Christian Palestinian Committee: Israel has “erased the presence of Christians” in Palestine
Israel has destroyed the Christian presence in Palestine and continues to bomb churches and their institutions amid the genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian governmental body announced.
In a statement published on Facebook, alongside a photo of an Israeli tank in front of the Church of the Nativity during the 2002 invasion of the West Bank, the Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs in Palestine responded to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech on Friday at the UN General Assembly, in which he claimed that Israel is the only state in the Middle East that protects Christians.
“In an almost empty hall of the UN General Assembly, the war criminal and fugitive from the International Criminal Court, Benjamin Netanyahu, once again spread lies about Palestinian Christians,” the committee said.
“The truth is clear: Israel’s colonial policy of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide has destroyed the Christian presence in Palestine,” it added.
The committee said that Palestinian Christians made up 12.5 percent of the population of historic Palestine before the Nakba of 1948, or “catastrophe,” when hundreds of thousands of people were expelled from their homes during the establishment of the state of Israel. It noted that today they make up only 1.2 percent of the population in historic Palestine and only one percent in the territories occupied in 1967.
The committee emphasized that this decline in the Christian population is “a direct result of Israeli ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, land confiscation, and systematic repression.”
Examples were cited, including the displacement of 90,000 Palestinian Christians during the Nakba and the forced closure of nearly 30 churches.
It also recalled the killing of 25 Palestinian Christians in the bombing of the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem in 1948, carried out by the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah, as well as the execution of 12 Christians in the village of Eilabun near Nazareth the same year.
Christian homes and churches have not been spared
The committee noted that during the war in Gaza that has been ongoing since October 2023, Israel bombed the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius and the Catholic Church of the Holy Family, massacring civilians who had sought refuge there, as well as targeting church-linked institutions such as the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital and the Orthodox Arab Cultural and Social Center.
It added that Christian homes were also bombed, forcing families to shelter in churches, which themselves were not spared from Israeli attacks.
The committee stated that 44 Palestinian Christians have been killed since the beginning of the assault on Gaza, either directly by bombings or indirectly due to dire humanitarian conditions, including shortages of food and medicine.
In the occupied West Bank, the committee reported repeated attacks on the Christian village of Taybeh near Ramallah by militant settler groups. It also warned that churches across Palestine face an “unprecedented assault that threatens their historic presence and ongoing mission in the Holy Land.”
The statement also pointed to the recent Israeli freezing of the Orthodox Patriarchate’s accounts in Jerusalem and the imposition of high taxes on church property, which represents a violation of the status quo, along with the confiscation of Armenian church property.
In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, “illegal settlements, military checkpoints, and the separation wall are choking the city, while land belonging to Palestinian Christians is confiscated for settlement construction,” the committee said. It added that Bethlehem today is surrounded by more than 150 barriers, gates, and earth mounds — the largest number in the West Bank.
“The truth cannot be denied: Israel has eliminated the Christian presence in the Holy Land, and Netanyahu’s lies at the UN cannot erase history or the reality of Palestinian life — both Christian and Muslim — under Israeli colonial rule,” the committee stressed.
It underlined that “the defense of the Christian presence in Palestine is not only a local issue, but a global human, moral, and legal cause.”
