all

all

Jordan church massacre spotlights Israel’s Christian exception

The massacre at a church funeral in Jordan is a reminder that Christian security in the Middle East should be measured by whether communities survive, not by whether hatred exists.

Ryan Jones
Oct 25, 2026 at 10:22 am
2 Min Read
| Topics: CHRISTIANS
Monks take part in a Rogation procession at the Trappist Monastery in Latrun, May 12, 2026. The traditional Christian ceremony is held to bless humanity and the work of nature in the hands of God. Photo by Nati Shohat/Flash90
Monks take part in a Rogation procession at the Trappist Monastery in Latrun, May 12, 2026. The traditional Christian ceremony is held to bless humanity and the work of nature in the hands of God. Photo by Nati Shohat/Flash90

Mourners gathered at St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Hammoud, a small Christian village in Jordan’s Karak governorate, to bury one of their own when Islamist gunmen arrived to compound their tragic loss.

Surveillance footage verified by ABC News shows at least three gunmen pulling up at the church entrance before opening fire. Eight people were confirmed dead on Friday, and a ninth wounded person died on Saturday, according to Jordan’s Public Security Directorate. As of Saturday, authorities were still searching for the attackers, and no group had claimed responsibility.

King Abdullah vowed retaliation for what was a rare attack on Christians in the Hashemite kingdom. Jordan declared three days of national mourning, and Prime Minister Jafar Hassan blamed terrorist ideology and blind extremism. Church bells rang out across the country at noon the next day in remembrance of the victims.

But Karak raises a question that will outlast the funeral: where in the Middle East can a historic Christian community expect to still be there in 50 years?

Counting who is left

The honest answer starts with headcounts, and they are not kind to the region’s oldest churches.

Iraq’s decline did not begin with the 2003 invasion. The 1987 Iraqi census counted 1.4 million Christians, about 8 percent of the population. Even under Saddam, they were leaving. By 2001, Christians made up 30 percent of all Iraqi emigrants, far beyond their share of the population, driven by economics and the increasing Islamization of society. The collapse of the regime then exposed them to sectarian bloodletting, and in 2014 the Islamic State expelled Christians from the Nineveh Plains. Today, church officials estimate only a few hundred thousand, or even fewer, remain in the country.

Syria has followed the same path in half the time. There is no official count, but estimates indicate Christians fell from roughly 10 percent of the population before the 2011 war to around 2 percent today, or about 300,000 people.

Lebanon was once the region’s great Christian stronghold. The 1932 census suggested that about 53 percent of the population was Christian. Higher Muslim birth rates and, in particular, large-scale Christian emigration have lowered that share, through a fifteen-year civil war and decades of sectarian conflict since.

Egypt holds the region’s largest Christian community, and it too is shrinking as a share of the nation. Egyptian censuses found Christians at 8.3 percent in 1927, with the share falling in each of seven later counts to 5.7 percent in 1996. Coptic leaders insist the real number is higher, generally between 10 and 15 percent, though without a verifiable count. Either way, Pew concluded the data point to a steady proportional decline in recent decades.

Closest to home is Bethlehem. Only one in five residents is now Christian, a sharp decline since the town was placed under Palestinian Authority control in 1995, when 80 percent identified as Christian. Estimates vary, and in one poll of Palestinian Christians, most said their desire to emigrate was economic, while a smaller share sought a safer, less corrupt place with greater liberty and religious tolerance. But documented attacks on local Christians by Islamists have also certainly played a role.

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics tells a different story. About 184,200 Christians lived in Israel at the end of 2025, roughly 1.9% of the population. The community grew 0.7% in 2024. Nearly four in five are Arab Christians. These are the indigenous churches of Nazareth, Haifa and the Galilee, not a figure padded by foreign workers.

That distinction matters, because some will point to the Gulf. Pew found the region’s overall Christian population grew between 2010 and 2020. But that growth came largely from migrant workers in states like Oman, people on temporary visas with no ancient churches, no ancestral villages and no expectation of staying. Counting them alongside the Chaldeans of Iraq or the Copts of Egypt is like measuring a forest’s health by the number of visitors in the parking lot.

