Pope Francis received Ehud Olmert, former Prime Minister of Israel, at the Vatican this morning; and three former foreign ministers of Palestine: Nasser Al-Kidwa, Gershon Baskin and Samer Sinijlawi.
Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican Press Office, reported that the meeting with the four representatives, all together, lasted about fifteen minutes, without giving further details.
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Ehud Olmert was Prime Minister of Israel between 2006 and 2009, years in which the war with Lebanon occurred and in which the country responded to Hamas with a military operation after a rocket attack by the Islamic group.
Ohmert also encouraged negotiations with Palestine between 2007 and 2008, specifically with President Mahmoud Abbas, who in 2014 was in the Vatican Gardens with Israeli President Shimon Peres for a prayer for peace promoted by Pope Francis.
Although no further details of today’s meeting have been released, on many occasions Pope Francis has called for a ceasefire and an end to the war between Israel and Hamas, such as when in June of this year he remembered the tenth anniversary of the 2014 prayer.
The Holy Father prays for this intention every Sunday after the Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.