Fasting, Bombs, and Holy Week: How Christians in the Middle East Are Living Through Easter 2026

For Christians across the Middle East, Holy Week 2026 is happening in the middle of a war that has destroyed churches, restricted access to holy sites, and displaced millions. Here is how communities are observing.

The Maronite Catholic community in Byblos, Lebanon, has held Easter services in the same church since the 12th century. This year, the service on Palm Sunday was conducted with blackout curtains on the windows — not for ceremonial purposes, but because the church is within the threat radius of Israeli strikes on Hezbollah positions in the area, and parish council members decided that lit windows visible from the air created an unnecessary risk.

This is Holy Week in the Middle East in 2026: ancient ritual practices conducted in conditions that require military-grade precautions, in communities that have survived millennia of conquest, persecution, and upheaval but that are currently living through a conflict that Pope Leo XIV described, without exaggeration, as a 'brutal ordeal' whose consequences fall disproportionately on people who had no role in starting it.

The Christian communities of the Levant — Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Coptic, Latin Rite Catholics, Anglican, and dozens of other traditions — are among the most ancient Christian communities in the world. They have maintained continuity through the Ottoman period, through two world wars, through multiple Arab-Israeli conflicts, through Lebanon's civil war, through the Syrian war. The current conflict is not the worst thing any of these communities has experienced. It is happening in a world more connected than any previous conflict, which means the experience is documented, transmitted, and witnessed in ways that previous generations of Middle Eastern Christians could not have imagined.

Pope Leo's specific prayer for 'Christians in the Middle East who cannot fully observe the rites of these holy days' named exactly this experience — the Palm Sunday procession cancelled in Jerusalem, the priest in Byblos conducting Mass behind blackout curtains, the Lebanese Christian family sheltering in a Beirut apartment trying to observe the fast requirements of Holy Week without access to the churches where those observances are supposed to happen.