Divine Dreams – “The One Thing More Forbidden Than Israel”
Cardinal Pizzaballa: ‘Gaza is a disaster. Do not leave the Holy Land alone’
“One thing the images do not convey is the smell. And one of the greatest scourges right now is the rats, which bite. They bite children above all, and Gaza is full of children—you see them everywhere, but instead of going to school, they play, dirty, beside the sewers.”“One thing the images do not convey is the smell. And one of the greatest scourges right now is the rats, which bite. They bite children above all, and Gaza is full of children—you see them everywhere, but instead of going to school, they play, dirty, beside the sewers.”
By Guglielmo Gallone
“There is a need for empathy toward those who do not think as we do,” said Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, after receiving on Monday, June 29, in Bergamo, Italy, the Limes Prize for Dialogue and Peace, from the Italian geopolitical magazine Limes.
“Gaza is a disaster,” the Cardinal emphasized during his conversation with Limes editor-in-chief Lucio Caracciolo. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem spoke about his visit to the Gaza Strip the previous week, on June 22–23, together with Theophilos III, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem.
“The cities have been razed to the ground, leveled, wiped out. Rafah no longer exists. What strikes me most is traveling along makeshift roads, through tents and sewage. This is where the people of Gaza live,” he explained.
“One thing the images do not convey is the smell. And one of the greatest scourges right now is the rats, which bite. They bite children above all, and Gaza is full of children—you see them everywhere, but instead of going to school, they play, dirty, beside the sewers.”
No sign of improvement
A situation that shows no sign of improvement even after the ceasefire, Cardinal Pizzaballa continued, because “while some food is now able to enter, almost everything else is still prohibited. Dual-use goods are not allowed in. And by dual-use they even mean school desks, pencils, notebooks, and the glass needed for windows. We want to reopen the schools, but we are missing almost everything. We try to make do by recycling whatever pieces we can find here and there.”
“Healthcare workers have told me that what is needed right now is staff trained to handle the psychological trauma experienced by children and mothers,” he emphasized.
“This is an issue that must be handled with the sensitivity it deserves. I’ll say it in a not-very-diplomatic way, but I feel profound sorrow. I just can’t understand.”
Meanwhile, images have emerged of an Israeli airstrike that destroyed dozens of tents sheltering displaced Palestinian families in a densely populated area of the Strip.
Women, children, and people with disabilities were forced to spend the night outdoors. Eight people were reportedly killed in central and southern Gaza, while 2 more were killed north of Khan Younis in a drone strike.
The situation in the occupied territories
The situation is equally dire in the West Bank, in the State of Palestine.
“There is no rule of law,” the Patriarch said, “The law does not apply, and even if it does, it is not meant for Palestinians. Israeli settlers are allowed to do anything. They set up checkpoints everywhere, cut down trees, and prevent people from cultivating their land. Assaults, thefts, and insults have become everyday occurrences.”
These incidents continue largely because they go unpunished: “We often call the Israeli army (IDF) to intervene and restrain the settlers, but by the time they arrive, the settlers have already left—as though someone had warned them—and so the IDF ends up taking it out on us.”
The effort for dialogue and peace
Yet Cardinal Pizzaballa’s descriptions of Gaza reduced to rubble, children playing beside sewage and being bitten by rats, and settler violence in the West Bank do not prevent him from reflecting on the importance of dialogue.
Its necessity is even greater today because “October 7 remains deeply present in the Jewish and Israeli psyche. Since that day, the last restraints have fallen away,” the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem said.
The Cardinal acknowledged that Israel today “is a mix of things,” where “there is a bit of everything, but—I must say with regret—the most hardline are the religious military.”
“It’s very difficult to have a clear and serene relationship with them,” he continued. “The most extreme elements of the Jewish population are not yet in the majority, but they are gaining support and becoming increasingly influential politically, with consequences that are, however, divisive for Israeli society itself.”
