ICC Note: The December 11 church bombing is not an isolated case of cruelty and persecution committed against Christians. In fact, in the past years they have clashed with military personnel, faced enraged mobs and suffered immensely for nothing more than their faith. While the Egyptian government claims to protect the minority, local authorities in many places ignore this and allow for atrocities to be committed against Christians.

12/22/2016 Egypt (NYTimes):The Dec. 11 bombing of a church in the Cairo cathedral complex — the seat of the Coptic pope — has been claimed by the Islamic State, although the Egyptian government has blamed the Muslim Brotherhood. Whoever planted the bomb that killed 27 people, including a 10-year-old girl, when it ripped through a church full of Sunday worshipers understood well how endemic bigotry in Egypt has left Christian lives at the whim of a regime that pays lip service to protecting them, armed Islamists who actively seek them harm, and a public that largely does not care.

To gauge the enormity of what happened at the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, imagine a bombing in a church within the Vatican complex. Egyptian churches have been bombed before, but this was the first time a bomb had been taken inside a church to directly target worshipers; and it was the first time that Islamic State affiliates in Egypt targeted civilians after months of attacking the police and, in the Sinai province, the military.

Coptic Christians are the largest Christian community in the Middle East, numbering about 10 percent of Egypt’s 90 million people. The cruel reality for Egyptian Christians is that only the Egyptian military has killed more Christians in recent times than did the Dec. 11 bombing. In October 2011, 28 Christians were killed in clashes with the military outside the Maspero television building in Cairo. They were protesting against an attack on a church.

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The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights has documented at least 77 cases of sectarian attacks on Copts between 2011 and 2016 in the province of Minya alone. In that state, south of Cairo, Christians are estimated to make up about one-third of the population. Pope Tawadros, the head of the Coptic Church, has said that attacks against Christians have occurred on average about once a month over the past three years.

In May, hundreds of Muslims set fire to homes of Christians in Minya. The unrest began after rumors that a Christian man had had an affair with a Muslim woman. The man fled with his wife and children, while his parents, fearing for their lives, went to the police. The police did nothing. The next day, around 300 Muslim men looted and burned the parents’ house and stripped the mother naked in the street. They also ransacked and set fire to six other houses, witnesses told Reuters.

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