Israelis burn West Bank’s last Christian-majority town
Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2025 1:58 am
The Israeli settlers crept up to the ancient church perched above the West Bank’s last Christian-majority town.
As they reached the outer walls, they crouched down to light a ring of fire. Then they revved the engines of their secret weapons brought to fan the flames: garden leaf blowers. Residents watched in horror as the blaze spread closer to the Church of St George, which dates back to the fifth century.
The flames were doused, but not for long. That evening, settlers returned to the town of Taybeh with assault rifles. The same happened the next day and three days after that. Bashar Fawadleh, the parish priest, told The Telegraph: “Each time we called the Israeli police, but they did not come.
“If they attack our sacred site, they can attack anything of ours.” Settler attacks on Palestinians are on the rise across the occupied West Bank, where roughly half a million Israelis live in Jewish settlements among three million Palestinians.
Five Palestinians have been killed in the last two weeks in villages and towns not far from Taybeh, including Sinjil where two men, including a dual US citizen, were beaten to death by settlers on July 12, prompting fury from the Trump administration.
While most of the violence is directed against Muslims, settlers have started to attack Palestinian Christian villages like Taybeh. The once-flouring Christian community in the West Bank has dramatically shrunk to less than 2 per cent of the population as many emigrated abroad to escape the violence and religious discrimination. The same has happened in Gaza, where its roughly 1,000 Christians are mostly sheltering in the war-battered Strip’s last three churches, one of which was attacked by Israeli forces last week, killing three civilians. Walking around the scorched earth that now encircles the Church of St George, Father Bashar warned: “This is just the beginning. They want to put fear in our hearts to live here. “These attacks will bleed the town of people as they leave scared. We have lost 10 families already in the past two years.”
David Khoury, the leader of Taybeh’s Greek Orthodox Church, also fears an exodus. “The settlers are making problems for us every day. Assaulting, vandalising, terrorising, terrifying our families, destroying our fields of olive trees, damaging our properties,” he said. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel who is an evangelical Christian and staunch advocate of Israeli settlement construction, also toured the blackened church site on Saturday. He called the attacks an “act of terror” and demanded “harsh consequences” for the perpetrators. But he did not attribute the attack to settlers.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/ ... tian-town/
As they reached the outer walls, they crouched down to light a ring of fire. Then they revved the engines of their secret weapons brought to fan the flames: garden leaf blowers. Residents watched in horror as the blaze spread closer to the Church of St George, which dates back to the fifth century.
The flames were doused, but not for long. That evening, settlers returned to the town of Taybeh with assault rifles. The same happened the next day and three days after that. Bashar Fawadleh, the parish priest, told The Telegraph: “Each time we called the Israeli police, but they did not come.
“If they attack our sacred site, they can attack anything of ours.” Settler attacks on Palestinians are on the rise across the occupied West Bank, where roughly half a million Israelis live in Jewish settlements among three million Palestinians.
Five Palestinians have been killed in the last two weeks in villages and towns not far from Taybeh, including Sinjil where two men, including a dual US citizen, were beaten to death by settlers on July 12, prompting fury from the Trump administration.
While most of the violence is directed against Muslims, settlers have started to attack Palestinian Christian villages like Taybeh. The once-flouring Christian community in the West Bank has dramatically shrunk to less than 2 per cent of the population as many emigrated abroad to escape the violence and religious discrimination. The same has happened in Gaza, where its roughly 1,000 Christians are mostly sheltering in the war-battered Strip’s last three churches, one of which was attacked by Israeli forces last week, killing three civilians. Walking around the scorched earth that now encircles the Church of St George, Father Bashar warned: “This is just the beginning. They want to put fear in our hearts to live here. “These attacks will bleed the town of people as they leave scared. We have lost 10 families already in the past two years.”
David Khoury, the leader of Taybeh’s Greek Orthodox Church, also fears an exodus. “The settlers are making problems for us every day. Assaulting, vandalising, terrorising, terrifying our families, destroying our fields of olive trees, damaging our properties,” he said. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel who is an evangelical Christian and staunch advocate of Israeli settlement construction, also toured the blackened church site on Saturday. He called the attacks an “act of terror” and demanded “harsh consequences” for the perpetrators. But he did not attribute the attack to settlers.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/ ... tian-town/