For a full week, a story ricocheted through international media claiming that Israeli settlers had burned down the 1,500-year-old Church of St. George in Taybeh. The tale reached television studios from London to Los Angeles before even the most basic fact-checking took place.
Late Monday night, the Israel Police punctured the narrative: “Contrary to misleading reports, no damage was caused to the Church of Saint George. The fire was confined to adjacent scrubland.”
That sober line should have stopped the runaway coverage in its tracks, but the genie was already out of the bottle. As Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Zvika Klein wrote Tuesday: “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.”
The chain reaction began last week, when Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III, flanked by Latin Patriarch Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa and more than 20 diplomats, declared on camera: “Radical Israelis from nearby settlements intentionally set fire near the town cemetery and the Church of St. George.”
Within days, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited the site and pronounced the incident “an act of terror” that merited “harsh consequences.” That quote, too, ran worldwide – rarely accompanied by photographs of the very solid, very unburned limestone basilica.
Independent reporting by The Press Service of Israel (TPS-IL) told a different story. A frame-by-frame review of video released by the Taybeh Municipality showed teenage Jewish farmhands sprinting toward the flames with a compressed-air blower – equipment used to contain, not ignite, brush fires.
One shepherd, identified only as Y., said he had tried beating back the flames with his shirt while Palestinian youths hurled stones at him. Police call logs confirm that the adjacent farm had filed arson complaints on July 7, 8 and 11, the same dates the church now cites as attacks on its compound.
Binyamin Regional Council spokesperson Eliana Passentin, a trained archaeologist, visited the scene with her cellphone camera rolling. “I don’t see any signs of a fire. Even on the outer walls there are no signs of burning,” she told viewers, pointing to a narrow strip of charred weeds halted by a stone retaining wall.
Her matter-of-fact walk-through has since been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, but it arrived long after the original headlines.
Taybeh’s Christians are part of a shrinking 1% minority in the Holy Land. They deserve protection from vandalism, harassment, and genuine hate crimes. So do Jewish farmers whose grazing fields have been torched three times this month.
When journalists rush to frame every brush fire as sectarian arson, they erode trust on all sides and trivialize the real persecution Palestinian Christians face daily – land expropriations, schoolbook erasure, and official discrimination under the Palestinian Authority.
Moreover, repeated false alarms have diplomatic costs. Huckabee has since tempered his remarks, noting on X/Twitter that he “did not assign blame” and welcomes “a thorough investigation.” Yet the initial sound bite remains lodged in countless social feeds, ready to be resurrected whenever the next flare-up occurs.
A church that survived everything almost fell because of bad journalistic rigor
The Church of St. George has survived earthquakes, conquest, and centuries of neglect. What nearly felled it this month was not fire but a failure of journalistic rigor.
We do not expect every newsroom to dispatch archaeologists before hitting “publish,” but we do expect editors to hold a story until at least one verifiable fact supports the accusation. When credible corrections emerge – as they did Monday night – they must receive the same prominence as the original claim.
The Israel Police continues to investigate who lit the dry brush beneath the basilica. If negligence or malice is proven – by Palestinian or Israeli hands – the perpetrator must face justice. Anything less would dishonor both the law and the Christian heritage we are duty bound to protect.
But justice also demands honesty in storytelling. In an information war where images travel faster than investigations, a single photo of unscorched limestone can undermine a week’s worth of sensational headlines. That image should lead tonight’s broadcasts.
The damage to public discourse is real, yet it is repairable. It begins with the same principle that has guided this newspaper since 1932: Facts first, outrage later – if at all. Truth may lag behind the first viral post, but it is never optional.