> In Israel, Jews are attacking Christians.

As Christians are attacked in Israel, government shows little concern

Christians are being targeted by hostility and violence and say their attackers feel emboldened by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government.

July 06, 2026

JERUSALEM — The stone footpath begins at the tomb of King David, revered by Jews, and curves past the room where Christians believe Jesus held the Last Supper. Nearby, the Dormition Abbey towers over a site where many believe Mary slept before being taken to heaven.

Steeped in history and faith, this quiet alleyway in Jerusalem’s Mount Zion was the site of a brazen attack in April, when a Jewish Israeli man from the occupied West Bank shoved a French Catholic nun to the ground and kicked her out of “religious hostility,” according to Israeli police.

The assault, recorded by surveillance cameras in broad daylight, shocked many. But not Nikodemus Schnabel, abbot of the Dormition Abbey, which the nun had visited before she was attacked.

Christians today are “hit, spit at, beaten,” said Schnabel, who has experienced it all — and worse. “There was a video in this case, but you can be sure there are so, so many undocumented things.”

“Believe me,” he sighed, “this is not the case of one lost soul.”

Across the Holy Land, Christians are being targeted by a tide of hostility and violence — attacks that risk drawing the ire of Christians in the United States, including evangelicals who are traditionally among Israel’s most ardent American supporters.

In Jerusalem, Christians say they are routinely harassed by ultra-Orthodox Jews and huddle in fear when Religious Zionists rampage through the Old City, destroying property during their processions.

Twenty miles away, in the West Bank’s only predominantly Christian town, Taybeh, the population is dwindling after years of unrelenting attacks and economic pressure from armed Jewish settlers.

U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, an evangelical pastor who has often spoken in Israel’s defense, visited Taybeh last year after settlers allegedly set fire to its most famous landmark, the 1,500-year-old Church of St. George, and denounced what he called “an act of terror,” though he later retracted that statement.

Meanwhile, a string of social media posts from neighboring Lebanon, where Israeli soldiers have recorded themselves smashing Christian icons and defacing churches despite calls for discipline from military commanders, have reinforced a sense that animosity toward Christians is being normalized under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history.

For decades, Christian monastics and pilgrims, easily identifiable with their robes and crosses, faced harassment in Jerusalem. But the number of incidents nearly doubled from 2023 to 2025 and is on track to reach a new high this year, according to the Rossing Center, an interreligious organization in the city.

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