US Senator Lindsey Graham:

There was a Palestinian Catholic church burned in the West Bank.

If Israeli settlers are the ones who burned the church in the West Bank, I want them to be punished.

I will write to the Israeli government regarding the burning of a church in the West… pic.twitter.com/9wfmbs6gSL

— Clash Report (@clashreport) July 21, 2025

 "Christians are being targeted all over the Mideast. There was a Catholic church burned in the West Bank. I'm incredibly upset by that," Graham said. He was referring to incidents of arson targeting religious buildings and a cemetery near the Christian village of Tayibe near Ramallah.

"You had a Palestinian Catholic church burned to the ground, and I want to find out who did it, and I want them to be punished. And if it was settlers from the West Bank, Israelis, I want them to be punished. So I'm going to write a letter to the Israeli government. I want accounting for what happened," the senator added.

Graham also mentioned the visit by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee to Tayibe on Saturday, stating that "He went to the community in question and he told the people there that America would get to the bottom of this."

The senator also addressed the death of Sayf Muslet, a 20-year-old American-Palestinian who was killed in Judea and Samaria, with the act attributed to Israeli settlers, saying that "a young American Palestinian, 20 years old, was killed in the West Bank, visiting his family. This needs to stop."

Graham's words come amid growing tension from the Christian world following two types of incidents. In Gaza, damage to the "Holy Family" church, the only Catholic church in the Strip, caused the deaths of three people and sparked outrage from Pope Leo XIV, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and President Trump. In Judea and Samaria, the burning of Christian religious buildings in Tayibe and the death of a 20-year-old American-Palestinian, acts attributed to settlers, have drawn sharp criticism from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and US Ambassador Huckabee.

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The diocese of Rome expressed outrage Tuesday after a Nazi flag was draped over the coffin of a neo-fascist activist during her funeral at a church in the city.

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A photograph published by La Repubblica newspaper showed mourners outside the Santa Lucia church in the upmarket Prati neighborhood surrounding the coffin covered with a red flag adorned with a swastika.

It said Monday's funeral was held Alessia Augello, a member of Forza Nuova.

The neo-fascist group was blamed for violent protests in central Rome last October that targeted Prime Minister Mario Draghi's office and parliament.

La Repubblica said Augello, 44, died of deep vein thrombosis.

Members of Forza Nuova gave the fascist salute during the funeral, the newspaper wrote.

The diocese of Rome confirmed the coffin was draped in the Nazi flag, which it called a "horrendous symbol incompatible with Christianity," adding that some of those present shouted and made gestures relating to "this extremist ideology."

In a statement, it condemned the incident as "offensive and unacceptable."

Parish priest Alessandro Zenobbi expressed his "deep sadness, disappointment and dismay for what happened, while distancing ourselves from every word, gesture and symbol used outside the church."

Forza Nuova was created in 1997 in the tradition of the violent, extreme right-wing organizations active in Italy's so-called Years of Lead in the 1970s, and grew into a national force in 2008.

The group is openly neo-fascist. Its current leader, Roberto Fiore, a 62-year-old father to 11 children, was found guilty in the 1980s of subversive crime and founding a far-right armed political movement.

La Repubblica said police had been present at the funeral and were investigating.

i24NEWS contributed to this report

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Thieves have stolen an iron cross outside a church in the northern Galilee where Christians believe that Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, a church official reported.

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Last week, vandals pried the iron cross out of a basalt rock altar outside the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes in Tabgha, at the Sea of Galilee, said Georg Roewekamp, as reported by AFP.

Roewekamp, who represents the German Association of the Holy Land that owns the property where the church is located, denounced an "anti-Christian" act.

"It shows that people can invade and desecrate our property," he told AFP.

The Israel Police said it had launched an investigation into the incident.

The church at Tabgha – an Arabization of its original Greek name, Heptapegon – has been targeted before. In 2015, Jewish vandals torched the church, causing extensive damage, and spray-painted graffiti.

Roewekamp said the cross measured some 15 centimeters long (about six inches) and was embedded in a basalt rock altar at an outdoor prayer place on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

He said vandals might have arrived by boat, adding that he had little hope of finding the cross.

"Because the cross was fixed very well in the basalt stone, it was removed … not by coincidence," he added.

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

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A popular strip club that once beckoned customers off a busy highway leading into Anchorage is now a church offering salvation – instead of temptation – thanks to a daughter of a former exotic dancer.

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Linda Dunegan believes divine intervention played a hand in transforming the building that housed Fantasies on 5th into the start-up Open Door Baptist Church, turning the show floor into a sanctuary and trading the dancer's pole with a pulpit.

"This church came about because I prayed for five years," said Dunegan, who tried to buy the building before but walked away – for good, she thought – when she and the owner couldn't come to terms. Then the owner gave a real estate agent a week to sell it and suggested the agent call Dunegan. This time, the deal went through.

