Newsrooms I know so well blasted out bulletins that settlers had torched Taybeh’s 1,500-year-old Church of St. George. I know the news cycle, too. The damage is done, but the truth still deserves its own headline.
Anyone who has covered Israeli-Palestinian friction for more than five minutes knows how swiftly a bushfire rumor can leap language barriers and ignite international outrage.
This time, the spark was struck last Monday, when Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III, flanked by Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa and 20 foreign diplomats, stood beside the hillside basilica near Tulkarm and pronounced that “radical settlers” had tried to torch it.
A few well-placed cameras, a practiced tone of moral indignation, and a ready-made villain were all the global media needed. Within hours, wire services were selling the image of Israeli arsonists gleefully burning down an ancient church.
Four days later, former Arkansas governor turned US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee arrived to survey the “crime scene.” He labeled the incident “an act of terror” that warranted “harsh consequences.”
His remarks rocketed across American cable shows before viewers could finish their breakfast cereal. By the time the weekend rolled around, the story was no longer a claim; it was the truth.
There was, of course, one small problem: Limestone doesn’t burn. A fact-checking team from The Press Service of Israel (TPS-IL) slowed down the Taybeh Municipality’s own video and noticed something that every headline writer missed: The supposed arsonists, teenage farmhands from the adjacent Jewish ranch, were running toward the flames with reflective vests and a compressed-air blower, the sort of equipment firefighters use to smother shrub fires.
One of them, a 16-year-old shepherd identified only as Y., told TPS-IL he had phoned the farm for help, stripped off his shirt to beat back the flames, and was promptly rewarded with a hail of stones from villagers emerging from the cemetery.
The farm’s owner had already lodged police complaints about pastureland fires on July 7, 8, and 11 – dates that precisely match the “arson attempts” cited by church officials.
Those details never found their way into the early reports. They didn’t fit the template.
The archaeologist with a camera
Mateh Binyamin Regional Council spokesperson Eliana Passentin, who is an archaeologist with a master’s degree in the subject, decided to see the “charred ruins” for herself. She walked the perimeter with her cellphone recording and found nothing but a blackened strip of weeds that halted at a low retaining wall.
“I don’t see any signs of a fire,” she says in the now‑viral clip. “I don’t see a church burned down here. Even on the outer walls, there are no signs of fire. Someone has an interest in making you believe Jews burned a church. It makes a great story when you have enough funding to spread the word.”
Passentin’s tone is exasperated rather than triumphant. She knows the cost of fabricated outrage: It corrodes trust between Christian friends and Jewish neighbors, falsifies the historical record, and crowds out genuine instances of anti-Christian vandalism that actually deserve attention.
Amit Barak, a researcher who has spent a decade helping Arabic-speaking Christians integrate into the IDF and Sherut Leumi (National Service), was direct: “Yesterday, the villain was simply ‘The Jew.’ Today, it’s ‘The settler.’ The label updates the trope for modern audiences, but the reflexive blame is exactly the same.”
Indeed, accusing Jews of torching churches plays nicely into the World Council of Churches’ recent call to sanction Israel and brand the Jewish state as an apartheid regime. This document stripped off decades of polite ecumenical varnish and laid bare a deeply political agenda.
Israel Ganz, chairman of The Yesha Council (the umbrella organization representing communities in Judea and Samaria), called the Taybeh saga a “blood libel engineered to harvest headlines and diplomatic leverage.”
If that phrase sounds over the top, recall how many politicians thundered about a “burned Catholic church in the West Bank” before quietly deleting their tweets.
Monday night’s reality check
The police finally poured cold water on the fevered narrative: The church walls are unscathed, no smoke ever reached the roofless nave, and investigators are examining a brush fire in an adjacent field, period.
Whether that blaze was a result of negligence or malice remains under investigation, but the structural integrity of Church of St. George was never in question.
Possibly embarrassed, Huckabee has since clarified on X/Twitter that he did not assign blame and merely condemned whoever set the fire, “whoever they may be.”
It was a gentle about-face, but the damage had been done. The correction will zip around the world at a fraction of the original speed, and many newsrooms will bury it in their overnight updates – if they report it at all.
Taybeh’s Christians make up part of the Holy Land’s dwindling 1% Christian minority, and they deserve protection from vandalism and harassment. So do the Jewish farmers whose grazing fields have been torched three times this month.
Both truths can coexist. What does not coexist with responsible journalism is the breathless rush to proclaim that “settlers burned down a church” – when not even the charred weed line reaches the sanctuary wall.
These pages have repeatedly warned that lazy retweet journalism does more than mislead readers; it fuels diplomatic spats, hardens sectarian resentment, and, most ironic of all, distracts from the real persecution Palestinian Christians face inside the Palestinian Authority, where church lands are routinely expropriated, Christian history is scrubbed from textbooks, and believers are driven abroad.
Stone churches outlast brush fires. Reputations do not. The next time a dramatic clip appears to confirm your worst suspicions about Israelis, or Palestinians, take a breath, watch it in slow motion, and remember that limestone doesn’t burn – but the truth can.