Anti-Christian Attacks In Israel Increased In 2025

Attacks against Christians in Israel have increase in 2025, according to data from the Rossing Center. The report “offers an analysis of harassment and violence directed at Christian communities in Israel and East Jerusalem.”

Lifesite News said the data shows that “many Israeli Jews increasingly view Christianity as something dangerous and best kept at a distance.”

“Out of 155 documented incidents in 2025, physical attacks remained the most prevalent category, with 61 recorded cases, followed closely by attacks on church properties (52 cases). The remaining incidents consisted of harassment (28 cases) and the defacement of public signs with Christian content (14 cases),” the report said.

Verbal harassment has increased sharply in 2025.

“A significant shift from 2024 is the rise in verbal harassment, which increased from 13 recorded cases in 2024 to 28 known cases in 2025,” the report said.

Church property has also been subject to graffiti, trespassing, vandalism, stone-throwing, garbage dumping, and arson. Spitting on holy places has also been document, according to the report.

Image credit: A priest inspects the damage at a room located on the complex of the Church of the Multiplication at Tabgha, on the shores on the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, on June 18, 2015, in the aftermath of a suspected arson attack. The suspected attack totally destroyed an external atrium of the Christian shrine, which is believed by many Christians to be the place where Jesus fed the 5,000 in the miracle of the five loaves and two fish, with a church adviser pointing the finger at Jewish extremists. AFP PHOTO / MENAHEM KAHANA (Photo credit should read MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images)

“Among the trends that persisted in 2025 is also the violence that afflicts Arab communities living in Israel. This reached the highest number on record in 2025, with 252 Palestinians citizens of Israel murdered in crime-related incidents,” the report said.

The Jewish view of Christianity has shifted since 2024, likely fueled by the ongoing wartime environment Israel has found itself in following October 7, the Gaza genocide, its preemptive attack on Iran and its new war against Lebanon.

“Within Israel, the report identifies a continued deepening of polarization and ultra-nationalist political trends, reflected in renewed efforts to reshape key institutions and embed religious-nationalist narratives more firmly in public life. In such an environment, minority communities are more exposed to scapegoating, exclusionary rhetoric, and permissive social norms around harassment,” the report said.

The environment within Israel is moving in a direction that makes the prospects for a multi-religious future fall into doubt.

“One of the most striking findings of the survey we conducted to examine perceptions of Christianity and Christians among the Israeli Jewish population, is the indication that younger respondents and those identifying as more religious are more likely to express intolerant positions,” the report said.

“Taken together, the 2025 findings point to a concerning trajectory: harassment and violence against Christians are continuing within a sociopolitical climate that is increasingly intolerant of diversity and more assertive in exclusivist national-religious claims,” the report said.

While Israel has no formal constitution, some of its founding documents enshrine equality for inhabitants regardless of faith.

According to Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Israel “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Despite this, the Jewish State has developed into a land where not every citizen is equal under the law.

“However, the ‘Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People’, approved in 2018, declares that ‘the Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people; the State of Israel is the nationstate of the Jewish People, in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination; and exercising the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People’,” the report said. “The law was criticized by legal experts and civil society organizations dedicated to safeguarding the rights of minorities, including the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries, which called the attention to the tension that exists in the wording of the declaration about the State being both ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic’ and to the fact that although the 2018 Basic Law changes very little in practice, it does provide a constitutional and legal basis for discrimination between Israel’s citizens, clearly laying out the principles according to which Jewish citizens are to be privileged over and above other citizens.”

Israel has also launched attacks against churches in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.

Image credit: ANKARA, TURKIYE – APRIL 22: An infographic titled “Israeli attacks targeting churches and Christian religious symbols in Palestine and Lebanon since October 2023” created in Ankara, Turkiye on April 22, 2026. (Photo by Yasin Demirci/Anadolu via Getty Images)

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