Category: Wires

JERUSALEM — The stone footpath begins at the tomb of King David, revered by Jews, and curves past the room where Christians believe Jesus held the Last Supper. Nearby, the Dormition Abbey towers over a site where many believe Mary slept before being taken to heaven.

Steeped in history and faith, this quiet alleyway in Jerusalem’s Mount Zion was the site of a brazen attack in April, when a Jewish Israeli man from the occupied West Bank shoved a French Catholic nun to the ground and kicked her out of “religious hostility,” according to Israeli police.

The assault, recorded by surveillance cameras in broad daylight, shocked many. But not Nikodemus Schnabel, abbot of the Dormition Abbey, which the nun had visited before she was attacked.

Christians today are “hit, spit at, beaten,” said Schnabel, who has experienced it all — and worse. “There was a video in this case, but you can be sure there are so, so many undocumented things.”

“Believe me,” he sighed, “this is not the case of one lost soul.”

Across the Holy Land, Christians are being targeted by a tide of hostility and violence — attacks that risk drawing the ire of Christians in the United States, including evangelicals who are traditionally among Israel’s most ardent American supporters.

In Jerusalem, Christians say they are routinely harassed by ultra-Orthodox Jews and huddle in fear when Religious Zionists rampage through the Old City, destroying property during their processions.

Twenty miles away, in the West Bank’s only predominantly Christian town, Taybeh, the population is dwindling after years of unrelenting attacks and economic pressure from armed Jewish settlers.

U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, an evangelical pastor who has often spoken in Israel’s defense, visited Taybeh last year after settlers allegedly set fire to its most famous landmark, the 1,500-year-old Church of St. George, and denounced what he called “an act of terror,” though he later retracted that statement.

Meanwhile, a string of social media posts from neighboring Lebanon, where Israeli soldiers have recorded themselves smashing Christian icons and defacing churches despite calls for discipline from military commanders, have reinforced a sense that animosity toward Christians is being normalized under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history.

For decades, Christian monastics and pilgrims, easily identifiable with their robes and crosses, faced harassment in Jerusalem. But the number of incidents nearly doubled from 2023 to 2025 and is on track to reach a new high this year, according to the Rossing Center, an interreligious organization in the city.

At different times in the past 18 months, the two joint-chief rabbis of Israel, David Yosef and Kalman Ber, have issued statements condemning attacks on Christians as antithetical to Jewish values and as a “severe phenomenon” that “must be eradicated.”

But local and national political leaders have often kept their silence.

After the attack on the nun on April 28, which drew condemnation from the French Consulate, the Israeli Foreign Ministry was one of the few official voices that issued a statement, calling the assault a “shameless act” that contradicted Israel’s founding values of “respect, coexistence, and freedom of religion.”

Netanyahu’s office did not comment at the time of the assault but in a statement to the Washington Post said: “We have made it clear that any acts of violence and vandalism of this type will not be tolerated. Those who commit such acts will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

When an earlier wave of harassment targeting Christians made headlines in 2017, Itamar Ben Gvir, then a settler activist and lawyer, gave a radio interview to defend spitting at Christian monks and churches as “an ancient Jewish tradition.”

“I don’t think this represents any violation,” said Ben Gvir, who today leads Israeli law enforcement as minister of national security, a post he was given despite having been convicted of supporting a Jewish terrorist organization and inciting racism. “Why do we turn this into a criminal matter?”

A spokesperson for Ben Gvir did not respond to requests seeking comment.

Francesco Ielpo, the custodian of the Holy Land and a senior Vatican official in Jerusalem, said he feared the growing influence of Israel’s far right will push Christians in Israel and the Palestinian territories to leave, accelerating a pattern of emigration among a prosperous and well-educated minority group.

Although Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics says the population of Christians in Israel and Jerusalem has ticked up about 1% annually to 184,200 at the end of 2025, or 1.9% of Israel’s population, Christian leaders say the official data does not reflect that many Christians included in the census mostly live abroad.

In the West Bank, the Christian population has hovered between 40,000 and 50,000 for years, as emigration balances out births.

“The general atmosphere is this: Many people are afraid,” Ielpo said. “I can give good works and health assistance. I can give good schools. But all this is not enough. You need hope to remain.”

