In a major investigation published this week, Ynet, one of Israel’s largest media outlets, has confirmed what Armenians of Jerusalem have been warning about for years: that spitting on Christian clergy, vandalism of churches, the tearing of religious flags, and harassment of religious processions in the Old City have become a daily reality, and that the situation has dramatically worsened under the current Israeli government.
The Ynet article was translated to English by Jerusalemite-Armenian Kegham Balian.
The report, written by Oded Shalom, features extensive testimony from Save the Armenian Quarter co-founder Hagop Djernazian and Armenian ceramic artist Garo Sandrouni, identifies a stretch of Armenian Patriarchate Street that locals now refer to as “Spitting Street,” and cites 2025 data from the Rossing Center documenting 61 physical attacks on Christian clergy and laity, 52 cases of damage to church property, 28 incidents of harassment during religious processions, and 14 cases of vandalism against church signs across Israel and East Jerusalem.
The significance of the Ynet report is not in the substance of the allegations, all of which have been documented for years by Armenian and Christian community leaders, by international press including The Nation, the Christian Century, and Reuters, and by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem itself. The significance is the source. Ynet, owned by Yedioth Ahronoth, is one of the most widely read news platforms in Israel, with a domestic Hebrew-language readership that traditionally has had limited exposure to the lived experience of Christian residents of the Old City. That a publication of this scale has now placed the testimony of Armenian and Greek Christian residents on its front page, alongside hard data on attacks against clergy, marks a meaningful shift in how the issue is being treated inside Israel itself.
Earlier this year, Zartonk Media reported on two of them inside the Armenian Quarter. On January 27, 2026, a Jewish extremist was filmed spitting on an Armenian priest in the Quarter. Eleven days later, on February 7, 2026, Haredi Jews were filmed casually taking turns spitting at the entrance of the Saint James Monastery. Both videos were shared by Balian.
What the Report Documents
Sandrouni, who operates an Armenian ceramic shop near the seminary that trains young Armenian clergy from around the world, told Ynet that he sits in his shop every day from morning until evening and watches a constant stream of harassment directed at Christian symbols, the Armenian monastery, and Christian clergy walking to and from their daily duties. Asked how it feels to witness this hatred, he answered with three words: “Think for yourselves.”
Djernazian, one of the founders of the Save the Armenian Quarter movement and one of the most consistent voices warning about the deterioration of Christian life in the Old City, recounted an incident from approximately three weeks before the Ynet report’s publication. Young people from the Quarter had decorated Armenian Patriarchate Street ahead of Easter, hanging chains, colored balls, and paper flags of the Armenian Apostolic Church bearing the cross. A passerby with a knitted kippah, walking near the Armenian monastery, tore one of the Armenian church flags apart and continued on as if nothing had happened.
Djernazian told Ynet that incidents of this kind are now routine, that they have crossed every imaginable line, and that they predate the current Israeli government but have become more extreme and more frequent since it came to power. He noted that residents of the Quarter sometimes hesitate before walking through the Old City wearing a visible Christian symbol such as a pendant in order to avoid harassment.
A Pattern Confirmed by Israeli Data
The Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, an Israeli institution that promotes interfaith coexistence, publishes an annual report on attacks against Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem in cooperation with the Religious Freedom Data Center. According to its 2025 report, cited by Ynet, the trajectory has continued upward year over year. The 61 documented physical attacks on clergy and laity in 2025 included spitting, pepper spray, and beatings. The 52 cases of damage to church property included graffiti, trespassing for the purpose of vandalism, and the smashing of statues.
The Religious Freedom Data Center was founded in June 2023 by Yisca Harani, an Israeli Jewish scholar of Christian history and interfaith relations who established the center after observing what she described as a sharp increase in anti-Christian incidents in Jerusalem and the absence of any institutional mechanism to track them. Earlier reporting by Zartonk Media in July 2025 documented that, according to the Center’s quarterly data, half of all hate crimes recorded in the Old City between April and June 2025 occurred in the Armenian Quarter, with the Armenian Patriarchate identified as the single most frequently targeted site in all of Jerusalem.
Hana Bendcowsky, the Rossing Center’s director of educational programs, told Ynet that the climate inside Israel is one of growing rejection of anyone who is not Jewish, that police rarely investigate complaints filed by Christian residents, and that this lack of accountability has emboldened young Israelis who once hesitated before spitting at clergy.
Easter at the Holy Sepulchre
The Ynet report also documents two extraordinary incidents from this past Easter season that have already reverberated across the Christian world. At the end of March, Israeli police prevented Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to hold the Palm Sunday ceremony, citing wartime crowd restrictions during the Iran war. According to the Church, the Patriarch’s arrival had been coordinated in advance with the police. For the first time in 100 years, the ceremony was not held inside the Holy Sepulchre.
