LONDON: Harassment, violence and displacement have become a daily reality for Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, where attacks by Israeli settlers — allegedly with the protection or tacit approval of the army and government — have spread unchecked.
Religious minorities, including the West Bank’s various Christian denominations, have not been spared amid the violence. On Aug. 7, settlers illegally seized land belonging to the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Abba Gerasimos of the Jordan in Jericho.
Just days earlier, another group stormed Taybeh, the only entirely Christian village in the West Bank, home to Greek Orthodox, Melkite and Catholic residents. Masked and armed, the assailants reportedly set vehicles ablaze, sprayed graffiti and released livestock.
It was the second such raid in as many weeks. A fortnight earlier, settlers had torched the ancient Church of Saint George and desecrated its adjoining graveyard.
“They have always done this around the village, but nowadays they dare to go inside,” Buthina Khoury, a Greek Orthodox filmmaker who grew up in Taybeh, told Arab News. “My cousin the other day opened her window and she saw the settler just outside her house, just in the backyard of her house.”
Although nobody was killed in these raids, attacks such as these reflect a pattern of escalating settler abuse that is rarely prosecuted by Israeli authorities.
The same week, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich approved a highly controversial plan to advance 3,401 new housing units in the E1 settlement, a move that would split the West Bank in two and sever it from East Jerusalem.
These settlements are deemed illegal under international law and would make any future contiguous Palestinian state even harder to realize.
The move, widely condemned by the international community, risks deepening an already volatile situation, further entrenching a dynamic in which nationalist and colonialist ideologies are intertwined with Jewish religious extremism.
“The whole situation has been very, very critical and very sensitive, and what’s happening in the rest of Palestine, it affects Taybeh as well,” said Khoury. “They are trying to turn our life into misery.”
For decades, Taybeh — a village mentioned in the Gospel of John where Jesus is said to have stayed before his entry into Jerusalem and eventual death on the cross — had been largely spared from settler violence. That is now changing.
Recent attacks have drawn international figures to the village, including Roman Catholic Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. But Khoury says such visits do little to change the reality on the ground.
“What happened in Taybeh is the least compared to what happened to the villages and towns nearby,” she said, adding that such visits “do nothing” but “show a fake solidarity.”
Christian minorities such as Khoury’s, arguably more at risk than any other Palestinian community, have steadily dwindled in the West Bank.
In 1922, in what was then Mandatory Palestine, Christians made up about 11 percent of the population. Today they account for less than 1 percent. Bethlehem, once 85 percent Christian, is now home to just 10 percent.
A 2020 study by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and the Philos Project found that political instability, residency permit restrictions for married couples and clergy, frustration with the stalled peace process and economic hardship were drivers of this decline.
About 40 percent of Christian respondents also reported feeling discriminated against by fellow Palestinians.
Khoury said the situation has shifted dramatically since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel triggered the war in Gaza. Violence has simultaneously escalated in the West Bank, and Christians are being used to fuel a narrative of division.
Indeed, Khoury said Israeli policies had been designed to drive a wedge between religious groups. “It’s the policy of every occupier,” she said. “We Palestinian Christians or Palestinian Muslims — we don’t feel separate from each other.”
Regardless of any deliberate effort to divide Palestinians along these lines, Khoury said settlers are not targeting Christians solely for their religious identity, but rather aiming to purge the West Bank of any and all non-Jewish peoples.
The UN has recorded a sharp rise in settler violence this year. In the first half of 2025 alone, it documented in excess of 700 attacks — more than triple the number for all of 2023.
Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 11, Israeli authorities also “punitively demolished or sealed 23 homes and four other structures,” displacing about 140 people, including 57 children — the highest level of displacement in such a short period since 2009.
The monthly average of Palestinians injured by settlers also doubled in June and July to about 100, compared with 49 per month in the first five months of the year.
But the pressures faced by Christians are not confined to the occupied territories. Within Israel itself, Christian communities — long perceived as relatively secure — are reporting a surge in harassment and hostility.
“In recent years, the Christian community in the Holy Land has faced a rise in violence and intimidation, targeting both clergy and faithful,” Bishop William Shomali, patriarchal vicar for Jerusalem and Palestine, told Arab News.
