A vehicle that Pope Francis used during a 2014 visit to the West Bank, will be turned into a mobile health clinic specifically designed to treat children in Gaza. The idea of a “Vehicle of hope” is coming all the way from Sweden.
In November 2024 Peter Brune, Secretary General of Caritas Sweden, came up with the idea of turning Pope Francis’s car into a medical station for treating children in need. Caritas is a nonprofit organization for international solidarity and the initiative with the vehicle, named the Vehicle of hope, is now underway and led by Caritas Jerusalem. The wording Pope Mobile is describing a specially built, often open car that is usually used by the Pope during official visits among other occasions.
Caritas Jerusalem, which has advocated for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, currently operates 14 medical teams across the Gaza Strip, two of which are actively working in Gaza City.
– Caritas Jerusalem has more than 100 staff working out of Gaza—actually, several of them have been killed, Brune says.
A special team in Jerusalem is working day and night equipping the vehicle with diagnostic tools, vaccines, suture kits, and emergency supplies to treat displaced and malnourished children. The clinic will be operated by drivers and trained medical staff from Caritas Jerusalem.
Guterres: “A voice of peace
During a special commemoration remembering Pope Francis at the UN in New York in April 21st, UN Secretary General António Guterres praised the late Pontiff for always being ‘a voice of peace in a world of war,’ reminding us of our moral duties, and being a constant ‘messenger of hope.’
– It is up to all of us to carry this hope forward. In today’s world of division and discord, he continued, it is particularly significant that Pope Francis proclaimed 2025 as the Year of Hope, Guterres said.
Gaza has a population of more than two million people who mostly depend on aid, but no humanitarian or commercial supplies have entered since 2 March when Israel imposed a full blockade on the territory. This is by far the longest ban on aid moving into the Strip since the start of the war in October 2023. The situation has led to shortages – not just of food, but other items including medicine, shelter supplies and safe water and it turns entering the area into the most important question for the Caritas Vehicle of Hope.
– Israel is indeed part of the negotiations of letting the vehicle in where it is needed, Peter Brune says. We are hopeful the help will reach the children.
Shortages of food, medicine, water
“Yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war. I want to say it because it touches my heart”, Pope Francis said in December 2024, a day after the rescue agency in Gaza said an Israeli air strike had killed seven children from one family.
Around the same time, in November the same year, Peter Brune had already discussed the idea of the Vehicle of Hope with his colleague Anton Asfar, Secretary General of Caritas Jerusalem. Peter Brune went to Jerusalem to see the Mitsubishi vehicle that was already on public display and although there was engine problems, significant rust and a flat tire there was hope. Brune contacted Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Stockholm, a good friend of Pope Francis, to ask for permission on the donation. Pope Francis answered, in what turned in to be one of his last wishes: “You have my blessing for this”.
– The children have not started the wars, but they are the first victims, Peter Brune states. This is a concrete, life-saving intervention at a time when the health system in Gaza has almost completely collapsed, he adds.
For around the past year and a half, Pope Francis made nightly calls to Gaza’s only Catholic church, offering his unwavering support to their suffering. He once stated: “Children are not numbers. They are faces. Names. Stories. And each one is sacred”, and with this gift, his legacy lives on.