Italian Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, created cardinal by Pope Francis on September 30, offered this Monday to surrender to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in exchange for the release of children taken hostage last week after an attack on Israel. "Am I ready for a change? Anything can help freedom and return those children to their homes. No problem, I have absolute availability to do it," Pizzaballa said in dialogue with Vatican journalists when asked about the idea of offered as an exchange. The cardinal, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, also reaffirmed the Vatican's willingness to seek mediation in the Middle East after the Hamas attack on Israel and in the midst of that country's siege of the Gaza Strip, which according to several organizations puts the lives of people at risk. thousands of Palestinian civilians. In any case, according to the cardinal, the eventual mediation "is very difficult, because to mediate you have to have interlocutors, and at this moment you cannot talk with Hamas," he said about the attitude of the extremists who launched missiles and murdered hundreds. of people in their attacks on Israel.