Israeli extremists are terrorizing Palestinian Christians and their holy sites

Janan Abdu

28 June 202

With Religious Zionism dominating key institutions of the Israeli state, police and courts fail to hold its adherents accountable for attacks on Christian communities.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israeli-extremists-are-terrorising-palestinian-christians-and-their-holy-sites

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.

These crimes have also targeted Palestinian Christians in the 1948 areas and their holy sites. Among them were the attacks on St Elijah's church in Haifa between June and August 2023, involving several repeated assaults by followers of Religious Zionism. In August 2023, the Latin Monastery of the Archangel Gabriel in al-Mujaydil was also attacked and stoned.

In and after 1948, many Christian or mixed towns were depopulated or completely destroyed. In some cases, churches were left standing and limited permission was granted for religious services and for the burial of the dead, while this was denied in other towns.

It was only in 2026 that the people of al-Bassa succeeded in securing the right to pray in the town's two churches. In the destroyed village of Ma'lul, however, residents were denied access to the cemetery after it was enclosed within a military zone and declared closed. Only after a long legal struggle did the military authorities permit, in very rare and highly restricted cases, visits to some of the graves.

The people of Gaza have not been spared. The report of the Higher Presidential Committee documented several incidents in 2023, most notably the targeting of al-Ahli al-Arabi Baptist Hospital on 17 October 2023, which killed around 500 Palestinians. On 16 December 2023, a woman and her daughter were shot dead by snipers while inside the Holy Family Catholic Church.

An ideology of supremacy

This escalation in individual and collective Religious Zionist terrorism has been fuelled by the rise of leading figures from the movement to central positions and ministerial posts within the current Israeli government.

The Religious Zionist worldview combines historic theological hostility with modern nationalist politics, in which Christianity and its history are viewed as enemies of the Jewish people. This hostility is reflected in the ideology of the movement's leaders, foremost among them Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionist Party (formerly National Union-Tkuma party). It is regarded as the most extreme current within Religious Zionism and is ideologically rigid in both its Zionist and religious dimensions.

Smotrich serves as the finance minister and as a minister within the defence ministry responsible for the Civil Administration in the West Bank. He and his movement promote an ideology that fuses Jewish religious supremacy with an absolute rejection of any Christian influence in the so-called "Greater Land of Israel", refusing to concede any part of it. The movement seeks to transform Israel into a state governed by "Torah law" - a halachic, or theocratic, state.

Under this vision, non-Jews are not granted equal rights and are instead relegated to the status of "resident strangers", conditional upon their recognition of absolute Jewish sovereignty.

Smotrich's party also adopts a hardline stance against any Christian activity in Jerusalem and Israel, opposing what it describes as "missionary work". While it accepts financial and political support from evangelical groups, it insists this support must be treated cautiously and must not be allowed to spread evangelical beliefs.

Within this framework, hostility towards Christian symbols and the Christian presence is both highlighted and justified. By eradicating the Christian religious and ecclesiastical presence, the conflict can be reframed before the West as one solely with Islam, thereby reinforcing anti-Muslim hostility and Islamophobia.

This movement has increasingly come to dominate the security apparatus - including the police, Israel Border Police and Prison Service - all of which fall directly under the authority of Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the extremist Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party and an ally of Smotrich.

Above the law

The Zionist extremist understands that, by committing crimes against Christians and their symbols across areas under Israeli control, he is unlikely to face legal accountability.

He perceives himself as above the law, if not the law itself. Even if charges are brought, the incident is treated as an isolated case, divorced from the broader context of extremist Religious Zionist ideology. Nor is it classified as terrorism or as a hate crime.

Israeli law, if the police and prosecution were to enforce it, allows for severe penalties for religiously motivated hate crimes. The Counter-Terrorism Law of 2016 defines crimes committed on religious grounds, or against places of worship, cemeteries and holy sites, as acts of terrorism, and stipulates that offences motivated by hatred should carry double the standard penalty.

The definition of a hate crime within the Penal Code also includes assaults against a person's body, liberty or property on racist grounds, or out of hostility towards a religious group, likewise prescribing enhanced penalties.