"God has been very good to me," Dunegan said, "to give me a family, a wonderful husband, food on the table, a place to live."

The journey to savvy real estate investor with 19 properties in three states seems implausible for a girl barely surviving on a daily bowl of rice in her native Vietnam.

Dunegan grew up in a small village near the Cambodian border, where most homes were on stilts and the surrounding water was everyone's fishing grounds – and toilets.

Her mother and father had an arranged marriage that Dunegan said failed when her mother didn't produce a male heir and was sent back to her village with her two daughters. With no other skills, her mother took a job as a waitress in a bar, where she met an American who would become her husband and help the family flee the war-ravaged country in April 1975 on a military transport when Dunegan was 8.

The family struggled financially and moved around a lot, flitting from Los Angeles to Hawaii, Florida, Arizona and all over the East Coast.

In the early 1980s, her mother and stepfather divorced. Friends encouraged her mother to move to Anchorage, where they said there was good money to be made working as a waitress in the bars filled with oil industry workers.

Once in Alaska's largest city, her mother quickly found out that there was better money to be made dancing at different bars, though Dunegan wasn't sure if Fantasies on 5th was among them. She and her mother had a falling out recently, and attempts by the Associated Press to contact her for comment were unsuccessful.

As a child, Dunegan said she escaped into literature, reading a book a day. She studied hard, made the National Honor Society and went to college, eventually earning a doctorate. She also had a nearly three-decade military career with service in the Air Force and Navy Reserves and the Alaska Air National Guard.

Along the way, she married Gerry Dunegan, a longshoreman, and together they built their real estate holdings.

Dunegan's path to devout Christian took root when she was a child in America and a woman at one of the churches they attended ostensibly for the free food decided to take her under her wing.

"I was dirty, unsightly, and she took me to Sears. She bought me three dresses," Dunegan said.

"I work to pay that back today," she said of the gesture that meant the world to her.

Pastor Kenny Menendez said God called him to start a new church in Anchorage; he just didn't know he and others would have to excavate through the detritus of a strip club to find it.

The electricity was off on his first visit, but cellphone flashlights exposed black and red carpeting, booth seating, private showrooms, poles, a catwalk, a stage, huge bar tables and chairs among the Halloween decorations still displayed after the club abruptly closed a few years ago.

"I looked at it as, 'Yeah, it could be a church,'" said Menendez, who gave up a career in purchasing at an aerospace industry manufacturing plant in his native Oregon for his first ministry. "It just needed a facelift," which included turning a private lap dance room into the youth ministry.

Seventy-six people showed up for the grand opening, some to see what a church inside a former strip club looks like. Now they average about 45 people every Sunday, a decent crowd given it's competing with about three dozen or so other Baptist churches in Anchorage.

He also believes the Almighty approves of the work they are doing.

"I would say God is pleased to have a change, a transformation in the building, a place that really ultimately points more people towards him instead of away," he said.

He has hopes that the church – which is situated between a marijuana retail store, a sex shop and downtrodden motels – will help improve the neighborhood.

"One would hope that, yes, this is the beginning of just putting some light right here," he said.

The church, which will have its first anniversary in October, isn't the only benefactor of the three-story building. Dunegan intends to use the second floor for fundraisers and as a reception rental location, and the third floor as a base for her Children's Benefit Foundation.

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Here, she plans to bridge the gap for Anchorage youth, setting up cultural exchanges for them to visit Vietnam. She also intends to raise funds to help provide medical professionals in Vietnam with needed supplies, with a dream of possibly someday opening a hospital there.

She said in an Air National Guard magazine article that it was her mother who planted that seed in her over two decades ago.

"We're starting out small," Dunegan said, "but our heart is big."

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Five suspected antiquities robbers were caught red-handed over the weekend using a backhoe to conduct an illegal excavation at Khirbat al-Jahush, which lies in agricultural land between Kiryat Ata and Highway 70 in northern Israel.

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The suspects, residents of the villages I'billin and Tamra, were spotted and attempted to flee, but members of the Israel Antiquities Authority's Robberies Prevention Unit, Israel Police from the Tamra Station, Border Police, rangers from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and volunteers worked together to apprehend them.

In addition to the backhoe, the suspects used hand tools to dig up the site, causing damage.

After being apprehended, they were brought to the police station in Tamra for questioning. The authorities also seized two vehicles and the backhoe, which are likely to be confiscated during legal proceedings after the suspects are indicted.

Nir Distelfeld, an inspector for the Robberies Prevention Unit in northern Israel, explained that the excavation using the backhoe "caused irreparable damage to heritage ruins. Hewn stones that belonged to a public building were torn up, mosaic floors were broken, and so were pottery and glass shards."

