Pope in Bethlehem calls for Palestinian homeland

Pope Benedict today called for a sovereign Palestinian homeland as he started a one-day vist to the Palestinian territories in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

"The Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbours, within internationally recognised borders," the Pope said during a speech in Bethlehem at the palace of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The German-born Pope will celebrate mass in Bethlehem, just outside Jerusalem on the third day of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land that is so far marked by Israeli complaints that he has failed to show enough sympathy to Jewish suffering in the Nazi Holocaust.

Patriarch Fouad Twal, during a Mass in Jerusalem yesterday, reiterated before the Pope the Palestinian people's aspirations for a "free and independent state".

The Pope himself, on his arrival in Israel on Monday, reaffirmed Vatican support for a Palestinian state, something new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been reluctant to accept as a necessary outcome of negotiations.

To dramatise the impact of Israeli occupation on their lives, Palestinians have set up a small amphitheatre by a high concrete wall that forms part of the barrier that Israeli is building in and around the West Bank.

They said they ignored orders by Israel, which says it needs the barrier to keep out suicide bombers and others threats to its people, not to complete the amphitheatre. It remains unclear if the pope will use it when he speaks at the Aida refugee camp.

Israel's parliament speaker yesterday evoked the Pope's teenage membership of the Hitler Youth and berated him over his address a day earlier at Israel's memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

A Vatican spokesman said the German-born Pope was not an "active participant" in the Nazi movement and was enrolled against his will. He later served with the German armed forces.

The Pope will hold a Mass at Nazareth in northern Israel, where Jesus grew up, tomorrow. The surrounding Galilee region is where most of the country's 154,000 Christians live and where he will meet Prime Minister Netanyahu.

He flies back to Rome on Friday.