VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Benedict XVI called again on Thursday (Jan. 8) for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, as Israel criticized a senior Vatican official for likening that war-torn Palestinian territory to a “big concentration camp.”
“I would repeat that military options are no solution, and that violence, wherever it comes from and whatever form it takes, must be firmly condemned,” Benedict said in his annual address to foreign ambassadors accredited to the Holy See.
The pope called a cease-fire “an indispensable condition for restoring acceptable living conditions to the population” in Gaza, which Israeli ground troops invaded on Saturday (Jan. 3), in retaliation for missile attacks from the Hamas-controlled territory.
Benedict also voiced hopes that upcoming elections in the region-an apparent reference to scheduled Israeli elections on Feb. 10-would produce leaders who could “guide their people towards the difficult yet indispensable reconciliation.”
The speech came a day after Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, told an Italian Web site that Gaza “resembles more and more a big concentration camp.”
An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman denounced Martino’s remarks on Thursday.
“The vocabulary of Hamas propaganda, coming from a member of the College of Cardinals, is a shocking and disappointing phenomenon,” spokesman Yigal Palmor told the Reuters news agency.
The head of a major Jewish human rights organization compared the cardinal’s words to those of “terrorists and Holocaust deniers.”
“These remarks are untrue, distort the memory of the Holocaust and are only used against Israel by terrorist organizations and Holocaust deniers,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Catholic-Jewish relations have suffered tensions recently amid signs that the Vatican might eventually declare the late Pope Pius XII a saint. Critics say that Pius, who reigned during World War II, did not say or do enough to stop the Nazi genocide of the Jews.