A Jerusalem court judge acquitted a man accused of attacking a Catholic nun based on an insanity defence, but ordered that he be committed to a psychiatric hospital for up to six years.
CCTV footage of the April incident captured the moment the nun was forced to the ground from behind, causing her to hit her head on a stone wall before being kicked. She was walking in Jerusalem’s Old City during the daytime 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 quarters: Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian.
Nuns walk on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the old city of Jerusalem on May 3, 2026.
HAZEM BADER / AFP via Getty Images
Clergy and advocates say verbal abuse and spitting have grown increasingly common in the densely packed heart of Jerusalem, where multi-faith occupants cross paths daily, mostly peacefully, as they visit some of the most sacred sites in their respective religions, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 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 experiencing a nearly three-year-long war.
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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 was charged with but upheld his insanity defence based on expert analysis that found he was psychotic when the attack occurred.
The director of The French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem, where the nun is a researcher, told The Associated Press that he hoped the man’s psychiatric hospitalization would be seen through “so that public safety can be assured, our colleague can recover psychologically, and people can live in and visit Jerusalem without fear, regardless of their belonging to any community.”
Yisca Harani, founder of the organization Religious Freedom Data Center, which tracks harassment of Christians, said even mentally unstable individuals can be influenced to act by their proximity to a dominant discourse.
“He is still someone who is the product of either the ignorance or the incitement that is around him,” she said. “Even if he is mentally unstable, he was fed with all that anti-Christian material that is around us now.”
Harani’s organization says there are three times as many anti-Christian incidents in Jerusalem compared to four years ago. In the last three months, it has recorded about one per day — almost all by Jewish religious nationalists.
George Deek, Israel’s new special envoy to the Christian world, said earlier this month that Israeli police had appointed an English-speaking officer as first point of contact for Christians in case of incidents, “so there will be a rapid response.”
–with files from the Associated Press
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