A nun at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during the Holy Fire ceremony in the Old City of Jerusalem, on April 11, 2026. (Credit: Ammar Aouad/Reuters)
A 36-year-old man suspected of violently assaulting a French nun in Jerusalem on Tuesday has been arrested, Israeli police said Wednesday, amid a backdrop of growing violence against Christians by Jewish extremists.
He “was taken into custody for questioning … with all possible motives being examined,” a police statement said, which declined to provide the suspect's nationality to AFP. The Consulate General of France in Jerusalem “firmly” condemned the attack, calling for the perpetrator “to be brought to justice for this act and for justice to be served.”
The assault took place Tuesday afternoon, near the site known as the Tomb of David on Mount Zion, adjacent to the Old City.
'Growing hostility against the Christian community'
"The sister … felt someone coming up behind her, and who pushed her with all his force onto a stone," Olivier Poquillon, director of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (Ebaf), where the 48-year-old Catholic nun is a researcher, told AFP. "While the sister remained on the ground, the man began kicking her," added this Dominican father.
A photo released by Israeli police shows the nun in habit, her face blurred, with a large purple mark on her temple. The attack “takes place in a context of increasingly common anti-Christian acts, with insults, spitting by extremists targeting religious people in habit on a daily basis," according to a European diplomatic source. "But this is another level."
The Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem condemned a “violent assault” that is not “an isolated incident [but] part of a disturbing trend of growing hostility against the Christian community and its symbols.” In the video of the arrest released by the police, an officer can be heard telling the suspect in Hebrew that he is suspected “of assault causing injury and motivated by a nationalist motive.”
A week ago, Israel for the first time appointed a special envoy for the Christian world, after several highly publicized incidents targeting religious sites and figures. A month ago, Israeli police had prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, from accessing the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate Palm Sunday mass.
According to the Church, this was the first time in centuries that religious leaders of such rank were prevented from performing this ritual.
A few weeks later, in southern Lebanon, an Israeli army soldier smashed a statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer in the Lebanese village of Dibil.
