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| - Fact Check: Hate crime in West Bank? This church attack video is old and unrelated to Christmas
While the video shows an attack on a church in Bethlehem, it's from October 2022. The incident also had nothing to do with Christmas decorations.
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India Today Fact Check
While the video shows a church attack in Bethlehem, it is from October 2022. Also, the incident had nothing to do with Christmas decorations.
A church was allegedly attacked in Beit Sahour, a town near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus Christ, in occupied West Bank. Those making this claim shared a video of an unruly crowd.
While many posts simply said “Palestinians” attacked a church in Beit Sahour because churchgoers had started decorating for Christmas, some laid the blame squarely on Palestinian Muslims. The archive of the viral video can be seen here.
India Today found that while the video shows an attack on a church in Bethlehem, it’s from October 2022. The incident also had nothing to do with Christmas decorations.
OUR PROBE
We found the viral video in a news report published by the Jerusalem Post on October 29, 2022. According to the report, dozens of Muslim men hurled stones at the Orthodox church of Beit Sahur, which injured many people.
The church authorities reportedly said that a quarrel between some young men prompted the attack on the church. Archbishop Atallah Hanna of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem strongly condemned the assault, saying it “distorts the image of our people and harms civil peace and the good relationship that binds us as the sons of the Palestinian people”.
Another report related to the incident says that a quarrel took place between the church’s people and outsiders during an annual event there. The dispute was settled for some time, but the outsiders returned and attacked the church.
We did not find the reason behind the quarrel reported by any credible news organisation. We also found no reports that said the church was attacked because of Christmas decorations.
The Jerusalem Post report mentioned that Wadie Abu Nassar, media spokesperson of the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land, condemned the attack in a Facebook post. We found the post. He said while the incident was unfortunate, what relieved him was that the city’s residents from other religions defended them and condemned what had happened.
In his post, Nassar too did not mention if the attack was the outcome of Christmas decorations. India Today Fact Check reached out to Nassar, who clarified that the attack on the church had no connection with Christmas. He called it a local dispute.
POPULATION DECLINE?
The viral claims about the church attack also said the Christian population of Bethlehem shrank from 80 per cent to under 10 per cent in just 20 years. While we couldn’t find any credible report about a massive drop in Bethlehem’s Christian population, some news reports say the Christian population in the city has dropped from 84 per cent to about 20 per cent in a century. According to a report in the Times of Israel, the Christian population in Bethlehem, as well as in nearby Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, was 86 per cent in 1950. This dropped to just 12 per cent by 2016.
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