Tensions Between Vatican and Israel Over Palestinian Red Crescent's Role in October 7 Massacres

«The Palestinian Red Crescent played an active role in the massacres of October 7th». The Israeli Embassy to the Holy See entrusts to X - on the official account - a polemical message (not even too veiled) towards Pope Francis who just yesterday received Younis Al Khatib, President of the «Palestine Red Crescent Society», the Palestinian Red Crescent, the humanitarian organization of the international movement of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Palestine and Gaza. After the controversies of the past few days with Ambassador Raphael Schulz on the course of the war, the relations between the Vatican and Israel once again prove to be always agitated and tense. It is not the first time since the beginning of the conflict that Israeli exponents, authoritative diplomats, rabbis and academics have expressed disorientation for the diplomatic line of Oltretevere judged unbalanced. On X, this time, the footage taken on October 7th, the morning of the anti-Semitic Pogrom, at the Erez crossing, the only pedestrian crossing between Gaza and Israel, is posted, in which a wounded Hamas terrorist is rescued and evacuated by paramedics on a Red Crescent ambulance which, as the images show, were evidently part of the operational plan of the attack. The Israel-Vatican crisis is easing, the Israeli ambassador explains that the statement was translated badly for him About the audience with President Al Khatib the Vatican has not provided any details, nor wanted to make comments. Always on X the president of the Palestinian Red Crescent informed that the meeting with Francis served to offer the Pope a picture of the humanitarian situation in Gaza. In recent days, the Palestinian Red Crescent had denounced the killing of a woman due to shots by Israeli soldiers against the organization's building in Khan Younis. New diplomatic clash between the Vatican and Israel. «Deplore the words of Cardinal Parolin» For the Pope today is his last public appointment: after the Angelus, in fact, the Lenten spiritual exercises begin. He will be on retreat until Friday afternoon. Contrary to what he has always done in the past years (except for the biennium of the pandemic) the spiritual retreat takes place in a separate and personal form without any retreat with the curia in the religious house of Ariccia where Francis organized for cardinals and bishops even the transport all together on a bus. Even in this case the Vatican did not want to provide any explanation to this decision that surprised some members of the curia who expected the collective retreat at the gates of Rome.