Pope Francis met Wednesday morning in the Vatican with representatives of families of Israelis held hostage in Gaza. The families asked him to issue a clear call for the release of all the abductees held by Hamas and not to leave anyone behind. Yuval Danzig, whose 75-year-old father Alex was abducted in Gaza, said, \u201cAt the end of my words, the Pope stated that he had heard about my father.\u201d His father Alex was one of the pioneers of the youth delegations to Poland.<\/p>\n
\u201cTerror is worse than war,\u201d the Pope told the delegation and at the end, he warmly shook the hands of all the participants of the meeting and emphasised that he would do everything in his power to help.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s ambassador to the Vatican Rafi Schutz noted that the meeting is taking place as part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs\u2019 effort to keep the issue at the centre of the world agenda, as part of the various steps taken on behalf of the ministry to bring about the speedy release of all the abductees. Schutz emphasised that the meeting with the Pope is unique in two aspects. \u201cBeing the leader of approximately 1.3 billion believers around the world gives his statements about the need to release the abductees a significant international resonance,\u201d he said was the first.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn addition,\u201d he said, \u201cthe connections that the Pope has developed over the course of his ten years in office with religious leaders in the Muslim world may help in this humanitarian effort on a religious and not necessarily a political basis.\u201d On Tuesday, the delegation met with Italy\u2019s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Taiani and with the Minister of Culture Sangiuliano who expressed support and solidarity with the families and called for the immediate release of all the abductees in Gaza.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pope Francis met Wednesday morning in the Vatican with representatives of families of Israelis held hostage in Gaza. The families\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":12582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[1380,1530,1418,3712,536,1264,3711],"class_list":["post-12581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-gaza","tag-hostages","tag-israel-hamas-war","tag-israeli-ambassador-to-the-vatican-rafi-schutz","tag-palestine","tag-pope-francis","tag-the-vatican"],"reading_time":"2 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}