“These incidents reflect a growing climate of hostility that threatens peaceful coexistence and religious freedom.”
Shomali, a Catholic who grew up in the Christian-majority town of Beit Sahour near Bethlehem, said members of the clergy had been spat on by Jewish extremists while walking in religious attire or during processions in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Church walls and properties have been vandalized with hateful graffiti in Hebrew. Often filmed and shared online, these acts, he said, “express clear contempt for the Christian presence in the Holy City.”
Attacks against Christians in Israel have risen sharply in recent months, shaped in part by the post-Oct. 7 political climate.
A recent report by the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue — a Jerusalem-based interreligious organization promoting ties between Jews, Christians and Muslims — documented 111 cases of harassment in 2024, with physical assaults being the most common.
The figure, almost certainly an undercount given the community’s reluctance to report such incidents, marks a 30 percent increase compared with 2023.
“The problem is much bigger and wider than that,” Hannah Bendcowsky, the center’s program director, told Arab News.
“We’re talking about the legitimizing of violence toward minorities, the normalization of violence and anti-Christian attacks, the lack of condemnation from authorities, and the lack of proper reaction from police forces.”
These actions, she said, not only endanger the Christian community but have long-term consequences for Israeli society as a whole.
While Israel’s Christian population grew slightly in 2023 — by about 0.6 percent — Bendcowsky warned that persistent harassment is fueling what she called a “slow emigration.”
The community numbers about 180,000 people — around 80 percent of them Arab Christians. Yet they experience what she described as a “double minority” status — marginalized as both Christians and Palestinians within Israeli society.
“The main question is, when an Israeli meets a Palestinian Christian, what do they see? A Palestinian or a Christian? Or I should be more accurate. When they meet a Palestinian Christian, when do they see him as a Christian and when do they see him as a Palestinian?”
Bendcowsky said longstanding religious tensions have been deliberately instrumentalized by Israeli leaders since Oct. 7, deepening polarization and mistrust that extend beyond minorities to affect Israeli Jewish communities as well.
She emphasized the need for a broader contextual understanding of these incidents to fully grasp the wider dynamics affecting the Christian community, whereby some attacks can be deemed anti-Palestinian while others distinctly anti-Christian.
“We do relate to the attacks of settlers, but I would say that it’s a different kind of attack,” she said.
“The harassment we see in Jerusalem and in Israel against Christians is anti-Christian. So it’s not because they are Palestinian, but it’s because they’re Christian. And most of the people being attacked are not Palestinians. They’re foreign Christians.
“While the incident in Taybeh is not anti-Christian per se, it’s anti-Palestinian. And this is part of a wider phenomena that, to my understanding, is ignored by the international community.”
Bishop Shomali described an “emotional shift” since Oct. 7 that has provoked a “noticeable increase in hatred and mistrust” across the region.
“What used to be a tense coexistence has now turned into a more hostile and polarized atmosphere,” he said. “People express fear, sadness and a sense of loss — not only of physical safety but also of hope for peaceful relations.”
While much remains to be done to address the situation in the West Bank, some local efforts have emerged to curb harassment in Israel. Jewish volunteers have begun accompanying Christian clergy and pilgrims during major processions in Jerusalem, documenting incidents of spitting or other abuse and reporting them to the police.
“There is a growing sense that the Israeli police are now more seriously committed to addressing specific issues, particularly the spitting incidents and anti-Christian graffiti in Jerusalem,” said Shomali.
However, he cautioned that while these measures are “meaningful and appreciated,” they remain limited in scope, addressing the problem within Israel without tackling the broader context that has fostered instability and mistrust for decades.
For Shomali, the heart of the issue lies deeper than religious tensions.
“Interreligious dialogue, though valuable, cannot by itself resolve the deeper and more complex issue of the land’s ownership,” he said.
“The core of the conflict lies in two national narratives — Palestinian and Jewish — that are often contradictory and deeply rooted in historical, political and religious claims.
“Religion is not just a spiritual identity in this context; it is interwoven into each narrative, which makes compromise particularly difficult to achieve.”
