure our common values and our common future.

Thank you.

Netanyahu’s wife, Sarah, wrote Sunday to Pope Francis, asking for his help in pressuring Hamas to release more than 120 Israeli hostages who are still in captivity, and in convincing the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit the hostages.

She wrote:

By deliberately targeting our civilians while hiding behind their own civilians Hamas committed a double war crime. But it also committed a third crime — kidnapping innocent hostages.

…

Your Holiness, I ask for your personal intervention in this matter. Please use your influence to demand the unconditional release [of] all the hostages without delay.

Please also call on the Red Cross to demand to visit all the hostages at once and deliver them vital medicine. So far, the Red Cross has failed to insist on these deliverables. Your intervention could tilt the balance and save precious lives.

As Breitbart News reported last month, Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, now controlled by the Palestinian Authority, canceled public Christmas celebrations to honor the “martyrs” of Hamas who were killed trying to murder Israelis.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.