Heavily armed Israeli “settlers” and police attempted the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter yesterday, where Armenian Christians have lived since the 4th Century AD, roughly 1,600 years before the 1948 founding of the modern State of Israel.

On the evening of November 5th, armed Israeli “settlers”, accompanied by armed police officers, invaded the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, in an attempt to expel Christians from the area, seize their homes, and repopulate the neighborhood with Jews. By definition, the expulsion attempt constitutes ethnic cleansing and is part of a wider Israeli policy to remove Christians and Muslims from land that the Israelis want complete control of.

In what’s been described as both a “siege” and a “standoff”, Armenian Christians met the “settlers” and their accomplices at the walls of the Armenian Quarter and refused to allow them to advance.

Watch video footage of the anti-Christian ethnic cleansing attempt below: 

https://twitter.com/ZaraGiaa/status/1721305724264083920

Israeli government trying clear out the remaining Armenians in Jerusalem — they’ve been there for like 2 millennia and have zero to do with Hamas https://t.co/OjgqTFLH1X

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 6, 2023

As mentioned, the expulsion attempt, by definition, constitutes ethnic cleansing, which is defined as “the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogenous.”

Israel has long been accused of committing ethnic cleansing by way of the nation’s settlement programs which, as seen in the video footage above, involve armed Israeli “settlers” and law enforcement kicking racial and religious minorities out of their own homes.

The practice has long been used in areas populated by Palestinians and has repeatedly resulted in the deaths of residents unwilling to surrender their homes.

The attempted ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians in Israel comes just a few weeks after an entire city of Armenians was ethnically cleansed by Azerbaijani Muslims, in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Reportedly, over 120,000 Armenian Christians were forced to flee the area at the price of their lives, yet the blatant case of anti-Christian ethnic cleansing barely even made the news, because it coincided with the Hamas terror attacks that kicked off the current conflict in Israel and Gaza.

This story is developing. Stay with National File for further details as they become available.