Israel destroyed Christian presence in Palestine

Defence affairs - Def-Geopolitics

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

In a statement posted on Facebook 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 percent 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 percent of the population in historic Palestine and just 1 percent 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.