Ten days later, Greek Orthodox Christians attempted to mark Holy Saturday, the most sacred day of their liturgical year. Tour guide Paniot Penioto, who has coordinated the Holy Saturday procession for 25 years, told Ynet that police backtracked on every prior agreement, set up barriers throughout the Old City, prevented Christians from reaching the church, and capped attendance inside the Holy Sepulchre at 2,700, of whom roughly a thousand were police officers. Penioto noted that historical photographs from earlier eras show tens of thousands of Christians filling the church courtyard and surrounding alleys, including under both Jordanian rule and earlier Israeli administrations.
“We Christians have lived here for 2,000 years. This is our place too. What is your problem?” Penioto asked.
The Ynet investigation also lays bare a defense of the spitting culture coming from inside Israeli political circles. Elisha Yered, an outpost activist and former aide to Knesset Member Limor Son Har-Melech of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, publicly defended the practice on social media, writing that spitting near priests and churches is “an ancient Jewish custom” with a halachic blessing attached.
The Broader Picture: Statues, Soldiers, and a Receding Evangelical Base
The Ynet investigation was prompted in part by the recent video of an Israeli soldier smashing a statue of Jesus in the village of Debel in southern Lebanon. The soldier and the soldier who filmed him were each sentenced to 30 days in military detention, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly condemned the act, asserting in English that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that respects freedom of worship.
Djernazian responded publicly that Netanyahu’s framing of the incident as an isolated case is contradicted by the daily reality on the ground in Jerusalem. Bendcowsky added a strategic dimension that should be of particular concern to Israel’s political establishment: that the steady erosion of Christian safety in the Holy Land is being noticed by Evangelical communities in the United States, particularly younger Evangelicals, and is contributing to a measurable decline in Evangelical support for Israel.
The article also notes that conservative American media personality Tucker Carlson traveled to Israel and the West Bank earlier this year and produced a documentary on the situation of Christians under Israeli rule that has accumulated nearly two million views. Carlson interviewed Alice Kisiya, a Palestinian Christian resident of Beit Jala, who described being told by settlers attempting to take over Christian land near Bethlehem: “It is ours, you will have to leave.”
Ynet also notes that in July of last year, a fire was set near the remains of St. George’s Church in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh, northeast of Ramallah, in an incident that drew solidarity visits from European ambassadors and from US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an Evangelical Christian and a vocal supporter of the West Bank settlement enterprise.
What This Means for the Armenian Quarter
For the Armenian community of Jerusalem, the Ynet report does not reveal anything new. Hagop Djernazian and his colleagues at Save the Armenian Quarter have spent more than two and a half years documenting attacks on clergy, settler intrusions onto Armenian Patriarchate property, and the daily humiliations endured by Armenian residents and seminarians. They have done so in the face of the Cows’ Garden land deal, in which 25 percent of the Armenian Quarter, including the Goveroun Bardez, the Patriarch’s private garden and parking, the Manougian seminary hall, five Armenian family homes, and a portion of the Patriarchate building, was secretly leased in 2021 to Xana Gardens Ltd., an Israeli-Emirati firm with documented ties to settler networks, for the construction of a luxury hotel. The Patriarchate cancelled the deal in November 2023. The Israeli developer, accompanied by armed settlers and Israeli police, has continued to attempt to seize the land by force ever since.
The Armenian Patriarchate’s status as the single most targeted site in the Old City, as documented by the Religious Freedom Data Center, coincides with this ongoing pressure on Patriarchate property, and the two phenomena cannot be separated. The harassment and the land grab are part of the same pattern.
What changes with the Ynet report is the audience. For the first time, a major Hebrew-language Israeli outlet has placed the testimony of Armenian residents alongside that of Greek and Latin Christians, alongside hard data on the rising tide of attacks, alongside the words of Israeli interfaith experts who concede that the situation has spiraled. The article does not mention the Cows’ Garden by name, and it does not address the legal proceedings underway in the Jerusalem District Court, where Save the Armenian Quarter and the Armenian Patriarchate are pursuing two separate lawsuits to nullify the Xana lease. But it confirms, in the Israeli mainstream, the climate against which those legal battles are being fought.
The Armenian community of Jerusalem has lived in the Old City since the 4th century. It is the oldest continuously inhabited Armenian diaspora community in the world. Its monastery, the Armenian Apostolic Brotherhood of St. James, has been in its current location since at least the 7th century. The community now numbers fewer than a thousand residents inside the Quarter, down from 1,598 in 1967. The combination of property pressure, daily harassment, and unresolved legal status threatens to drive that number lower still.
For years, Armenians have asked the world to listen. This week, an Israeli newspaper finally did. The question now is whether anyone in Israel’s political establishment will follow.