Christian village under siege

From a vantage point an hour north of Jerusalem’s Old City, Suleiman Khouriyeh pointed in every direction to explain how the residents of Taybeh — a village that, according to the Gospels, once gave refuge to Jesus and his disciples — now cannot find relief themselves.

Khouriyeh, the mayor, was blocked from harvesting his 4-acre olive grove after settlers closed in from the west, seized his land and built a fence. Across the valley, a local business owner, Hanna Massis, was building a multistory hotel but halted construction because of settler attacks.

Bashir Marouf, the owner of a house on a street where settlers often arrive at night to set up roadblocks to disrupt the local traffic, had long fled.

To the south was Roland Bassir’s cement factory, its office windows shattered and its machinery destroyed from a recent attack. Initially, in late 2023, settlers set up a single tent on a nearby hilltop. One tent became a few trailers, then a small farm.

Over the next two years, settlers from the outpost began taking their cattle to graze inside the factory premises and forcing Bassir’s workers to leave in the middle of the day, according to Bassir and videos his employees recorded.

They lofted an Israeli flag, vandalized cars, and smashed equipment. During two attacks, on Sept. 14 and March 14, they shot in the air with rifles, Bassir said. Struggling to keep the factory running, Bassir has laid off nearly all of his 45 employees.

After sinking more than $100,000 into the business, Bassir was ready to abandon it, he said. He has already applied for a U.S. visa. “If I get it, I will leave tomorrow,” Bassir said. “There is no future. Every day I think it might be my last day here, because I might be killed.”

In the past 10 years, 10 extended families have left Taybeh for the United States, Latin America, and Spain – a significant exodus for a town of 1,500 residents, Khouriyeh said.

“They can’t handle living here,” Khouriyeh said. “It’s really hard, especially for young men who don’t have jobs and are forced to leave. What we see is Israelis taking the whole area.”

On a recent afternoon, Khouriyeh sat in his office with municipal employees, venting about the Western governments that they believed should do more to protect them — if not as Palestinians, then at least as Christians.

In 2024, many Taybeh residents celebrated when Donald Trump was reelected as president, believing he was the “peace president,” recalled Khouriyeh and the acting mayor during the recent election period, Khaldoun Hanna.

The following year, the village felt relieved when Huckabee, Trump’s new ambassador to Israel, visited.

But their appreciation turned to fury when Huckabee retracted his statement after Israeli police denied finding clear evidence of an arson attack.

Months later, villagers found clips of Huckabee telling Tucker Carlson in an interview that Israel had the divine right to claim as its own the Palestinian territories and parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

“Someone ask Huckabee, is he America First or Israel First,” a young municipal employee, Jeries Taye’e, angrily demanded.

“He’s Israel First,” Hanna snorted.

Mayor Khouriyeh raised his hands, then posed a question: Without a change in policy in Israel — and in Washington — what will happen to the Christian population here?

“We have the oldest holy sites: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity,” Khouriyeh said. “But what is the value of an empty church without Christians?

International dimensions

At a time when Israel already faces international isolation and criticism over its actions in Gaza, particularly from the Islamic world, tensions with Christians could further undermine a crucial pillar of support, some Israeli analysts warn.

In America, Christian conservatives — who traditionally leaned pro-Israel — have questioned Vice President JD Vance at public events about Israel’s treatment of Christians, noted Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv think tank that advises the government. Christian nationalist commentators who are influential on the American right, like Carlson and Candace Owens, also frequently cite reports of attacks and harassment against Christians when they lambaste Israel, Ben Sasson-Gordis said.

“The violence against Christians and the [Israeli] political figures who encourage it are bad enough that something needs to be done about them,” he said. “But it’s also important to pay attention to the way it alienates Israel’s friends and provides tools for Israel’s detractors.”

These days, the slew of headlines suggests that anti-Christian sentiment has grown particularly quickly among Israeli youths, said Yisca Harani, the founder of the Religious Freedom Data Center, a Jewish Israeli group that operates a hotline for reporting attacks against Christians in Jerusalem.

