Golan Heights, Syria - Pope John Paul II, visiting one of the Middle-East's most bitterly contested zones in Syria on Monday, urged Arabs and Jews to be merciful and forgiving seekers of peace, even amid news of yet more violence.
He included in his prayers the killing of a four-month-old Palestinian baby girl by Israeli gunfire in the Gaza Strip, saying: "Mindful of the sad news of conflict and death which even today arrived from Gaza, our prayer becomes even more intense.
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God," he said in Quneitra's ruined Greek Orthodox Church of Our Lady.
The appeal, made more pressing by his trembling voice, was made on a visit to Syria in which he had already made history by becoming the first pontiff to enter a mosque.
The church from which the 80-year-old Pope spoke was destroyed in 1974, like the rest of the town, by withdrawing Israeli forces who had captured it seven years earlier.
Syria has left the town as a macabre memorial to what it calls Israeli atrocities, and urges tourists to visit it.
Around the Pope, bulldozed houses, demolished hospitals, shell-scarred churches and gutted mosques stood as reminders of the bitter conflict between Israel and Syria.
A narrow wooden catwalk was built to help him negotiate the broken paving.
"From this place, so disfigured by war, I wish to raise my voice in prayer for peace in the Holy Land and the world," said the Pope.
"Genuine peace is a gift from God. Our openness to that gift requires a conversion of heart and a conscience obedient to his law."
In a visit that was a propaganda bonanza for Syria, many Golan refugees stood on the ruins of their razed houses as the stiff wind forced the Pope to read his prayer inside the church.
He prayed that people of the region would respond to God's call "to follow the path of reconciliation and peace, and to be merciful as you are merciful".
A 13-year-old girl, Lin Doughouz, reminded him that Quneitra was known as "the flower of the Golan" before "the enemy destroyed its houses so savagely".
The Pope, speaking in a region where political hatred can be expressed as passionately by a child as by a president, prayed: "Merciful Father, may all believers find the courage to forgive one another so that the wounds of the past may be healed and not be a pretext for further suffering in the present."
Inside the church, a two-page testimony written by its bishop before the war, Father George Muhassal, was left for visitors to read: "I kept repeating to myself, how could they have done something like this. How could any human being have done something like this, but some people are not human beings."
The pontiff has made war and peace in the region a crucial theme of his pilgrimage to Syria to retrace the steps of St Paul, who converted to Christianity on the road to Damascus.
The Pope was due to leave Syria for Malta on Tuesday. - Reuters