According to Distelfeld, the suspects' capture prevented future destruction to the archaeological site.

Gilad Tzinamon, the IAA archaeologist for the western Galilee region, explained that archaeological surveys of the site had identified fragments of hewn stone and pottery shards from the Hellenistic, Byzantine, early Muslim, and Ottoman eras.

Tzinamon said that the illicit dig had exposed a wall constructed of "very high-quality" stonework as well as roof tiles and glass vessels that could indicate that the site was once home to a church. He said that the IAA would conduct a salvage excavation to save the finds that remains, and learn as much as possible about it.

Dr. Eitan Klein, deputy head of the Robberies Prevention Union, said that the site in question has yet to be researched, and therefore "any damage to the archaeological layers and archaeological artifacts there comprise mortal, irreversible damage that makes it difficult for archaeologists to understand the history of the site and the people who lived near it throughout the generations.

"It's incredible that people take the law into their own hands and for the sake of greed, damage and destroy antiquities and prevent the general public in Israel from enjoying its heritage," Klein said.

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Israeli researchers announced last week the discovery of an ancient Christian church in the Golan Heights that dates from the Byzantine Era.

An excavation team from the Israel Antiquities Authority said that the church dated back to 400 CE and had likely built upon a pagan temple dedicated to the Greek god Pan, according to The Times of Israel.

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According to Professor Adi Erlich of the University of Haifa, the 5th-century builders likely converted the ancient temple for their own purposes. Erlich also noted that the church may be the site where Jesus tasked Peter with establishing Christianity, as mentioned in Matthew 16:18.

"You are Peter and, on this rock, I will build my Church," the passage reads.

After discovering an inscription carved on an altar to Pan, the satyr god of shepherds, music, and sex, IAA archaeologists said they were confident the highly stylized open-air temple had once been dedicated to Pan.

The very word Banias, the name of the Golan Heights spring that is the source of the Jordan River, is thought to be a slight Arabic corruption and alteration of the word Panias or Paneus – a reference to the same god.

The church was discovered as part of a conservation project by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the University of Haifa to preserve monumental archaeology.

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

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The slaughter merited brief reports by international news outlets, then quickly faded from the spotlight – not surprising in a year where attacks on places of worship occurred with relentless frequency. Hundreds of worshippers and many clergy were killed at churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples.

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A two-week span in January illustrated the scope of this somber phenomenon. In Thailand, a group of separatist insurgents attacked a Buddhist temple, killing the abbot and one of his fellow monks. In the Philippines, two suicide attackers detonated bombs during a Mass in a Roman Catholic cathedral on the largely Muslim island of Jolo, killing 23 and wounding about 100. Three days later, an attacker hurled a grenade into a mosque in a nearby city, killing two Muslim religion teachers.

The worst was yet to come.

On March 15, a gunman allegedly fueled by anti-Muslim hatred attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people. The man arrested for the killings had earlier published a manifesto espousing a white supremacist philosophy and detailing his plans to attack the mosques.

At a national remembrance service two weeks later, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said New Zealanders had learned the stories of those impacted by the attacks – many of them recently arrived immigrants.

"They were stories of those who were born here, grew up here, or who had made New Zealand their home. Who had sought refuge or sought a better life for themselves or their families," she said. "They will remain with us forever. They are us."

On Easter Sunday – April 21 – bombs shattered the celebratory services at two Catholic churches and a Protestant church in Sri Lanka.

Other targets, in coordinated suicide attacks by local militants, included three luxury hotels. But Christian worshippers at the three churches – including dozens of children – accounted for a large majority of the roughly 260 people killed.

The victims at St. Anthony's Shrine in Colombo included 11-month-old Avon Gomez, his two older brothers, and his parents.

The day's biggest death toll – more than 100 – was at St. Sebastian's, a Catholic church in the seaside town of Negombo. It's known as "Little Rome" due to its abundance of churches and its role as the hub of Sri Lanka's small Catholic community.

The attacks surprised many in the predominantly Buddhist country, where the Christian community totals about 7% of the population and has long avoided involvement in bitter ethnic and religious divides.

Six days after Easter, more than 9,400 miles (15,000 kilometers) from Sri Lanka, a gunman opened fire inside a synagogue in Poway, California, as worshippers celebrated the last day of Passover. A 60-year-old woman was killed; an 8-year-old girl and two men, including the Chabad of Poway's rabbi, were wounded.

Some congregation members said the slain woman, Lori Kaye, blocked the shooter by jumping in front of Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, whose two index fingers were injured.

The man charged with murder and attempted murder in the attack, John T. Earnest, could face the death penalty if he is convicted of murder, although prosecutors haven't yet said whether they will pursue capital punishment.

