Israel has rejected allegations from Church leaders that unnamed “fringe radical groups” are trying to drive Christians out of the Holy Land. The patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem said authorities had failed to curb assaults against Christians and desecration of their sites. The Archbishop of Canterbury said the statement was an “unprecedented and urgent alarm call”. But the Israeli government called it baseless and distorted.

While the overall number of Palestinian Arab Christians in Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip is growing, the community has been in decline for years as a proportion of the population. Christians now make up less than 2% of the population and fewer than 2,000 are believed to be left in the Old City of Jerusalem.(BBC)…[+]