Displaced Lebanon’s Christians mark Easter far from their homes, churches

Jdeideh (Lebanon), April 5: It was not how the Rev Maroun Ghafari had envisioned this Holy Week – for years, he had held Easter sermons in his predominantly Christian village of Alma al-Shaab in southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel.
This year, he is preaching from a Beirut suburb, beside a cardboard cutout depicting his church in Alma al-Shaab, now caught in the crossfire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters.
Since hostilities erupted last month between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group – in the shadow of the wider US-Israeli war on Iran – over 1,400 people have been killed in Lebanon, and more than 1 million have been forced to flee their homes.
Among those displaced from the war-torn south are thousands of Christians. They now find themselves far from their ancestral churches in Lebanon, where Christians have maintained a strong presence through centuries of Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman conquest and plenty of modern-day crises.
This year, displaced Christians could only reflect from afar.
Marius Khairallah, a priest in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, where much of the Christian community has hunkered down, says that he and his congregants are staying put “not out of stubbornness, but out of a sense of mission, to remain alongside their fellow faithful, as witnesses.” “A significant number of parishioners have been displaced or are absent,” he said. (AP)