RAMALLAH, Palestine/ISTANBUL

Israel has destroyed the Christian presence in Palestine and continues to bomb churches and their institutions amid the war on Gaza, a Palestinian governmental body said Sunday.

In a statement posted on the US social media company Facebook’s platform accompanied by a photo of an Israeli tank outside the Church of the Nativity during the 2002 West Bank incursion, the Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs in Palestine responded to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech Friday at the UN General Assembly, in which he claimed Israel is the only state in the Middle East that protects Christians.

“In a nearly empty UN General Assembly hall, war criminal and ICC fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu once again spread lies about Palestinian Christians,” the committee said.

“The truth is clear: Israel’s colonial policies of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide have destroyed the Christian presence in Palestine,” it said.

The committee said that Palestinian Christians comprised 12.5% of the population of historic Palestine before the 1948 Nakba, 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% of the population in historic Palestine and just 1% in the territories occupied in 1967.

This decline, it argued, is a “direct result of Israeli ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, land confiscation and systematic repression.”

It cited examples including the displacement of 90,000 Palestinian Christians during the Nakba and the forced closure of around 30 churches.

It also recalled the killing of 25 Palestinian Christians in the 1948 Semiramis Hotel bombing in Jerusalem by the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah and the execution of 12 Christians in the village of Eilabun near Nazareth the same year.

The committee noted that during the ongoing Gaza war since October 2023, Israel bombed the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius and the Catholic Holy Family Church, massacring civilians who had sought refuge there, as well as targeting church-affiliated institutions such as Al-Ahli Baptist 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 strikes.

The committee said 44 Palestinian Christians have been killed since the beginning of the assault on Gaza, either directly by bombardments or indirectly due to dire humanitarian conditions, including shortages of food and medicine.

In the West Bank, the committee reported repeated attacks on the Christian village of Taybeh near Ramallah by settler militias. It also warned that churches across Palestine face “an unprecedented assault threatening their historic presence and continued mission in the Holy Land.”

The statement also pointed to Israel’s recent freezing of Orthodox Patriarchate accounts in Jerusalem, the imposition of heavy taxes on church properties in violation of the status quo, and the seizure of Armenian church properties.

In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, “illegal settlements, military checkpoints and the separation wall are strangling the city, while lands belonging to Palestinian Christians are being confiscated for settlement construction,” the committee said. It added that Bethlehem today is surrounded by more than 150 barriers, gates and earth mounds — the highest 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 — Christians and Muslims alike — under Israeli colonial rule,” the committee stressed.

It underscored that “defending the Christian presence in Palestine is not only a local matter but a global human, moral and legal cause.”