Harani now organizes a group of about 100 Jewish volunteers to walk alongside Christian nuns whenever they leave their homes, and since the May attack, nuns have called Harani every day requesting a protective presence. The problem begins with education, said Harani, an observant Jewish Israeli who has pushed Jewish religious schools to teach more about the history of Christians in the Holy Land.

“Half of Israel is greatly affected by the rhetoric of Jewish supremacy and Jewish exclusivity,” Harani said. “What can only be the outcome if in school they say: ‘All gentiles want your annihilation, remember what the Christians did, remember what Hamas did.’ People therefore look at the world through glasses of fear, estrangement, and, finally, animosity.”

For Nikodemus, the Dormition Abbey abbot, the change in atmosphere is more easily explained.

When he first traveled to Israel in 2003, he saw advertisements at the Tel Aviv airport showcasing the country as the home of Christian holy sites. The minister of tourism at the time held receptions where the young Benedictine monk was welcomed. But over the years, the occasional curses that Schnabel encountered in dark alleys became spitting and open confrontations in broad daylight.

“That’s the difference between then and now,” Schnabel said. “The government.”

One major shock for Schnabel came in 2015, when Jewish extremists set fire to the Church of the Multiplication, where it is said Jesus performed the miracle of feeding 5,000 people with two fish and five loaves.

A decade later, one memory from the arson trial has stuck with Schnabel: the attorney delivering a fiery courtroom argument in defense of the young Jews accused of terrorism.

That lawyer was Itamar Ben Gvir, now the minister of national security.

TEHRAN — Among the tens of thousands of mourners gathered in central Tehran for the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are families of the schoolchildren from the southern city of Minab who, like the supreme leader, were bombed to death on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

At least 175 civilians were killed at the girls’ elementary school, most of them students, in what appeared to be a strike by a U.S. Tomahawk missile. So far, the United States has not taken responsibility or released the results of any investigation. In Iran, the children’s deaths have become a potent symbol for U.S.-Israeli brutality and an unjust war.

Parents and other family members made the 800-mile trip to the Iranian capital by train, car, and bus, and on Sunday, they were brought to the Grand Mosalla religious center for the funeral prayers. The crowd swelled in size ahead of the prayers, with tens of thousands packing into the open-air complex.

Many mourners had hoped that Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, would appear in public for the first time since his father’s assassination to lead the prayers, but he did not show, probably because of concerns for his safety.

Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani, a prominent theologian and member of the Council of Experts that chose Ali Khamenei’s successor, led the ceremony instead.

Also present Sunday was Ahmad Vahidi, the recently appointed commander of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a key member of the surviving regime, which has emerged emboldened and even more hard-line after months of attacks by two of the world’s most powerful militaries.

Vahidi, too, had been in hiding since the war. A shudder rippled through the crowd as people recognized him. After the prayer concluded, isolated chants broke out, invoking his name: “Vahidi! Vahidi! Revenge! Revenge!”

The Minab school attack occurred on Feb. 28, the same day that Ali Khamenei was killed at his leadership compound, along with other members of his family and other senior officials.

Hanzaleh Salehi, 43, whose son was killed in the school strike, said he remembers hearing confirmation of the supreme leader’s death while he was in the morgue identifying his child’s body. Experiencing the two losses back to back left him feeling frozen, he said.

“We want to send our voice to the world,” Salehi said, wearing a T-shirt that showed his son’s framed portrait. “I want the world to realize how the Iranian people are treated. This was not the first crime, and it may not be the last.”

An invitation from the Iranian government to attend the proceedings, albeit under restricted conditions, including accompaniment by a government-provided guide and interpreter, has allowed the Washington Post its first opportunity to report from Iran since the war began. The views of people interviewed at the funeral events are unlikely to represent all of Iranian society, given the risks posed to those who have opposed or been critical of the government.

While the U.S. has not accepted responsibility for the attack, video evidence and Post reporting found that the school was on a U.S. target list, suggesting it was carried out by U.S. forces. The Pentagon said it launched an investigation, but more than four months later, no findings have been published.

In Iran, the strike is a national tragedy. Memorials to the children have been installed in government offices and businesses and at Iranian embassies abroad. In Tehran, an installation of backpacks, flowers, and children’s shoes commemorates those killed in Minab at the capital’s international airport.

