Three Greek Orthodox clergy who started the punch-up with Franciscans were released from custody but may still face charges.

Both sides said they would try to resolve their differences. But rivalry has often boiled over between the six Christian sects that share the church on the site at Golgotha, where tradition dictates that Jesus was crucified and buried.

A fragile peace is maintained by a book of rules, known as the “status quo”, that took centuries to hammer out and governs the tiniest details of life in the church. Tensions have degenerated into violence because of some perceived infringement.

The spark for the latest fist-fight came when the Franciscans left open their chapel door as a Greek Orthodox procession approached. Greek Orthodox priests, annoyed because the door should have been closed, insulted Franciscans in the doorway and a brawl ensued.

Israeli police with batons took five minutes to break up the brawl. “Police were hit. Monks were hit. There were people with bloodied faces,” Aviad Sar Shalom, a guide, said.

One Franciscan was hauled by his rope belt from the chapel by Greek Orthodox clerics. “They’re trying to kill me, they want to kill me,” he wailed as he was beaten.

A Franciscan friar from Ghana fought his way into the fray to try to free his colleague. But it was an Arab photographer and a shopkeeper who freed him by cutting the rope. Shmuel Ben-Ruby, a spokesman for police in Jerusalem, said that both sides had been “told in no uncertain terms that this was no way for religious leaders to behave”.

Two years ago 11 monks from the Ethiopian Orthodox church were taken to hospital after a fight with members of the Egyptian Coptic Church.

So distrustful of one another are the denominations that responsibility for locking and unlocking the church each day has been in the charge of successive generations of a Muslim family.

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