A Jerusalem court judge acquitted a man accused of attacking a Catholic nun on an insanity defense, but ordered him committed to a psychiatric hospital for up to six years.
CCTV footage of the incident in April captured the moment the nun was forced to fall to the ground from behind, causing her head to hit a stone wall before she was kicked. She was walking in the Old City of Jerusalem during the day when the attack occurred.
The more than 5,000-year-old Old City is surrounded by 16th-century Ottoman walls in East Jerusalem and is divided into four sections: Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian.
Nuns walk to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’s Old City on May 3, 2026.
Hazem Badr/AFP via Getty Images
Clergy and human rights advocates say verbal abuse and spitting have become increasingly common in the densely populated heart of Jerusalem, where residents of different faiths meet daily, mostly peacefully, as they visit some of the most sacred sites in their faiths, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount.
The violent beating of the nun was seen as a rare escalation in a region where people of all faiths have been suffering from an ongoing war for nearly three years.
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A judge ruled on Wednesday that there was sufficient evidence that a Jewish man from a settlement in the occupied West Bank committed the act he is accused of but upheld his insanity defense based on expert analysis that found he was psychotic when the attack occurred.
The director of the French Bible and Archaeological School in Jerusalem, where the nun works as a researcher, told the Associated Press that he hopes the man will be admitted to a psychiatric hospital “so that public safety can be guaranteed, our colleague can recover psychologically, and people can live in Jerusalem and visit it without fear, regardless of their affiliation to any community.”
Even mentally unstable individuals can be influenced to act because of their proximity to mainstream discourse, said Yeska Harani, founder of the Religious Freedom Data Center, which tracks harassment of Christians.
“It is still a product of ignorance or incitement surrounding it,” she said. “Even if he was mentally unstable, he was fed with all that anti-Christian material that is around now.”
Al-Harrani’s organization says the number of anti-Christian incidents in Jerusalem is three times what it was four years ago. In the past three months, it has recorded about one case a day — almost all of them by nationalist-religious Jews.
George Dick, Israel’s new special envoy to the Christian world, said earlier this month that Israeli police had appointed an English-speaking officer as the first point of contact for Christians in the event of incidents, “so there will be a quick response.”
—With files from The Associated Press
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