The Rev. Maroun Ghafari spent Holy Week far from the village where he has long led Easter services. For years he preached in Alma al-Shaab, a mostly Christian village in southern Lebanon near the Israeli border. This year he delivered his sermon from a Beirut suburb, standing beside a cardboard image of the church that now sits amid fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah.
Since the fighting erupted last month between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah — part of a broader U.S.-Israeli confrontation with Iran — more than 1,400 people have been killed in Lebanon and over a million people have fled their homes. Thousands uprooted from the south are Christians, cut off from ancestral churches where their communities have worshipped through centuries of Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman rule and through repeated modern crises.
Christians make up roughly a third of Lebanon’s population of about 5.5 million and, with a dozen Christian denominations, the country has the largest Christian proportion in the Arab world.
Many villagers sought shelter in churches as clashes intensified. Some who ignored evacuation warnings became isolated pockets of civilians trapped by advancing forces. In Alma al-Shaab, residents who had been displaced in the 2024 Israel-Hezbollah war initially resolved to stay. They took refuge in their church even as airstrikes hit wide areas of southern and eastern Lebanon, Israeli ground forces moved in and Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel.
In his Easter homily, Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rai criticized both Hezbollah and Israel, saying Lebanon was “going through a critical situation due to Iranian interference through Hezbollah and Israeli aggression,” and expressing sorrow for the victims of a conflict he described as imposed on the country.
The death of 70-year-old Sami Ghafari was a turning point. He left the church briefly on March 8 to tend his garden and was killed by what residents said was an Israeli drone strike. After his killing, the remaining villagers — including his brother, the Rev. Maroun Ghafari — decided to leave. UN peacekeepers serving with the long-standing UNIFIL mission evacuated them to suburbs north of Beirut.
“We wanted to stay, but any one of us might have been targeted at any moment,” Rev. Maroun Ghafari said from St. Anthony Church in the Jdeideh suburb, where the displaced gathered to worship. “Everyone is tired. War brings only destruction, death and displacement.”
The upheaval changed familiar Holy Week practices. On Holy Saturday many Lebanese Christians customarily visit the graves of relatives; this year those who were forced out could only pray from a distance. Nabila Farah, dressed in black at the St. Anthony service and among the last to leave Alma al-Shaab, said she remained heartbroken a month later. She said she missed “the smell of home, the beloved traditions, and the sound of three church bells ringing.” She added that the Easter atmosphere in exile could not match that of their village.
Those who remained in southern towns faced other hardships. In Tyre, where many Christians have stayed, Father Marius Khairallah said clergy and worshippers remained not out of stubbornness but out of a sense of mission — to stand with the faithful as witnesses. Many parishioners had been displaced or were absent, yet churches kept their doors open and services continued with smaller congregations.
Anxiety grew as the Lebanese army tried to maintain neutrality but pulled back from parts of the south, raising fears that civilians would be more exposed as Israeli forces advanced. At St. Antony’s, the Rev. Dori Fayyad used his Good Friday sermon to speak about the mounting toll on southern Christians as parishioners prayed in Arabic and Syriac. “Today you understand what the cross means — not as an idea but because you are living it,” he told a packed church where dozens had to stand or crouch on the back stairs.
Parishioners wiped away tears as Fayyad read the names of southern parishes, their images displayed on cardboard cutouts beside the pulpit. “These village churches are more than buildings,” he said. “They are silent witnesses to both suffering and faith.”
