Holy Land: Christian cemetery vandalised in northern Israel

Maronite ruins

Vandals have smashed gravestones at a Maronite Christian cemetery in a village near Israel's northern border with Lebanon, Israeli police said on Wednesday. An investigation has now been opened into damage to a number of graves at the Christian cemetery in Kufr Birim, spokeswoman Luba Samri said. She said the the tombstones were broken and displaced. Walls were daubed in anti-Christian graffiti.

Kufr Birim is a derelict Palestinian village whose inhabitants were evicted by Israeli forces 1948 six months after the state of Israel was established and never allowed to return.

The Christian village was almost totally razed by the Israeli army in 1953.

Last year, Lebanese Maronite patriarch Beshara Rai paid a historic trip to the Holy Land during which he visited Kufr Birim, pledging to help the displaced villagers return.

There are still some 11,400 Maronite Catholics living in Israel.

In recent years there have been a spate of 'price tag' hate crimes targeting Christian churches and cemeteries, and Israeli military property, beiieved to have been been carried out by Jewish extremists in retribution for perceived action against the Jewish-only settlement enterprise throughout the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Following price-tag attacks on Vatican-owned offices in occupied East Jerusalem in May 2014, Israeli Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said the government planned to begin using administrative detention against suspected extremists, but has since only given one 30-month prison sentence.

On Tuesday, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin met with church leaders in Jerusalem's Old City, pledging to crack down on religiously inspired hate crime.

Source: MEM/Fides