Suspected Jewish extremists torched part of a church-owned building in Jerusalem overnight, police said, in the second racist attack in the Holy land in two days.
The vandals set fire to an annexe of a Greek Orthodox seminary just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, and scrawled “graffiti insulting Jesus” on the building, police spokeswoman luba Samri said, describing it as a “nationalist” attack. There were no casualties and the fire was put out before causing significant damage, she added.
On Wednesday, a mosque near Bethlehem in the southern West Bank was set alight and anti-Arab slogans in Hebrew sprayed on a nearby wall. The Palestinian foreign ministry said that attack was tantamount to “an official declaration of religious war”, and the UN warned it could “inflame an already volatile environment.”