Father Manuel Musallam (71), the only Catholic priest in Gaza for the last fourteen years, has retired to live in his home town of Bir Zeit in the West Bank.This took place some days before the Pope's visit to the Holy Land. He had been in Gaza since 1951.
Fr Manuel's Holy Family Catholic parish in Gaza had a congregation of 250 Catholics and his Catholic school is highly regarded by Muslim families, many of whom send their children there.
An outspoken critic of Israeli torment of Palestinians, he had strong ties with Palestinian Muslims and resisted the Israeli strategy of "divide and conquer" toward Catholic and Muslim Palestinians in Gaza.
This is how Fr Musallam assessed relations between Christians and Muslims: "The situation is not one of division between Christians and Muslims. The big Muslim families are open-minded people, they protect Christian families. Their children go to school together, they live as neighbours. The culture of Islam is to be good neighbours, to invite people to your house and to marriages."
"Palestinian Christians are part of the Palestinian people," he said, "not a religious community set apart in some corner. Our relationship with Hamas is as people of one nation. Hamas doesn’t fight religious groups. Its fight is against the Israeli occupation," he said in an interview.
During the Israeli bombing blitz of Gaza in January, Fr Musallam spoke with anguish of the 1,400 Gazans killed (as against thirteen Israelis), of the thousands left homeless, hundreds of thousands left without running water, sanitation, proper diet or medical care, and the already overburdened infrastructure blown to pieces by US-supplied weaponry and explosives.
He described, in particular, the delayed effect of phosphorous bombs: "I saw with my own eyes a phosphorus bomb landing in the courtyard of the Rosary Sisters School. It could not be touched as it was smoking for two days. After that, a friend of mine, a Hamas supporter, removed it.
"In April when it rained in Gaza, it reactivated all these phosphorus bombs and they started smoking again. Many people went to hospital with particles of this phosphorus embedded in their bodies. At first, some doctors thought it was just shrapnel and they cleaned the people up and sent them home. But two hours later they would come back as the phosphorus in their bodies started smoking again out through their wounds."
When Pope Benedict came to Jordan and the Holy Land (12th-18th May), there was disappointment in Gaza that he did not visit that enclave.
One blogs on the Internet headlined: "Pope skips Gaza: 'I was in prison and you did not visit me'."
However, most people understood that the Pope did not have total control over his itinerary and the sight of the Pope consoling Gazan Palestinians would have hardly have been acceptable to the Israelis.
Indeed, the very possibility of a papal visit to the Holy Land seemed threatened when during the war in January Cardinal Renato Martino, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, described Gaza as "a big concentration camp". On that occasion Jewish leaders said his remarks were "offensive and an insult to the memory of the Holocaust".
However, despite his age Fr Musallam's departure from Gaza still remains something of a mystery. It will be felt with a great sense of loss by both Christians and Muslims alike.
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