A withering response to the Vatican’s latest serving of platitudes about proportionality and such in Gaza underscores a growing Israeli impatience with what amounts to meddling as it prosecutes its war against Hamas.

On Wednesday Israel protested with the Vatican after Pope Francis’s deputy, Pietro Cardinal Parolin, tried to frame the ongoing war effort in Gaza as a “carnage” resulting from a disproportionate Israeli military response to Hamas.

The Israeli embassy was quick to rebuke that assertion, responding that “judging the legitimacy of a war without taking into account all the circumstances leads to erroneous conclusions.” The note sent to the Vatican added that “any objective observer cannot help but come to the conclusion that the responsibility for the death and destruction in Gaza lies with Hamas and only Hamas.”

The Italian foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, spoke at the same event ahead of Ash Wednesday as did Cardinal Parolin, who serves as the pope’s secretary of state. Mr. Tajani described Israel’s military actions in Gaza as “disproportionate.” 

To that Cardinal Parolin recalled what “the Holy See has said from the beginning,” namely, “a clear and unreserved condemnation of every type of antisemitism” and then added, “but at the same time [we] also a request that Israel’s right to defense, which was invoked to justify this operation, be proportionate. And certainly, with 30,000 deaths, it is not.”

The cardinal failed to mention that Gaza casualty figures are provided by the Hamas terrorist group with no means of independent verification, nor that many if not most of the deaths are of Gaza members and supporters themselves. 

Following that typical omission he concluded: “I think we are all outraged by what is happening, by this carnage, but we must have the courage to move forward.”

For the Israeli embassy, at least, that was not to be the final word. The formal response also included the clarification — because it appears as though the Vatican needed one — that “Gaza has been transformed by Hamas into the largest terrorist base ever seen” and that “a large part” of that transformation was “actively supported by the local civilian population” — to the extent that, as the Sun and others have reported, “Gaza civilians also participated” in the heinous war crimes of October 7. 

“It is not enough to condemn the genocidal massacre of October 7 and then point the finger at Israel,” Israel added.

Like many people in Europe right now, to say nothing of some in
America, Vatican officials in their public attempts to draw a spurious equivalency between Israel and those who support terrorism risk wasting everybody’s time or worse. At an Ash Wednesday Mass, Pope Francis prayed, “Let us never forget Palestine and Israel who suffer so much.”

Even though His Holiness has repeatedly condemned the October 7 massacres and appealed for the release of the hostages Hamas is keeping in Gaza, his concomitant harping on a two-state solution, and apparent approval of the Vatican press that publish such statements as “no one can define what is happening in the Strip as collateral damage,” undercut the authenticity of the original condemnation. 

Last year Cyprus floated the idea of a sea corridor to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza. That never happened, and likely never will — not because it is a particularly difficult feat, nor that it would not be appreciated as an alternative to UNRWA, but because the Palestinians themselves shot the idea down. The reason is a general suspicion of Israel, even though Jerusalem still hasn’t given the corridor a green light. 

So it was that during a meeting at Nicosia Wednesday between Cyprus’s foreign minister, Constantinos Kombos, and his Palestinian counterpart, Riyad al-Maliki, there was no mention made of a maritime humanitarian corridor. From Paris to Cyprus, by way of the Vatican, there is a lot of noise about what Israel needs to do.