Your request is being processed... Cardinal's Likening Of Gaza To Concentration Camp Angers Israel

Israel said Saturday it was shocked and distressed by a senior Vatican cardinal's likening of Gaza under Israel's military offensive to a concentration camp.

A spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry said the cardinal, whose remarks appeared in an interview Wednesday, adopted the kind of language that Hamas and other Islamic militant groups have used to demonize Israel and equate it with Nazi Germany.

"It was shocking to hear the same kind of terminology from such a high-ranking member of the church," Israeli spokesman Yigal Palmor said Saturday.

Cardinal Renato Martino, a former Vatican envoy to the United Nations and now Pope Benedict XVI's top official on issues of peace and justice, said in the interview that Gaza now resembles a "big concentration camp."

Commenting on Israel's two-week military offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Martino told the online newspaper Il Sussidiario.net that both sides were concerned only with their own interests.

"But the consequences of this selfishness is hatred, poverty, injustice. It is always the defenseless populations that pay," he was quoted as saying. "Look at the conditions in Gaza: It looks more and more like a big concentration camp."