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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.”

JERUSALEM: Israel approved a major settlement project on Wednesday in an area of the occupied West Bank that the international community has warned threatens the viability of a future Palestinian state.
Israel has long had ambitions to build on the roughly 12-square-kilometer (five-square-mile) parcel known as E1 just east of Jerusalem, but the plan had been stalled for years amid international opposition.
Critics say the settlement would effectively cut the West Bank in two, undermining hopes for a contiguous Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.
Last week, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich backed plans to build around 3,400 homes on the ultra-sensitive tract of land, which lies between Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim.
“I am pleased to announce that just a short while ago, the civil administration approved the planning for the construction of the E1 neighborhood,” the mayor of Maale Adumim, Guy Yifrach, said in a statement Wednesday.
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority swiftly slammed the move.
“This undermines the chances of implementing the two-state solution, establishing a Palestinian state on the ground, and fragments its geographic and demographic unity,” the PA’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
It added the move would entrench “division of the occupied West Bank into isolated areas and cantons that are disconnected from one another, turning them into something akin to real prisons, where movement is only possible through Israeli checkpoints and under the terror of armed settler militias.”
All of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, occupied since 1967, are considered illegal under international law, regardless of whether they have Israeli planning permission.
Israel heavily restricts the movement of West Bank Palestinians, who must obtain permits from authorities to travel through checkpoints to cross into east Jerusalem or Israel.
King Abdullah II of Jordan on Wednesday also affirmed his country’s rejection of the E1 project, saying “the two-state solution is the only way to achieve a just and comprehensive peace.”
Violence in the West Bank has soared since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war.
Since then, Israeli troops and settlers have killed at least 971 Palestinians in the West Bank, including many militants, according to health ministry figures.
Over the same period, at least 36 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military operations, according to official figures.
UN chief Antonio Guterres warned last week that constructing Israeli homes in the E1 area would “put an end to” hopes for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO focusing on Jerusalem within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also condemned the move.
“Today’s approval demonstrates how determined Israel is in pursuing what Minister Smotrich has described as a strategic program to bury the possibility of a Palestinian state and to effectively annex the West Bank,” he said.
“This is a conscious Israeli choice to implement an apartheid regime,” he added, calling on the international community to take urgent and effective measures against the move.
Far-right Israeli ministers have in recent months openly called for Israel’s annexation of the territory.
Israeli NGO Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity in the West Bank, said last week that infrastructure work in E1 could begin within a few months, and housing construction within about a year.
Excluding east Jerusalem, the West Bank is home to around three million Palestinians, as well as about 500,000 Israeli settlers.