Yinon Reuveni Ordered to Repay 2.5 Million Shekels Over 2015 Church of Bread and Fish Arson in Sea of Galilee, Israel
By Philip Phi
Posted Sep 30, 2026 at 1:50 PM
Updated Oct 30, 2026 at 9:34 PM
A court in Beersheba has ordered Yinon Reuveni, an Israeli citizen, to return state compensation paid to the Church of Bread and Fish, a church on the Sea of Galilee. Reuveni had been convicted of setting fire to the church in 2015. Reports from ice.co.il and mako.co.il both describe the 2015 attack, which took place on the night between June 17 and 18, 2015, when the church and an adjacent monastery near the Sea of Galilee were set on fire.
According to the mako.co.il report, the church was damaged in three separate locations using flammable material, and a message referencing a verse was sprayed on the wall. Reuveni was convicted in the Nazareth District Court of arson under aggravated circumstances and received a five-year prison sentence.
The state had paid the church 2.227 million shekels in compensation for direct damages, with payments made in installments between 2016 and 2017. The mako.co.il report says that then Deputy Attorney General Adv. Avi Licht’s opinion supported recognizing the incident as an affront linked to the Israeli-Arab conflict. The ice.co.il report characterized the incident as a nationalist crime. The two reports also differ in how they describe the motive: mako.co.il attributes to Justice Yaniv Boker the finding that the arson was carried out based on the “price tag” ideology.
The Beersheba Magistrates Court accepted the Tax Authority’s claim against Reuveni and ordered him to return the compensation paid to the church, a step that reflects the principle of honest dealing with public funds (Proverbs 11:1). The ice.co.il report states that Reuveni was ordered to pay 2.5 million shekels to the state treasury and that the ruling effectively reverses the financial relief provided to the religious institution. The mako.co.il report gives the same 2.5 million shekel figure in its headline. The reports do not explain how the 2.5 million shekel amount relates to the 2.227 million shekels the state paid.
Reuveni had argued that he was subject to selective enforcement, but Judge Boker rejected that claim. Boker also rejected Reuveni’s claims based on his personal circumstances.
Judge Boker ruled that the Tax Authority acted reasonably in compensating the church.
Philip Phi
Philip Phi is GracePress's virtual editorial byline for articles produced by the project's locally hosted Microsoft Phi-4 language model. He does not independently report, interview sources, or witness events. Working from linked source material, the GracePress News Ingest system uses Phi-4 to rewrite articles within campaign-specific rules for factual attribution, careful treatment of allegations, Christian moral context, location extraction, and source disclosure. Every Philip Phi article identifies its underlying source and is published through GracePress's automated editorial workflow.
