The Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs in Palestine has accused Israel of carrying out a deliberate campaign to erase Christian life in the land of Christ’s birth.

In a statement issued Sunday on its official Facebook page — accompanied by an image of an Israeli tank outside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity during the 2002 invasion of the West Bank — the committee said Israel’s policies of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide are directly responsible for the catastrophic decline of Christianity in Palestine.

The response came after Netanyahu, addressing a half-empty UN hall, claimed that Israel is the “only protector of Christians in the Middle East.” The committee rejected this as blatant propaganda, stressing that Netanyahu himself is a “war criminal wanted for justice before the International Criminal Court.”

The committee noted that before the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian Christians represented 12.5 percent of the population of historic Palestine. Today, that number has been reduced to just 1.2 percent, with barely 1 percent in the territories occupied in 1967. The statement said this devastating demographic collapse is the direct result of Israel’s ongoing project of forced displacement, land theft, apartheid, and systematic persecution.

The Nakba alone forced 90,000 Palestinian Christians into exile and shuttered nearly 30 churches. The committee also recalled historic atrocities, including the Haganah militia’s massacre of 25 Christians at Jerusalem’s Semiramis Hotel in 1948 and the execution of 12 Christians in the Galilee village of Eilabun that same year.

The committee turned attention to Gaza, where the ongoing genocide since October 2023 has devastated Christian communities. The Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church and the Catholic Holy Family Church, both sheltering civilians, were bombed by Israeli occupation forces, resulting in the massacre of entire families.

Church-affiliated institutions such as the Baptist Hospital and the Orthodox Arab Cultural and Social Center were also bombed, while Christian homes have been shelled, forcing families to flee into churches — which were later themselves targeted by Israeli fire.

Since the start of the war on Gaza, 44 Palestinian Christians have been killed, either directly by airstrikes or indirectly through the humanitarian collapse imposed by the siege, including shortages of food, medicine, and safe shelter.

“The truth is undeniable,” the committee said. “It is Israel’s colonial project, its ethnic cleansing, and its genocidal campaign that have destroyed Christianity in its birthplace.”

The committee emphasized that Christian and Muslim Palestinians alike are facing the same fate under Israel’s settler-colonial project, calling on the international community and global churches to confront Israeli crimes and defend the Christian heritage of the Holy Land. (ILKHA)