It was not how the Rev. Maroun Ghafari had imagined this Holy Week. For years he led Easter services in his mainly Christian village of Alma al-Shaab in southern Lebanon near the Israeli border. This year he preached from a Beirut suburb beside a cardboard cutout of his church, which now lies amid fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah.
Since hostilities flared last month between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah — in the context of a wider U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran — more than 1,400 people have been killed in Lebanon and over a million forced from their homes. Thousands of those displaced from the south are Christians, now separated from ancestral churches where Christians have lived through centuries of Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman rule and repeated modern crises.
Christians are estimated to be about a third of Lebanon’s roughly 5.5 million people, and with 12 Christian sects the country has the largest share of Christians in the Arab world.
Huddling in churches for protection, some villagers who ignored Israel’s evacuation warnings became isolated enclaves as clashes intensified. Though Alma al-Shaab residents had been uprooted before in the 2024 Israel-Hezbollah war, they initially resolved to stay, even as airstrikes neared. They sheltered in their church while Israeli warplanes struck wide areas of southern and eastern Lebanon, Israeli ground forces pressed in and Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel.
In his Easter homily, Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rai blamed both Hezbollah and Israel for the suffering, saying the country was “going through a critical situation due to Iranian interference through Hezbollah and Israeli aggression” and lamenting the victims of the conflict imposed on Lebanon.
The killing of 70-year-old Sami Ghafari, who left the church briefly on March 8 to tend his garden and was struck by an Israeli drone, prompted the remaining villagers — including his brother Maroun — to leave. UN peacekeepers in the area, part of the long-standing UNIFIL mission, evacuated them to northern Beirut suburbs.
“We wanted to stay, but it was always possible that one of us could be targeted or killed at any moment,” Rev. Maroun Ghafari told The Associated Press from St. Anthony Church in the Jdeideh suburb, where the displaced worshipped on Saturday. “Everyone is tired, and we see that war brings nothing but destruction, death and displacement.”
The displacement altered familiar Holy Week rituals. On Holy Saturday many Lebanese Christians traditionally visit graves of loved ones; this year the displaced could only reflect from afar. Nabila Farah, dressed in black at the St. Anthony service and one of the last to leave Alma al-Shaab, said she still felt heartbroken a month on. “You miss the smell of home, the lovely traditions and customs, the sounds of the bells of three churches ringing,” she said. “As much as we experience the Easter atmosphere here, it will never be as it is over there.”
Those who stayed faced other challenges. In Tyre, a southern city where many Christians remain, Father Marius Khairallah said clergy and congregants stayed “not out of stubbornness, but out of a sense of mission, to remain alongside their fellow faithful, as witnesses.” He noted many parishioners had been displaced or were absent, but churches kept their doors open and prayers continued, even with fewer voices.
Concerns grew as the Lebanese army sought to remain neutral but withdrew from parts of the south, raising fears that civilians would be exposed as Israeli forces advanced. At St. Antony’s, the Rev. Dori Fayyad used his Good Friday sermon to note the widening toll on southern Christians as worshippers prayed in Arabic and Syriac. “Today, you understand what the cross means, not as an idea, not as a concept, but because you are going through it,” he told a packed church, where dozens had to stand or crouch on the back stairs.
Some parishioners wiped away tears as Fayyad named the southern churches, their images shown on cardboard cutouts beside the pulpit. “These churches in these villages are not only places of worship,” he said. “They are silent witnesses to suffering and to faith.”
