As the bells rang out across the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the priests began to sing a deep, low prayer. Heads bowed over candles, and escorted by people bearing aloft large gold crosses, they made their way to a platform at the heart of the ancient square.
The ceremony on Holy Thursday, in which the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem washes the feet of 12 monastic priests to commemorate the Last Supper, is one of many Easter rituals that have taken place in the Old City of Jerusalem for hundreds of years. For Christians, there is no holier place to commemorate Easter than here, the site where they believe Jesus Christ was crucified, buried and resurrected.
Yet the crowd that assembled outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Thursday morning was small and muted. International pilgrims jostled with dark-robed Greek Orthodox monks, but one group of native worshippers was noticeably absent.
For generations, the tens of thousands of Palestinian Christians living in Israeli-occupied West Bank villages and cities such as Ramallah, Bethlehem and Taybeh would travel to Jerusalem’s Old City at Easter to take part in the prayers, processions and rituals such as the Holy Fire ceremony. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself is in East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel from Jordan in the six-day war of 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1980.
A Greek Orthodox cleric during the Washing of the Feet ceremony at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Thursday. Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters
Yet centuries of tradition have been ruptured by Israel’s increasingly draconian control over Palestinian movement – which means any Palestinian in the West Bank living outside Jerusalem, must obtain a military permit if they want to enter the city. For years, Christians in Palestinian territories were regularly granted permits to visit Jerusalem around Easter but since the war with Hamas broke out on 7 October 2023, they have become almost impossible to obtain.
This Easter, the government announced it had issued 6,000 permits, though there are 50,000 Christians – mostly Catholic or Greek Orthodox – living in the West Bank beyond East Jerusalem. However, in reality, just 4,000 were given, according to Christian leaders, and often only to a few members of each family who applied.
These permits are valid for just one week and do not allow the Palestinian pilgrims to stay in Jerusalem overnight, meaning they have to make the gruelling journey back to the West Bank by bus or taxi – crossing a multitude of army checkpoints – every evening, limiting the festivities they can take part in. A group from the village of Taybeh said the Israeli military still did not allow them to cross over to Jerusalem for Palm Sunday even though they had valid permits.
The few who do make it to the Old City have been met with increased police brutality in recent years. In April 2023, Palestinian Christian worshipers and international pilgrims were beaten by Israeli police and armed forces as they attempted to reach the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
“People are very afraid and many will not risk attending the Easter processions any more,” said Omar Haramy, who runs Sabeel, a Christian organisation based in Jerusalem. He said several staff were beaten last year as they tried to attend Easter festivities in the Old City, and Christians in the Old City regularly faced hostility outside churches or as they went about their daily lives.
One of the greatest sources of distress among the Christian community is the introduction of blockades and aggressive policing that prevented thousands of Christians being able to take part in the Holy Fire festivities that mark the resurrection on Easter Saturday afternoon, as they have done for hundreds of years in the Old City.
The sun shines through the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where tradition has it that Christ was crucified, buried and resurrected. Photograph: Debbie Hill/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock
While the restrictions have been justified in the name of safety, many Christians view them as another way for the Israeli state to exert dominance over the community.
“I will go to the celebrations on Holy Saturday because my family has been part of this tradition for thousands of years, but I’m not going to bring my kids, it’s too dangerous now, with the police violence,” Haramy said.
The spectre of Gaza also hangs over this year’s Easter festivities. Palestinian Christians are among the 51,000 people killed in Gaza since the war with Israel began and on Palm Sunday, an Israeli missile hit the only Christian-run hospital in the strip. There are about 500 Christians are sheltering in Holy Family church, one of only two left standing. Those contacted by the Guardian said they were too afraid to talk, fearful of anything that might make them a target of Israeli airstrikes.
For all its biblical significance and abundance of churches, convents and monasteries, Jerusalem’s Old City has become increasingly dangerous for all Christians, not just those from Arab backgrounds. Since the rise of Jewish ultranationalism in Israel, and the election of the most far-right government in the country’s history, extremist and settler Jewish movements – who want to claim all of Israel and Palestinian-controlled territories as a state only for Jews – have been emboldened in their actions against both Christians and Muslims.
Historically, the relationship between Christians and Jews has been fraught, because of the Christian church’s historic role in antisemitism and the persecution of Jews. The ongoing presence of proselytising evangelical Christians, many from the US, who travel to Israel with the sole purpose of converting Jews, has also been inflammatory, particularly among the Jewish Orthodox community.
But religious intolerance and antichristian sentiment has been made mainstream by Israeli political leadership – the ultra-hardline national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, described Israelis spitting on Christians as “an old Jewish tradition” – and old suspicions have escalated into brazen, all-out violence. There have also been growing incidences of settler groups attempting to seize Christian land in Jerusalem. In 2023, the Holy Land Roman Catholic patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa accused the government of establishing a “cultural and political atmosphere that can justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians”.
A recent report by the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue documented the steep rise in the scale and severity of attacks on Christians in Jerusalem and across Israel in 2024, ranging from spitting at priests and public hate speech to the desecration of graves, arson attacks and vandalising of churches.
“It’s usually young Israeli Jewish men who are conducting these attacks with impunity. They face very little punishment, if the police get involved at all,” said John Munayer, the director of international engagement at the Rossing Center.
“It’s a clear attempt by hardcore settler Zionists to Judaise the Old City of Jersualem and trying to make it unbearable for Christians who have been there for centuries.”
As he attended the Easter prayer ceremony on Thursday, Father Nikon Golovko, the deputy head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, said he had “really seen things change for the worse for Christians in the past nine years”.
Catholic clerics during the Washing of the Feet procession at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Thursday. Photograph: Léo Corrêa/AP
He said: “We receive a lot more hostility and even aggression from the Jewish community. They spit on priests, even when we are walking through the Christian quarter. It sends a message that the city belongs not to all communities but only to the Jews. It was not like this before.”
After an incident in which Orthodox Jews were caught on video spitting at Christians, Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that Israel was “totally committed to safeguard the sacred right of worship and pilgrimage to the holy sites of all faiths”.
Xavier Abu Eid, a Palestinian Christian political analyst and the author of Rooted in Palestine: Palestinian Christians and the Struggle for National Liberation 1917-2004, said that despite the mounting harassment they faced, the diminishing numbers of Christians left in the West Bank and the unrelenting horrors of the war in Gaza, he still viewed Easter as a time of hope and “the timely message that life defeats death”.
“As Palestinian Christians, we know that this generation will either make it or break it,” said Abu Eid.
“So making clear to the Israeli occupation that we are going to stay, that we will celebrate the same religious events that we’ve been celebrating for centuries is both a national mandate and a religious mission that we have. Keeping our Christian traditions alive, praying – they have become an act of resistance.”
