An Armenian guard confronted an Israeli Jewish man at the wall of St. James Monastery in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter and forced him away as he tried to urinate on it. Jerusalemite-Armenian journalist Kegham Balian published the surveillance footage..
The timestamp places the incident at roughly 10:31 p.m. on Saturday, September 26. A man in a white shirt approaches the wall beside the entrance before the guard reaches him and pulls him back.
“We are getting tired of this. Our home is becoming unrecognizable. Every day there is another incident, each more vile than the last,” Balian said. “We are not a toilet. Our dignity is constantly undermined. Enough. Stop.”
St. James is the seat of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the residence of the Armenian Patriarch.
On August 2, six Israelis, five minors and one adult, spat at the monastery entrance, banged on its gates and threw stones at the compound and at the window of an Armenian woman filming them from her home, shouting, “Get back inside, you daughter of a whore!” Three were brought before the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, three were released under restrictive conditions and barred from the Old City for 15 days, and four more were arrested at the end of August.
On August 16, Israel Police arrested a man in his 20s over the vandalism of St. Anthony’s Church in Jaffa, where officers found smashed statues and broken crosses.
On Yom Kippur, a 9-year-old Armenian Christian boy named William was pepper-sprayed on Mamilla Boulevard near Jaffa Gate while riding his bicycle. His mother said the attacker signaled him to stop with one hand hidden behind his back and sprayed him after hearing him speak English. Police closed the case almost immediately, reopened it after Israeli Channel 13 aired the story, and arrested a 22-year-old from the West Bank settlement of Ganei Modi’in on Sunday evening.
The Religious Freedom Data Center, an independent Israeli watchdog founded in June 2023 by the scholar Yisca Harani, recorded 50 anti-Christian incidents between April and June 2025. Sixty-four percent occurred within the Old City, and half of those were centered around the Armenian Patriarchate, making it the most frequently targeted Christian site in Jerusalem. The Rossing Center’s 2025 report documented 155 incidents, including 61 physical assaults, 52 attacks on church property, 28 incidents of verbal harassment, and 14 cases of vandalism against Christian signs and symbols.
The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem dates to the 7th century, and Armenian presence in the city is documented from at least the 4th. The Armenian community of the Old City numbered 1,598 in 1967 and now stands below 1,000.
