JERUSALEM — More than 30 graves at a historic Christian cemetery in Jerusalem have been found toppled and destroyed, the diocese said on Wednesday, shaking the Christian minority in the contested city.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry called the attack an “immoral act” and “an affront to religion”. The British consulate said it was just the latest in a series of attacks on the Christian community in the holy city of Jerusalem.
Police were dispatched to the Mount Zion Protestant Cemetery in Jerusalem to investigate the desecration. Mount Zion, associated in Christian tradition with the site of the Last Supper that Jesus shared with his disciples the night before his crucifixion, is also sacred to Jews and Muslims and has been the focus of competing religious ones during the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict Expectations .
Widespread footage from surveillance cameras on Sunday showed two young men – both wearing a Jewish skullcap and tzitzit, the knotted ritual fringe worn by devout Jews – bursting into the cemetery, knocking over stone crosses and smashing headstones and stomping and one Trail of debris left behind and broken tombstones.
Among the tombs destroyed was one with a 19th-century bust of Samuel Gobat, the second Protestant bishop in Jerusalem, who died in 1879, the episcopal diocese said. The graves of three Palestinian police officers who died during the British mandate years were also destroyed.
The diocese warned against seeing the desecration of the cemetery as an ominous warning of “hatred of Christians”.
“Many stone crosses were the target of the vandals, clearly indicating that these criminal acts were motivated by religious bigotry,” it said, urging authorities to redouble their efforts to find the perpetrators.
The Protestant cemetery on revered Mount Zion, just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, was established in 1848 and was part of territory Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East War. The cemetery houses the graves of dozens of Palestinian police officers killed during World War I and World War II, as well as Christian leaders who died in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Jewish extremists have defaced Church property on Mount Zion in recent years. Jews regard Mount Zion as the traditional burial site of the biblical King David, and some ultra-Orthodox and nationalist activists have opposed the Christian right to pray at the site. A Jewish seminary known as the Diaspora Yeshiva has taken over many of the buildings on the Mount Zion site.
About 16,000 Christians live in Jerusalem, most of them Palestinians. Israel claims Jerusalem as its eternal capital, while the Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for independent state.