Pope Francis resumes calls to Gaza’s Catholic parish

Elise Ann Allen/ Crux• April 9, 2025

Pope Francis has resumed calling Gaza’s Catholic parish after a hiatus forced by his hospitalisation and recovery.

Father Gabriel Romanelli, pastor of Gaza’s Holy Family parish, confirmed the resumption of the calls, while also issuing some choice words regarding the proposal by US President Donald Trump to turn the Gaza Strip into a luxurious beach resort.

“When he called, we were at the door of the rectory, inside the compound, and the children and young people started shouting, ‘Long live the Pope!’ in Arabic and in Italian,” Romanelli said, adding that the members of the parish thanked the Pope for his repeated appeals for peace.

In an interview with Vatican News, the Vatican’s state-run information platform, Romanelli said that a few days ago the Pope resumed his nightly calls to the Holy Family parish in Gaza, where some 500-600 people are sheltering amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

“The Pope called, he greeted us, he asked how we were doing, how the people were doing,” Romanelli said, saying the call was short, but was “deeply felt and appreciated”.

“We saw him at the Angelus on Sunday, and we thanked him for his appeal for peace,” Romanelli said, referring to Francis’s surprise in-person appearance at the conclusion of a 6 April Mass for the Jubilee for the Sick and Healthcare Workers.

In a written text for his Sunday Angelus, the Pope asked for peace throughout the world, saying that in Gaza, “people are reduced to living in unimaginable conditions, without shelter, without food, without clean water”. The Pope also urged that dialogue should be resumed.

Romanelli said the people at Holy Family parish “were very happy” to hear from Pope Francis. The pontiff had been calling periodically throughout his 38-day hospital stay, having been admitted Feb. 14 for a complex respiratory infection and double pneumonia. But he had to take a break from his calls due to his conditioning worsening, including two reported brushes with death, before being discharged March 23.

The situation in Gaza “is truly terrible in the whole Strip, so we really appreciated his closeness, his prayer and his concern for everyone. We thanked him,” Romanelli said.

Romanelli echoed the Pope’s words, calling the living conditions in Gaza “unimaginable”, and urged the world to pray for peace and to work to convince national leaders that “peace is possible”.

“As long as this armed conflict continues, no problem will be solved, essentially, it’s quite the opposite,” he said. It is necessary for the war to end with conditions in place that serve the interests of all those involved, “Palestinians and Israelis”, the priest added.

Gaza’s small Christian population is stable thanks to the “constant help” of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, led by Italian Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Romanelli said. As a result, the hundreds gathered at Holy Family church and their Muslim neighbours are currently “fine”, but provisions are beginning to run out.

“In other neighbourhoods everything is missing: food, water. The crisis already existed before the wary, imagine now, after a year and a half of war. The food, water, and medicine emergency is very urgent throughout the Strip,” he said.

Romanelli called Gaza “a prison”, saying the Strip “has become a cage, a big cage”, and that the parish tries to help everyone it can, including the countless Muslim civilians who are in the same boat.

“We help everyone, Christians and non-Christians, we try to truly make an instrument of peace for everyone,” he said, calling the situation a prolonged Lent.

Noting that estimates for the number of people living in the Gaza Strip vary and are difficult to determine since the outbreak of the current war in October 2023 – there are estimates of 2.3 million – Romanelli said what is important is to work for peace, and to give hope to the people, “that they can continue to live in the Gaza Strip without moving them”.

To this end, he referred to a proposal put forward by Trump in February to turn Gaza into a luxurious beach resort, after removing half of its resident population. Romanelli said it constitutes a violation of human rights and is tantamount to treating human beings like “objects”.

Trump in February said the US could “take over” the Palestinian territory, claiming that it is “the best location in the Middle East” and could be turned into “a better Monaco”, while its population would be displaced to other countries across the Middle East and beyond.

He said the proposal was not “made lightly” and claimed to have high-level support for the move from unnamed leaders with whom he has supposedly discussed the idea.

Shortly after those remarks, an apparently AI-generated video was published on social media, shocking users by transforming scenes of destruction in Gaza into a swanky, Riviera-style resort called “Trump Gaza”.

In the video, which Trump shared on both Instagram and his own Truth Social platform, the war-torn Gaza Strip is rebuilt as a lavish beachside destination, with children running out of rubble into palm trees and luxurious buildings.

The video depicts a giant golden statue of Trump, as well as belly dancers and a man presumed to be Elon Musk being showered with cash, as well as depictions of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sunbathing.

Shocked users condemned the video for its lack of sensitivity, as well as for ignoring the current destruction and suffering in Gaza while being immune to the plight of its people by proposing an American-led redevelopment that prioritises wealth at the expense the local, war-stricken population.

The creator of the video, Solo Avital, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, later told media that he created the video while experimenting with AI tools and that it was intended as political satire.

An Israeli-born US citizen, Avital said the video was posted to Instagram by a business partner and that it was shared by Trump without his knowledge or consent.

Romanelli, however, in his remarks condemned the proposal, saying, “We must respect the rights of every human being, regardless of their citizenship, of their religion, of their situation.”

“The Palestinian people in this part of the Holy Land, in Gaza, are made up of 2 million and 300 thousand people, they are human people!”

One of the first and most universally recognised rights, he said, “is the right to have one’s own land.”

He added: “True peace must be built on justice, not injustice.

“People are subjects of rights; they are not objects. You cannot move and deprive people of their rights, first of all the right to life and to live in their land, and to have assistance and property, their affection, and their business.”

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Photo: Argentinian Catholic priest Father Jorge Hernandez leading the Sunday Mass at the Holy Family Church, Gaza, 4 May 2014. (Photo by THOMAS COEX/AFP via Getty Images.)