The law further contains an entire section on offences against the religious sentiments of a community, including the desecration or destruction of a place of worship, a religious building, or a sacred statue, as well as the deliberate disruption of religious rituals or attacks on cemeteries. These offences carry prison sentences ranging from one to three years. Yet such penalties are, regrettably, not enforced in the frequent attacks against Christian holy sites.

Spitting is also classified under Israeli law as a form of assault, with penalties doubled if carried out on religious grounds. The Religious Freedom Data Centre documented 110 incidents of assault in the first half of 2025 alone, including 83 cases of spitting.

It is worth recalling that the Israeli prosecution previously used charges of hate-motivated and racially aggravated assault against Palestinians during the May 2021 uprising. Arabs accounted for 85 percent of those indicted. Terrorism charges motivated by racism were brought against 95 defendants, 87 percent of whom were Arab, while racist motives were attributed to 50 defendants, 70 percent of whom were Arab.

Yet the authorities do not bring indictments against Jewish extremists from settler groups who attack Christians and their holy sites in Jerusalem, the West Bank and elsewhere - even though surveillance cameras cover virtually every alleyway in Jerusalem, making it entirely possible to identify the perpetrators.

Nor do the police fulfil their legal obligation to open a criminal investigation once they become aware that a crime has occurred. Under the law, no formal complaint is required for the police to act. Nevertheless, they do not, and attacks against Christians and their holy sites continue to increase.

Two standards

The soldier who assaulted the statue of Christ could have been charged under military law with terrorism or hate crimes, with the corresponding penalties. He could also have been charged with "conduct unbecoming", which carries a sentence of up to one year's imprisonment.

Instead, the army dealt with the offence in an extremely lenient manner, and it is likely that no punishment would have been imposed at all were it not for the media outcry. The soldier was sentenced to 30 days of confinement in a military detention facility - a disciplinary punishment less severe than actual imprisonment. As for the six soldiers who witnessed the act, they were merely summoned for a "clarification discussion", despite the possibility of treating them as accomplices through their silence.

The state and its institutions - foremost among them the police, which report directly to Ben Gvir - apply two different standards to Israeli extremists and to Palestinians.

While the Latin patriarch was prevented from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, and restrictions were imposed on worshippers under the pretext of a "state of emergency" - with Muslim worshippers likewise barred from entering Al-Aqsa Mosque - Ben Gvir himself was permitted during the same period in April 2026 to storm the courtyards of Al-Aqsa under heavy police protection, despite the same declared emergency.

Violations committed by the Israeli state and its institutions against Christians, their property and their holy sites, as documented in the report of the Higher Presidential Committee, also include the freezing of accounts, as was carried out against the Orthodox patriarchate in Jerusalem, and the imposition of heavy taxes on church property in August 2025.

Earlier, in February 2025, property belonging to the Armenian patriarchate in Jerusalem was seized.

Violations have also occurred through settlement expansion and encroachment on church land, as seen with the Orthodox church around the Monastery of Saint Gerasimos (Deir Hajla) near Jericho, where new outposts were established. This constitutes a direct threat to the historical and religious character of the region and to the Christian presence in the country, and forms part of a broader plan to erase the Christian and historical identity of Palestine.

Following the destruction of the statue of Christ in southern Lebanon, the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land issued a statement calling for swift and firm measures to ensure accountability. Yet instead of a severe punishment proportionate to the crime, a lenient sentence was handed down.

When Israel found itself internationally embarrassed by the spread of a video documenting the crime, Foreign Minister Gideon Saar announced the appointment of a "special envoy to the Christian world" in April 2026, selecting a Palestinian Christian from Jaffa for the post. The church, however, issued no statement welcoming the appointment, which effectively amounted to a policy of silence and disregard.

The government's decision appears to be a cosmetic attempt to mask policies that operate according to double standards.

Externally, Israel seeks to present itself as respectful of religions, eager to deepen relations with the Christian world and to expand Religious Zionist propaganda internationally. Internally, however, it neither punishes nor deters extremists, allowing hate crimes, attacks on holy sites and the desecration of Christian religious symbols to continue unabated.