The Vatican’s top diplomat says the Israeli army is carrying out an “ongoing massacre” in Gaza in one of the Catholic Church’s strongest condemnations to date of the Israel-Hamas war.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, made the remarks in an interview for the Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano on the eve of the second anniversary of the 7 October attacks by Hamas on Israeli communities.
Parolin described those attacks as an “inhuman massacre,” warned against the “cancer” of rising antisemitism and said the “evil” which led to the Holocaust must “not rise again.”
But the cardinal said the Israeli army, in seeking to eliminate Hamas militants, is “targeting a largely defenceless population, already pushed to the brink,” while he lamented that “the international community is, unfortunately, powerless and that the countries truly capable of exerting influence have so far failed to act to stop the ongoing massacre.”
The cardinal pointed out many voices within the Jewish world strongly disagree with “how the current Israeli government has operated and continues to operate in Gaza and the rest of Palestine.”
