Pope Francis received assurances from Jordan's King Abdullah II that Christian and Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem will be protected amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Many people in the West Bank have been left without work but the only pediatric hospital in the area gives them a sense of hope and security.
Sudden peace negotiations or an intervention by the United States will not deliver Israelis and Palestinians from the suffering caused by the war in Gaza, a Jerusalem-based cardinal said.
Cardinal Fernando Filoni, grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, an ancient chivalric order of the Catholic Church rooted in the Holy Land, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land as a sign of peace and dialogue during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
Christians fear for Holy Land future
Despite a looming threat of being displaced forever from the Holy Land, the Christian community in Gaza is staying faithful to its commitment to help compatriots in facing an increasingly serious humanitarian crisis as war consumes all around them.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this before, never! It’s a war, not ‘like a war,’ it is a war,” said Rony Tabash, a member of a Christian family that has been in Bethlehem for generations, describing how the current conflict is directly impacting the Christian community in the West Bank.
The day after Pope Francis called for a cease-fire in the Holy Land, his foreign minister spoke by phone with the foreign minister of Iran, "reiterating the absolute need to avoid escalating the conflict," the Vatican press office said.
Canadians help keep hope alive in Holy Land
Despite living under dark clouds of uncertainty and fear, Christians in the Holy Land are still a beacon of light and a much-needed presence there, says Joseph Hazboun.
Orthodox Christians celebrated Easter in the Holy Land with another year of Holy Fire restrictions
Thousands of local and international Christian pilgrims thronged to Jerusalem's Old City and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for the ancient Eastern rite ceremony of the Holy Fire April 15, with some scuffles reported as Israeli police restricted the number of people able to reach the church.
A British-Israeli mother and her two daughters were killed in a drive-by-shooting terrorist attack in the Jordan valley on April 7, during a week that, instead of seeing the holidays of Passover, Easter and Ramadan celebrated in parallel peacefully, spiraled the region into violence.
Holy Land tourism begins to return to normalcy after pandemic, but Ukraine war presents other setbacks
Last December's Christmas tree lightings in many towns and cities in Jerusalem finally pointed to a return toward normalcy for Holy Land pilgrim visits and tourism to Israel following the global pandemic and lockdowns beginning in 2020.
Following a rampage of a radical Jewish gang in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City on the evening of Jan. 26, the Assembly of the Catholic Ordinaries in the Holy Land called on political and religious authorities to bring civil and religious life in Jerusalem back to "greater serenity.
Christian leaders in Holy Land: Refugees suffer like Holy Family did
Comparing the suffering Jesus and the Holy Family endured to the way many people and refugees are suffering today, the patriarchs and heads of churches of the Holy Land reminded the faithful of the "deep and abiding love" God has for all his people.
With pandemic restrictions almost fully lifted, churches and shopkeepers alike are hopeful that the streets of Jerusalem will fill up once again as Easter, Passover and Ramadan converge.