Middle East Monitor / March 30, 2026
Israel is facing widespread condemnation after police prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, and the Custos of the Holy Land, Father Francesco Ielpo, from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate Palm Sunday Mass.
In a joint statement, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Custody of the Holy Land said the two men were stopped while proceeding privately to the church and were “compelled to turn back”, adding that this was the first time in centuries that the heads of the Church had been prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday Mass at the Holy Sepulchre.
The same statement described the Israeli decision as a “manifestly unreasonable and grossly disproportionate measure” and rejected efforts to justify it on safety grounds. Church leaders said they had “acted with full responsibility” since the start of Israel’s war on Iran, cancelled public gatherings, prohibited attendance and arranged broadcasts of the Easter celebrations to worshippers around the world.
Church leaders slammed the move as “an extreme departure” from freedom of worship and respect for the status quo governing the holy places in Jerusalem.
World leaders including Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said the move “constitutes an offense not only to believers, but to every community that recognizes religious freedom.”
France’s President Emmanuel Macron also condemned the decision, while Spain said it was an “unjustified attack on religious freedom” and demanded that Israel respect both diversity of belief and international law.
Yet while Israel’s blocking of senior Catholic clergy triggered near universal criticism, the wider assault on non-Jewish Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, and on Christian symbols across the region has continued without opposition from Western leaders.
The erasure of Palestinian Christians and of Palestine’s indigenous heritage has been documented in detail by Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta through the work of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea. In 313 AD, Eusebius compiled a record of Palestinian towns and villages when he charted the land.
Abu Sitta’s research shows that 139 of those localities remained continuously inhabited from the Byzantine Christian period until the creation of Israel. Of those, 100 were depopulated and mostly destroyed during the 1948 Nakba, while only 39 remain inhabited by Palestinians inside what became Israel.
The record is a stark measure of the scale of rupture: Palestinian Muslims and Christian communities that had endured for more than 1,600 years were erased in the space of a single colonial war.
The Palm Sunday incident fits into a longer pattern that Palestinian Christians and church leaders have been warning about for years.
In 2021, Francesco Patton, the Catholic Church’s Custos of the Holy Land, former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, Hossam Naoum warned that Palestinian Christians in occupied Palestine were facing the threat of “extinction” from radical Israeli groups.
Patton noted that Christians had fallen from 20 per cent of Jerusalem’s population to less than 2 per cent, while Welby and Naoum warned that intimidation, discrimination, settler expansion and the West Bank separation wall were driving Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land.