At a court hearing in September, prosecutors played a 12-minute recording of Earnest calmly telling a 911 dispatcher that he had just shot up a synagogue to save white people from Jews.

The attack occurred exactly six months after 11 people were killed at a Pittsburgh synagogue in the deadliest assault on Jews in US history.

An additional anti-Semitic bloodbath was narrowly averted in October when an armed assailant tried to blast his way into a synagogue in Halle, Germany, where scores of worshippers were attending services on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism.

Unable to break through a locked door, the gunman went on a rampage in nearby streets, killing two people and wounding two others.

Authorities said the 27-year-old German man who has confessed to the attack had posted an anti-Semitic screed before the assault and broadcast the shooting live on a popular video game site.

In contrast to the Poway and Halle attacks, where authorities have identified suspects and motives, some of the worst attacks on houses of worship unfold without arrests or claims of responsibility.

In October, for example, more than 60 people were killed in a bombing during Friday prayers at a mosque in the village of Jodari in eastern Afghanistan.

No group claimed responsibility and authorities offered conflicting explanations of how the bombing was carried out.

One common element of all the attacks: Dismay that many people of faith now have reason for apprehension as they gather for worship.

"No one should have to fear going to their place of worship," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom after the Poway attack. "No one should be targeted for practicing the tenets of their faith."

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The wood piece, just a few inches long, was once kept in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. It was handed over earlier this week to the custodian of the Bethlehem church, who said it brought "great honor to believers and pilgrims in the area.".

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The provenance of ancient relics is often questionable. Still, they are revered by the Christian faithful, among them the many pilgrims who squeeze through a narrow sandstone entrance in the Church of the Nativity to visit the birth grotto that is its centerpiece.

According to the Custos of the Holy Land for the Catholic church, Francesco Patton, the relic dates back more than 2,000 years and was sent to the Vatican in the 7th century.

Encased in a silver-colored ornamental tabletop stand, it was unveiled to the public on Friday at the Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center. Marching bands greeted the relic as it arrived in Bethlehem on Saturday. It was placed in Saint Catherine's Church, at the Church of the Nativity compound in Manger Square.

"We are proud that part of the manger is back in Bethlehem because we feel that the soul of God is with us more than before," said Chris Giacaman, 53, a Bethlehem homemaker, as she stood outside the church.

Others were a little letdown.

"It's a small piece, we thought it would be a bigger piece," said Sandy Shahin Hijazeen, 32. "When we heard that the manger is coming back we thought it would be the whole manger, but then we saw it."

After night fell, the traditional lighting of the Christmas tree ceremony was underway as hundreds gathered at Manger Square to celebrate the start of the holiday season.

With a bright red star gleaming at its top, the giant tree was illuminated by hundreds of golden-white bulbs as fireworks lit up the night sky.

Bethlehem is usually particularly busy ahead of Christmas on Dec. 25, with tourists and pilgrims flocking to the Biblical city. Christians make up around 1% of the Palestinian population in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem.

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The dig uncovered floors decorated with vast mosaics depicting birds, fruit and plants, colorful frescoes, and a curious Greek inscription that has baffled the researchers.

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"We found one inscription in the courtyard of the church which dedicates the site in the memory of a 'glorious martyr,'" said Benyamin Storchan, who directed the excavation. "The martyr is unnamed and it's still a mystery."

The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) dates the shrine, located about 10 miles west of Jerusalem, to the sixth century CE.

An underground crypt found below the main part of the church is believed to have housed the martyr's remains. "This is the holiest place in the church," said Storchan, adding that pilgrims likely frequented the site.

Though the martyr in question is unknown, Storchan said the lavishness of the complex may indicate this person was an important figure. Another inscription showed Byzantine emperor Tiberius II Constantinus had helped fund the church's later expansion.

"We know of a few hundred churches in the Holy Land but this church by far surpasses most of them by its state of preservation and the imperial involvement which funded it," said Storchan.

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"We extend our heartfelt condolences to the families of the innocent victims and wish a speedy recovery to the injured. We stand by the Egyptian people in their battle against terrorism," Netanyahu said in a statement posted on the Prime Minister's Office website.

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Egyptian officials initially said the explosion was caused when a car driving against traffic collided with three other cars. The investigation had found that the car involved in the incident had been stolen a few months ago.

Video: Reuters

"The initial technical examination also showed that the car contained explosives, and the collision led to their detonation. It is estimated that the car was being transported to a location for use in the execution of a terrorist operation," Egypt's Interior Ministry said.

Egypt's Interior Ministry said Hasm, a group linked to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, was behind the attack.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi vowed to "face and root out terrorism" and expressed his condolences to the families.

Monday's attack was the deadliest one in Cairo since the Islamic State group bombed a chapel next to the main Egyptian Coptic Christian cathedral in December 2016 during Sunday Mass, killing 30 people.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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