Pope Francis will meet with Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday, according to the Vatican’s schedule of meetings.
The audience will be the seventh meeting between Mahmoud Abbas and Pope Francis. Besides their meeting in 2014 during the apostolic journey to the Holy Land, the Palestinian president has already visited the Vatican five times since the Argentine pontiff was elected.
On January 14, 2017 he opened the Palestinian embassy next to the Holy See, which has recognised the state of Palestine since 2015.
Abbas will travel to Italy this week, where he is also expected to meet with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Since the Palestinian leader’s last visit in 2021, the situation in the Holy Land has tragically deteriorated. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 triggered a massive Israeli response in the Gaza Strip, where more than 44,00 people have been killed, according to the Hamas health ministry, and a conflagration throughout the Middle East region.
Pope Francis has recently become more openly critical of Israel’s military campaign in the ongoing conflict with Hamas, saying in recent comments that some experts view the war in Gaza as “genocide” and taking part in the unveiling last weekend of a Vatican creche that showed the baby Jesus lying on a kufiya, a scarf that is the national symbol of the Palestinians.
Israeli strikes on Gaza kill at least 29
Meanwhile, Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip overnight and Wednesday killed at least 29 people, including one that hit a house sheltering displaced people in the isolated north, killing 19 people, Palestinian medics said.
The war between Israel and Hamas continues with no end in sight, even after Israel reached a truce with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and attention shifted to toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Both the outgoing and incoming US administrations have said they hope to end the war before the inauguration, but months of ceasefire talks have repeatedly stalled.
The strike, which killed 19 people, struck the northern town of Beit Lahia near the border with Israel, according to the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital, where the bodies were taken. The hospital said the dead included a family of eight, including four children, their parents and two grandparents.
Another strike near the hospital entrance on Wednesday killed a woman and her two children, hospital officials said.
