The last few decades have been terrible for Christians in the Levant and the wider Middle East. The Iraq War and the rise of Islamic State and other jihadist groups, as well as the Syrian civil war, have led to a huge exodus from the region. A report commissioned by Jeremy Hunt, the then Foreign Secretary, in 2019 described the situation as near a "genocide".
Since then, and especially this year, the position of Christians has deteriorated further, with state-sponsored persecution even occurring in countries with large Christian minorities. We have seen even more signs of the persecution of Christians, and in May the Egyptian state turned its gaze on one of the most famous Christian sites in Egypt: St Catherine's Monastery, at the foot of Mount Sinai.
