Israeli extremists are terrorising Palestinian Christians and their holy sites
A Christian worshipper lights candles during mass at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank on Orthodox Palm Sunday on 5 April 2026
Janan Abdu reports in Middle East Eye on 28 June 2026:
The frequency and intensity of hate crimes and terrorist acts against Palestinian Christians – including pilgrims, worshippers, clergy, nuns, Christian property, holy sites and religious symbols – carried out by Israeli extremists are steadily increasing.
These attacks are not the isolated or spontaneous incidents that Israel portrays them as to evade responsibility as a government and a state. They are premeditated crimes, committed by individuals and groups – including members of the police and military – who draw their ideological framework from extremist Religious Zionist doctrine, particularly the Hardal (Haredi Leumi, or nationalist Haredi) movement, an ultra-Orthodox nationalist current whose leading figures form part of the current governing coalition headed by Bezalel Smotrich. This ideology also has historical and biblical roots.
These crimes include verbal abuse; spitting at worshippers, holy sites and their entrances; physical violence; storming holy places and cemeteries and vandalising or desecrating them; destroying statues, gravestones and graves; writing racist slogans; throwing stones; theft, looting and arson against property; and occupying buildings and converting them for other uses.
These attacks are carried out across all areas under Israeli control but are particularly concentrated in the Old City of Jerusalem and its quarters, especially the Via Dolorosa and the Armenian Quarter. They also affect other Christian towns in the West Bank, the Palestinian communities within Israel’s 1948 borders, and Gaza.
The scale and geographical spread of these attacks have expanded, as seen recently in southern Lebanon. There, in April 2026, an Israeli soldier decapitated a statue of Christ, and another soldier desecrated a statue of Mary by placing a cigarette in its mouth.
Between these two incidents, a nun in Jerusalem was violently assaulted on 28 April 2026 by an extremist who deliberately shoved her from behind, causing her to fall face-first onto the ground. Not content with an act that nearly cost her her life, he returned while she lay wounded and repeatedly kicked her, with the clear intention of causing further harm.
Recent years have witnessed an escalation in the targeting of the Palestinian Christian presence. According to a report by the Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs in Palestine, 157 attacks were carried out between 2018 and 2023. In 2025 alone, more than 130 attacks took place, while 14 were documented in the first two months of 2026.