One of the Minab booths set up for Khamenei’s funeral displayed dozens of portraits of the children above a chalkboard, exercise books, and school desks.

Fatimeh Yavari, 39, from Semnan, east of Tehran, stopped to take pictures of the display with her two children. The Minab children “are like my own children. I cried for all of them like I was burying my own child,” Yavari said, growing emotional behind her sunglasses. “It was a great tragedy.”

Minab is a small town that’s home to large military installations in a province, Hormozgan, that is a critical export hub near the port city of Bandar Abbas.

Yasir Pour Jomeh, 39, a dock laborer, traveled 24 hours by bus and private car to Tehran so he could help oversee a Minab booth during the funeral. He said that after the Minab attack, there was a surge of support for the government in the area.

“People realized how supportive the supreme leader was of the people,” Jomeh said. “Even some who were against the establishment turned back.”

After the public viewing of Khamenei’s body ends on Saturday evening, his casket will be carried on an hourslong funeral procession through the Iranian capital.

That procession is expected to draw even larger crowds that those at Mosalla, and the daylong event could prove to be one of the most logistically difficult portions of the ceremony.

After the funeral procession, Khamenei’s body will be flown to the Iranian city of Qom, a center of Islamic learning, before it is brought to the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, both homes to holy Shiite shrines that are pilgrimage sites. Finally, Khamenei will be buried in his hometown, Mashhad, in eastern Iran.

For all the power he has flexed over the past year and a half, President Donald Trump could not control the scorching, dangerous, record-shattering weather in the nation’s capital for the 250th anniversary of America’s independence, or the lightning strikes in the distance that prompted officials to evacuate the National Mall ahead of his planned speech.

But nearly every other aspect of the celebration in Washington bore Trump’s imprint, as decisions he made transformed an official commemoration of American history into another polarizing moment in American politics.

After a chaotic scene unfolded early Saturday evening, with Secret Service officials forcing defiant Trump supporters to flee the president’s Salute to America event as severe weather loomed, Trump told them all to come back. The show would go on.

His supporters, wearing gear bearing his name and slogans, trekked back to stand in security lines again in the rain.

“I said, ‘There’s no way — if we have to speak in front of one person at 4 o’clock in the morning, I’m going to be here,’” Trump declared when the rain had stopped and he began speaking after 11 p.m. to a crowd half the size of what it had been earlier. “There’s no way we can be deterred.”

“This is an evening for the ages. I believe this is something very special,” Trump said into the night, describing the attendees’ perseverance and late-hour return as “bigger than if we didn’t have the lightning blaring.”

“But this is bigger. A little more inconvenient, but it’s bigger. I think, in its own way, it’s more beautiful.”

It was but the latest twist in a national celebration that Trump defined in his terms — and for which the president has called the shots.

Ever the showman, Trump throughout his speech brought notable Americans out onto the stage with him — war veterans as old as 107 who saluted from wheelchairs, astronauts from the Artemis II and Apollo 17 missions, and families of soldiers killed in battle.

He praised the “unstoppable spirit that created the world’s most powerful industries and built the strongest military anyone had ever seen‘” but also reprised his political grievances.

Trump joked that he was serving his third term as president, a reference to his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He prompted cheers from his supporters as he touted his bill to assert federal control over election rules — legislation that Senate Republican leaders have repeatedly told him won’t pass as it is currently written. And he lobbed several verbal attacks at “communists,” his label for the democratic socialists who have won several recent Democratic primary elections.

Before Saturday night’s rally, Trump didn’t pretend that the celebrations would be anything other than his usual unapologetic rhetoric.

“Has anyone ever seen a Happy Dumocrat?” the president wrote of his opposing political party on social media on Saturday morning, his first Fourth of July greeting of the day. Weeks earlier, Trump had abruptly announced that he would also serve as the headlining act of a rally kicking off the two-week Great American State Fair on the National Mall, calling himself “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime.”

“Only Great Patriots invited” Trump wrote of the launch of a fair that was, in theory, open to all, later billing the kickoff to the 250th anniversary festivities as a “Trump rally.”

Milestone anniversaries like the semiquincentennial present rare moments of shared civic ritual, occasions when presidents are widely expected to place themselves within the sweep of the American story, rather than at the center of it. This year’s celebration, instead, reflected both Trump’s vision of America, and America’s divisions over Trump.

