Vice President JD Vance visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Israel, on Thursday, paying his respects to the traditional site where many Catholics believe that Jesus Christ was buried after his crucifixion.
Many Protestants believe that the true site lies outside the Old City in an area known as the Garden Tomb. Nevertheless, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre draws Christian visitors and pilgrims from all backgrounds.
Vance, who is on a three-day trip to Israel with his wifeto show solidarity with the Jewish state and to shore up support for President Donald Trump’s ceasefire deal in Gaza, recently converted to the Catholic faith.
He paused to kneel, as many pilgrims do, at the slab that is said to have been the stone where Jesus’s body was placed before being cleansed in preparation for traditional burial rites, prior to His later resurrection.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance tours The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025. (Nathan Howard/Pool Photo via AP)
Vance’s visit also coincided with the continued, albeit slow and belated, return of the remains of Israeli hostages who were murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023, or in captivity. Hamas is required to return all 28 bodies; thus far, it has only returned slightly more than half of those, saying the rest are difficult to find.
Israel rejects those claims and says that Hamas is violating the ceasefire to cling to its diplomatic leverage.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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