The 21 months since Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack on Israeli civilians – which was the third deadliest terrorist attack in modern history – have seen dramatic changes in the Middle East. The so-called “12 day war” between Israel and Iran has accelerated those changes – but how does this affect Christians in the Middle East?

Gaza

The war in Gaza has not merely devasted that territory. As the Lindisfarne Centre has reported previously it has placed Christians in Gaza in an impossible situation – caught between two sides in a conflict they do not wish to be part of, but expected to show support for Hamas. It is almost impossible to know what is really happening in Gaza, but there are reports in Palestinian media of Hamas’ executing ordinary Palestinians who they view as insufficiently loyal. What is clear, is that once the fighting ends, the exodus of Christians from Gaza which has been happening for several decades is likely to significantly increase.

The wider impact of the conflict in Gaza

As we have written before, any attack on an Islamic area, no matter what the circumstances and regardless of how provocative its own prior actions may have been, typically leads to a deep emotional feeling of Islamic brotherhood. The ummah (Islamic community) rallies to the support of what it sees as a family member under attack.

Consequently, the conflict in Gaza has had a radicalising impact across the Middle East. It has empowered and emboldened Islamist and jihadist groups who demand that Middle Eastern governments pursue radical Islamist policies – or plot to overthrow them. For example, in April the Jordanian government found it necessary to ban the Muslim Brotherhood after uncovering a plot to attack targets in Jordan which it claimed was linked to them.

This matters, because Jordan has a large Christian minority and is one of the most open and tolerant Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East. However, the extent of the freedom which governments in such countries feel able to give Christian minorities exists in inverse relationship to the threat those governments face from radical Islamists. Added to which, when there is a lot of anger on the streets about any perceived attack on a Muslim area, Christians are at heightened risk from vigilante violence. So, anything which radicalises popular Muslim opinion – as the Gaza conflict has done – makes life so much harder for Christian minorities in the Middle East.

Syria – church bombing

One of the most disturbing developments of the last 21 months has been the shooting and suicide bombing of Mar Elias Church in Damascus on 22 June. In this attack, at least 22 people were killed and more than 63 injured. A little known group called Saraya Ansar al-Sunna put out a statement claiming responsibility. This appears to be a group which has recently split off from HTS.

The Syrian government immediately put out a statement claiming no such group exists and alleging the bombing was actually carried out by HTS’ bitter rivals Islamic State (IS). But whether the attack was carried out by a HTS splinter group, or by their rivals Islamic State, it has ominous echoes of the spate of church bombings which began in Iraq in 2003. These later spread to Syria where IS carried out a systematic destruction of churches in the north east. 

After 14 years of civil war in which Christians largely saw the Assad regime as more likely to protect them than the jihadist groups opposing it, fears of communal violence lie just below the surface and even before this attack, Christians were already deeply fearful.

The wider impact of HTS seizure of power

The new HTS government has been relatively successful in seeking to ‘spin’ itself to the west as a moderate political force. However, no-one should doubt the shockwaves which the seizure of Syria by a jihadist group with origins in al-Qaeda sent across the Middle East.

In effect it “normalised” the idea of a jihadist group seizing power. This massively increased the threat to every government in the Middle East, all of which see Islamists as the main threat to their power. Consequently, as governments feel threatened by radical Islamists and jihadists, so life becomes more difficult for Christians.

Iran

The early stages of the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution looked remarkably similar to the recent Syrian revolution. In December 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini actually sent a letter to Iranian Christian leaders seeking their support for the revolution.

However, within weeks of Khomeini coming to power, churches were closed and Christians began to be murdered by the new regime. In recent years, rather than killing Christians, the focus has shifted to arresting and imprisoning them under vaguely worded laws such as “rebellion against God on earth”. No-one knows exactly how many Iranian Christians are currently in prison – as even lawyers are often not told when someone appears in court. However, there are indications that since the October 2023 Hamas’ attack and Israeli response, there has been a massive increase in arrests of Iranian Christians.

The combination of the severe damage inflicted by Israel on the Iranian government’s overseas proxies Hamas and Hezbollah – and the huge loss of face caused by Israeli and US air attacks on Iran itself – have left the regime weaker than it has ever been. However, that is also the point at which it is potentially most dangerous for Iranian Christians.

Lebanon

Lebanon which has the Middle East’s highest proportion of Christians is a delicate balance of Sunni, Shi’a and Christian communities. However, since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 Hezbollah, which the Iranian government set up in the 1980s, has held an effective veto over major political decisions – not least because it was militarily stronger than the Lebanese armed forces. 

As the Lindisfarne Centre observed last October, the past three years have seen a spate of abductions and murders of Christian politicians, with the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah at one stage threatening to reignite the Lebanese civil war if he did not get his way.

Hezbollah’s entry into the war against Israel a day after Hamas’ 7 October attack led to it placing rocket launchers next to Christian villages in southern Lebanon – effectively using them as military shields. The country is recovering now and Hezbollah is much weaker, but its continued conflict with Israel makes it likely that those Lebanese Christians who can afford to do so, will continue to emigrate to the west – an issue which itself further destabilises the delicate political balance between Lebanon’s different communities.

Sadly, in the world of international diplomacy, too often Christians are ‘the forgotten minority’ whose peaceable influence on the Middle East is in danger of being lost sight of until it is too late.

Please pray for Christians in the Middle East at this time