Last Updated on December 26, 2023
Israel and its military marked the Christmas holiday of 2023 by bombing a more than 600-year-old Christian monastery in southern Lebanon in just the latest attack on the Christian heritage and infrastructure of the Holy Land by Israeli forces.
On December 23rd, just two days before Christians around the world celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ, Israeli forces bombed the Deir Mimas Monastery in southern Lebanon. The bombing came as Israeli forces continued their targeting of the southern Lebanon region, an area now being referred to as Israel’s “other front line” as combat operations appear to be expanding and as Israel is accused of trying to bait Hamas-aligned Hezbollah into a fight.
A photograph of the bombing’s aftermath has gone viral online and has been viewed more than 3 million times on the X platform.
BREAKING: Israel just bombed the Deir Mimas Monastery in South Lebanon, a historic site aged over 600 years old.
This is how Israel celebrates Christmas; by dropping bombs on ancient churches in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria. pic.twitter.com/jCU0lsSsAp
— sarah (@sahouraxo) December 23, 2023
Since the beginning of Israel’s war with Hamas, which has resulted led to the ground invasion of Gaza and near-constant aerial assaults on that region and others, Christians have been routinely targetted, both by military forces who claim they’re hunting Islamic terrorists and by Israeli “settlers” running modern-day anti-Christian pogroms in the West Bank.
As National File reported:
On the evening of November 5th, armed Israeli “settlers”, accompanied by armed police officers, invaded the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, in an attempt to expel Christians from the area, seize their homes, and repopulate the neighborhood with Jews. By definition, the expulsion attempt constitutes ethnic cleansing and is part of a wider Israeli policy to remove Christians and Muslims from land that the Israelis want complete control of.
In what’s been described as both a “siege” and a “standoff”, Armenian Christians met the “settlers” and their accomplices at the walls of the Armenian Quarter and refused to allow them to advance.
Video: Armed Israelis Attempt Ethnic Cleansing of Armenian Christians
Christians in other parts of the Holy Land, however, haven’t been so lucky.
In October, less than two weeks after the war between Israel and Hamas kicked off, Israeli forces bombed Gaza City’s Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church, the oldest church in the region, where displaced civilians were seeking shelter.
The strike, witnesses reported, left “a large number” of civilians both dead and injured.
Additionally, the Israelis have bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, another site run by Christians, in a move that has been slammed around the world as a war crime.