Israeli police said they had arrested two suspects after the desecration this week of Christian graves at a Protestant cemetery in Jerusalem. They are two teenagers, presumably Jewish.
With our correspondent in Jerusalem, Sami Boukhelifa
Cemetery CCTV captured the entire scene. The images were posted on social media. We see two men, dressed as Orthodox Jews, yarmulkes on their heads, attacking a cross, and relentlessly overturning it. In all, about thirty tombs will suffer the same fate, vandalized, stelae on the ground, broken.
In the process, the Anglican Church of Jerusalem expressed its ” consternation » and vigorously condemned an act described as « hate crime “. The authorities of the Hebrew State have denounced a ” immoral gesture and an affront to religion “. A year ago, the various Christian patriarchates of the Holy City had published a joint statement to alert of the danger. ” We have become the target of repeated attacks, by radical and marginal groups, in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land “.
Because this profanation is not the first of its kind. There were others in 2021 and 2022. In 2017, Israeli justice even sentenced a Jewish extremist to four years in prison for burning down a church in the Galilee. He was defended by the current Israeli national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, supremacist, from the extreme right, lawyer at the time.
At Christmas, the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem believed that Christians in the city were disappearing. 40 years ago, they made up 20% of Jerusalem’s population. They are now only 2%.