Israeli authorities continued their destruction and desecration of Christian holy places like several Christian convents and churches on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. They looted the ornaments and church golden and silver objects and transformed those convents and churches into military posts for Jewish armed forces.

This is the statement of an eyewitness who reported about the church of St. Saviour on Mt. Zion. The interior of the Church of St. Saviour is a scene of total devastation. The carved and gilded altar has been wrecked, and an altar painting lies destroyed on the upper floor. The oil paintings that decorated the upper part of the north and south walls have been torn out of their frames leaving only tattered shreds of canvas. Many of the Kutahya titles, brought especially from Turkey by Armenian pilgrims in the early eighteenth century have been ripped from the walls; those that have not been stolen lie smashed on the ground, along with a tangled mass of broken church furniture. The valuable collection of old church vestments has completely disappeared. On the other hand, Israeli forces desecrated and vandalized the Armenian and the Greek orthodox cemeteries on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. Fourteen tombs of Christian patriarchs were smashed open and their contents desecrated.

The Catholic cemetery on Mt. Zion received the same treatment from the Zionists. In October 1953, Israeli forces destroyed the Christian village of Kafr Bur’om in Galilee together with its churches, schools, and other buildings and scattered the Christian inhabitants to other parts of Galilee.

On April 16th, 1954, the Zionists launched an attack against the cemetery of the Greek Catholic Community in Haifa. In July 1954, a group of Israelis attacked a Christian religious procession of the Carmelite Fathers and the Christian community of Haifa nears the cave of St. Elijah on Mt. Carmel near Haifa. The Christian religious procession was broken up, many of the crosses carried by the procession were smashed, and many Christians were injured.

On January 10, 1963, seventy Jews, mostly Yeshiva students, attacked the Finnish Christian Mission School in Jerusalem, smashed thirty windows and beat Mr. Risto Santala, the school pastor. Further up the Street of the Prophets, a car belonging to a Hebrew-Christian family was overturned and the plate glass windows of the Zion Mission shop run by the Reverend William Hall were smashed.

Source: Encyclopedia of the Palestine problema by Issa Nakhleh.