Pax Christi International supported an urgent appeal by the Nassar family to prevent the seizure of their farm in the West Bank.

The farm, known as the Tent of Nations, operates educational work camps for international volunteers. It has faced increasing pressure from illegal Israeli settlements and the Israeli military in recent years, worsened by the war in Gaza.

The Nassar family, Palestinian Christians who have farmed the land for the past century, appealed to the Israeli government to allow them to register their ownership. 

A meeting with the Land Registration Committee of the Israeli Civil Administration of the West Bank scheduled for 2 July was cancelled the day before. The committee “simply chose to cancel the session after we had been waiting for nearly a year”, the family said.

They appealed for support from volunteers, warning that “the Tent of Nations urgently needs an international presence of volunteers at the farm for protection and to assist with cultivating, farming, and developing the land”.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, the Israeli authorities have restricted water supplies to the Hebron and Bethlehem governates, leaving around 180 Palestinian communities in rural areas without access to running water, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Bethlehem University, the only Catholic university in the Holy Land, has reported severe problems for its students who are unable to leave the West Bank or move within it, due to security restrictions.

During the Italian “Peace and Solidarity” pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Bethlehem last month, led by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Palestinian Christians told pilgrims “of daily attacks, killings of livestock, fires and many other brutal methods to try to induce the Palestinian people to flee”, Pax Christi reported.

An estimated 500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October last year.

Cardinal Zuppi said the occupation of the West Bank, the employment crisis and the lack of a stable future “do nothing other than fuel the exodus of Christians … and the Holy Land becoming empty of its original inhabitants”.

The Vatican’s secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin, paid a five-day visit to Lebanon last week, where he met authorities and Church leaders, and visited humanitarian projects. Maronite Archbishop Charbel Abdallah of Tyre said he visited the ten Maronite parishes close to the Israeli border to show the people “have not been left in the lurch by the Church”.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reported on Monday: “Conditions across the Gaza Strip are apocalyptic: buildings are reduced to rubble, there is almost no clean water and supplies are minimal. As war and displacement continue, UNRWA needs unimpeded and continuous access to deliver aid and plan humanitarian operations.”

Louise Wateridge, UNWRA spokesperson in Gaza, said that “the buildings are not buildings anymore, they are shells”.

On Saturday, anti-government protest organisers in Tel Aviv estimated that 130,000 people joined a march demanding an immediate ceasefire deal to bring the captives home from Gaza.

On Monday, two far-right ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government condemned the Israeli authorities’ decision to release of the director of Gaza’s main hospital, Mohammed Abu Selmia, after detaining him for seven months without charge or trial over allegations the Al Shifa Hospital had been used as a Hamas command centre. Abu Selmia alleged he was tortured in detention.

The World Council of Churches announced its theme for the 2024 World Week for Peace in Palestine and Israel on 16-22 September, as ‘“Whatever you did…you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).