Israel’s seizure of Palestinian church land raises renewed fears of efforts to erase Christians from Jerusalem
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s lands in Wadi al-Rababa, Jerusalem, June 2026
Majd Jawad reports in Mondoweiss on 2 July 2026:
In the predawn hours of June 15, 2026, heavy Israeli military vehicles stormed the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s lands in Wadi Rababah, Jerusalem. The shouts of Israeli soldiers mingled with the cracking of ancient tree branches and the uprooting of crops, a flagrant violation of the church’s legal ownership rights.
The bulldozers were part of a systematic, years-long Israeli effort to erase Jerusalem’s Palestinian character by seizing properties from its residents through a particular set of legal and administrative measures. The raid was also the latest in a string of Israeli attacks targeting church properties around Jerusalem.
The latest raid was made possible by an administrative instrument known by Israel’s Jerusalem Municipality as “gardening orders” — a mechanism deployed to seize control of supposedly “neglected land” under the guise of “landscaping.”
The cumulative effect of these measures is meant to impose new facts on the ground by restricting owners’ access to their properties, residents say. In this sense, the church raid isn’t an isolated incident, but it is also tied up in Israel’s broader attempts to erase the presence of Palestinians in Jerusalem, both Christians and Muslims.
Aftermath of the destruction of agricultural land belonging to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Wadi Rababah, Jerusalem, June 2026
Attempts to erase Jerusalem’s Christian presence
Damage from the raid was not limited to physical destruction; the Patriarchate’s representative was forcibly expelled from the property, and his belongings were confiscated. The land belonging to the Patriarchate was then encircled with barbed wire and iron gates, not only severing it from the adjacent monastery, but from its own archeological and religious past stretching back thousands of years.
In a statement, the Patriarchate affirmed its ownership of the land, registered as Plot 6, Basin 29985, and declared the Israeli confiscation to be without legal basis — the order cited by the authorities had been issued in April 2019, but it expired in April 2024, rendering it legally void. The statement further characterized the uprooting of trees, the expulsion of the lawful custodian, and the enclosure of church land as setting a “dangerous precedent.”