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| - A video showing several people vandalising a church is going viral on social media to claim that it is a recent incident that happened on Christmas eve of 2024.
The claim also states that it shows people from the Muslim community attacking this church building located in Bethlehem, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine.
How did we find out the truth?: We performed a reverse image search on some of the keyframes of the viral video on Google Lens, and this led us to a post on X (formerly Twitter).
This post was shared on 31 October 2022 and it stated this incident happened near Beit Sahour, Bethlehem.
Taking a cue, we performed a relevant keyword search and found several reports about this incident.
Reports from October 2022 shared by Christian Post, The Jerusalem Post and All Arab News carried the same video and stated that this attack took place on 29 October 2022 at the Greek Orthodox Church of The Forefathers in Beit Sahour, following a quarrel between Muslim men.
It also states that Beit Sahour is a small Palestinian town which is predominantly Christian.
We also found the location of the church, the Holy Forefathers Greek Orthodox Church in Beit Sahour, on Google Maps' street view.
Moreoever, we ran a keyword search for recent attacks on churches in 2024 and could not find any relevant results.
Conclusion: An old video from 2022 showing men attacking a church in Bethlehem is going viral as a recent video.
(Not convinced of a post or information you came across online and want it verified? Send us the details on , or e-mail it to us at and we'll fact-check it for you. You can also read all our fact-checked stories .)
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