Secretary of State of the Holy See Cardinal Pietro Parolin gave an interview to the Vatican media on October 6 [1]

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After repeating the Pope’s position on the October 7 attack in Israel (“The brutal violence perpetrated against children, women, young people and the elderly can have no justification”) and Pope Francis’ 21 public appeals for the release of the hostages, he reaffirmed “the right of those who are attacked to defend themselves, but even self-defense must respect the principle of proportionality”.

He lamented that “those who feed on this [false] information attribute responsibility for what is happening in Gaza to the Jews as such.”

He continued: “It seems obvious that the Israeli army’s war to defeat the Hamas militiamen does not take into account the fact that it is facing a mostly defenseless and exhausted population, in an area dotted with razed houses and buildings. It is equally clear to me that the international community is unfortunately powerless and that the countries that have so far had real influence have not acted to stop the ongoing carnage. I can only repeat the very clear words of Pope Leo XIV on this subject on 20 July: ’I call on the international community to respect humanitarian law and the obligation to protect civilians, as well as the prohibition of collective punishment, the indiscriminate use of force and the forced displacement of the population’.”

The Israeli embassy in Rome strongly criticized these remarks, stating that “there is no moral equivalence between a democratic state that protects its citizens and a terrorist organization that seeks to kill them.”

Pope Leo XIV validated the interview of H. Em. Pietro Parolin: “The cardinal has expressed the opinion of the Holy See very well,” he said in Castel Gondolfo.

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