The comparison that matters is between historic communities. On that measure, Israel stands out.

So does the nature of the threat. Across the region, Christians are still being gunned down in their churches. Karak is only the latest example. In 2016, a suicide bomber struck the St. Peter and St. Paul Church in Cairo, killing 28. More recently, jihadist forces assaulted Christian churches in Syria.

Israel has its own ugly problem with Jewish extremists who harass Christians, examined below. But that harassment, for all its ugliness, has not been deadly. Not one of the 355 incidents the Rossing Center documented between 2023 and 2025 was a killing.

The people who live it

Shadi Khalloul, a leader of Israel’s Aramean Maronite community, put it starkly after October 7: “If Israel ceases to exist here, we Christians will cease to exist.”

Khalloul is no uncritical cheerleader. His family was displaced from the Galilee village of Bir’im in 1948, and he still speaks openly about that grievance.

Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Greek Orthodox priest from Nazareth, went further before the UN Human Rights Council in 2014. “Israel is the only place where Christians in the Middle East are safe,” he said.

Yoseph Haddad, an Arab Christian from Nazareth who was wounded in Lebanon in 2006, has made the same point about Arab citizens generally. Ask any of them, even the extremists, he has said, and “they would never want to live anywhere else than in Israel.”

Not every Christian in Israel would agree with them. But they did not reach their conclusions from a distance.

The strongest objection

Critics will point to Jerusalem, and the occasional Jewish harassment of Christians there.

The Rossing Center, which monitors attacks on Christians in Israel, recorded 89 incidents in 2023, 111 in 2024 and 155 in 2025. Physical attacks rose from 37 to 61 over the same period. Most targeted visibly identifiable Christians such as nuns and monks, and most were concentrated in and around Jerusalem’s highly-charged Old City. A study cited in the report found that most perpetrators were adolescents or young adults from fundamentalist backgrounds.

This is a disgrace, and most Israelis say so without hedging. Spitting on a monk or pushing down a nun is a crime against a guest of the Jewish state and a betrayal of the Jewish people’s own history.

Now follow the critics’ logic to its end. If spitting, graffiti and assaults on clergy make Israel a danger to Christians, what word is left for Iraq losing the majority of its Christians in a generation?

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German political foundation hardly in the business of Israeli public relations, examined these same figures in June. It concluded that Christians in Israel do not suffer from structural oppression, but from social unease driven by a small, vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Israelis view these developments critically. It also noted, citing Rossing, that nearly 90 percent of Christians in Israel have not experienced discrimination or attacks.

See our recent video podcast exploring the Truth About Christians in Israel.

Then there is what the state does after an attack. When a man assaulted a nun near Mount Zion in May, Israeli police arrested him the same day. He was later indicted. The arsonist who torched the Church of the Multiplication at Tabgha in 2015 went to prison. The soldier filmed smashing a statue of Jesus in Lebanon was taken into military custody, along with the soldier who photographed it.

What safety actually means

Hatred of Christians exists across the Middle East, including in Israel. That cannot be the measure.

The measure is whether a community can stay, worship openly, raise its children and expect the state to stand between it and those who hate it. Jordan is trying to meet that test this week, and deserves support in doing so. Israel routinely meets it.

The clearest evidence may be the quietest. For more than a decade, the State of Israel has funded northern Christian communities working to preserve Aramaic, and elementary schools there now offer instruction in it. An ancient language and heritage closely tied to the history of Christianity but nearly wiped out by Islamic conquest is experiencing a revival with Jewish backing.

Christian children in the Galilee are learning the language Yeshua (Jesus) spoke, and Israel is encouraging them to do so.

Want more news from Israel?
Click Here to sign up for our FREE daily email updates

About the author

View All Posts

Patrick Callahan

This is an example of author bio/description. Beard fashion axe trust fund, post-ironic listicle scenester. Uniquely mesh maintainable users rather than plug-and-play testing procedures.

Leave a Reply

  • Subscribe to our Daily Newsletter

     

     

     

    • Login