Israeli Settlers Step Up Aggressions Against Christians In West Bank, Jerusalem Bishop Says
By Madalaine Elhabbal
Christians in the West Bank continue to face an onslaught of aggressions by Israeli settlers, threatening their presence in the region, according to Auxiliary Bishop William Shomali of Jerusalem.
“The aggressions against Christians in the West Bank are multiplying,” Shomali said in a March 20 interview with “EWTN News Nightly.”
The situation for Palestinian Christians had been “calm” in the Bethlehem area, he said. “But now, there is more expansion of the settlements and more aggressions from the side of the settlers.”
Shomali said settlers have prevented Palestinian Christians from accessing their land through various threats, physical aggression, and property damage, including burning their cars.
“This happened mainly in the Christian village of Taybeh, and we communicated this news to all the world, even to the American ambassador in Tel Aviv, who came to visit the place, and he promised to do something, but not many things were done,” Shomali said.
In Birzeit, a Palestinian Christian town about six miles north of Ramallah in the West Bank, Shomali said settlers have been coming “almost every day to threaten people in their own homes or in their work.”
“This has become a real threat to Christian families,” he said, “because they lost their livelihood and their source of income.” The Church must intervene and provide aid for them to survive, the bishop said.
Shomali said Israeli settlers have also recently occupied land belonging to a convent of sisters in a village near Bethlehem called Urtas. The sisters “have a hill where they plant and grow olives and other things,” he said. “Settlers came to occupy this hill and to make it theirs, where they think of building a new settlement.”
He also noted a settlement to be built on the Shepherds’ Field of his own village, Beit Sahour, which he said is a piece of land that belongs to Christian families there.
“I heard just today, that a piece of land, one acre, was also entered by settlers who put an Israeli flag to mean that this land now is Israeli, while there is a deed of ownership to a Christian family that I know from Beit Sahour,” he said. “So slowly, slowly, the land of Palestine that Israels call now Judea and Samaria, the biblical name, is becoming less and less Palestinian and more and more settlers’ land.”