The decision to have Trump speak late Saturday also reshaped a long-standing July Fourth tradition. Security restrictions prevented attendees from bringing coolers or arriving throughout the evening, and the speech was already set to delay the fireworks until after 10:30 p.m.

The pyrotechnics finally began moments before midnight, with Trump remaining in a climate-controlled box at the National Mall to watch. The massive show set a record, organizers said.

As Americans sweltered through a dangerous heat wave, with Washington’s heat indexes reaching 115 degrees, Trump had warned that he planned to “make a really long speech … just to show that I can do anything.” Organizers instructed those attending not to arrive too early to limit their time outside.

In the end, the late-night speech was about 35 minutes long.

The National Mall fair itself, long touted as a showcase for American greatness and national unity, instead became a Rorschach test. Trump supporters praised the patriotic atmosphere and military flyovers.

His critics, meanwhile, pointed to images of sparse crowds, a mock-up of Trump’s proposed triumphal arch on the grounds, and administration officials touting their accomplishments as evidence that the president’s personal involvement had undercut what might otherwise have been a broader civic celebration.

With just months to spare before the occasion, Trump had pushed aside America 250, the long-standing bipartisan commission tasked a decade ago with planning anniversary festivities, replacing it with his own group of political allies, Freedom 250. His advisers argued the move was necessary because the commission had become bogged down by bureaucracy.

But as Trump’s chosen planning organization became increasingly seen as a partisan entity, vendors and performers alike ultimately pulled out of the fair, which has struggled to draw large crowds for much of its first week.

Besides supplanting the bipartisan commission, Trump has increasingly put his imprint on other aspects of this year’s commemoration. His face appears on a commemorative gold coin marking the anniversary and on limited-edition “patriot passports.” Administration officials have pushed for a $250 bill bearing his portrait, and Trump this week posted an image of a $100 bill featuring his autograph — marking the first time a sitting president’s signature has been featured on U.S. currency.

As he has throughout the anniversary celebration, Trump cast himself as central to the story he wants the country to tell about itself: that America was diminished before him, revived by him, and is now celebrating its founding through his restoration — a promised “Golden Age.” At Mount Rushmore on Friday night, he told the crowd that he “saved, almost single-handedly,” the Second Amendment and that he was going to “give our country its identity back.”

“We never had the American Dream, however, like we have it right now,” Trump said Saturday on the National Mall. “The American Dream is back. Very strong. Beautiful.”

Republican President Gerald Ford took a different approach during the nation’s bicentennial celebration in 1976, even as he was running for reelection in the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War. In his remarks, Ford made no mention of the campaign, the Democratic front-runner Jimmy Carter, or his GOP primary challenger, Ronald Reagan.

Ford’s only reference to electoral politics came as a broader reflection on self-determination: “This November the American people will, under the Constitution, again give their consent to be governed,” he said, outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “This free and secret act should be a reaffirmation by every eligible American of the mutual pledges made 200 years ago by John Hancock and the others whose untrembling signatures we can still make out.”

But comparisons with past presidents are complicated by the fact that patriotism itself has become more polarized, said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and senior fellow at the Reagan Institute.

“There’s a feeling out there that Republicans are more patriotic than Democrats, or that the patriotism gap can differ depending on which party is in the White House,” Troy said. “While Trump does things in terms of partisanship that you can safely say are unprecedented, he is also president in a more divided time.”

A recent Gallup poll found that national pride has fallen to its lowest point since the organization began asking in 2001 how proud respondents were to be an American. Just 33% reported being “extremely proud,” down eight percentage points from a year ago and 37 points since a high in 2003. The partisan gap there is wide, with Republicans reporting much higher American pride while Democrats and independents have hit record lows for their respective groups, Gallup found.

John Pitney, a former national Republican official who now teaches political science at Claremont McKenna College, said Trump is diverging from the tradition of presidents who have used moments of national triumph and tragedy to speak as Americans first, not as partisans.

“I remember Reagan at Normandy in 1984 — the 40th anniversary of D-Day, surrounded by people who were veterans of that war,” Pitney said. “There is a reason why that speech is still remembered. It wasn’t about him.”