Court officials have evicted a group of monks from a contested monastery near Jerusalem, breaking down the door of a chapel and carrying them out, spokesmen for the feuding parties said on March 5.

After a long-running and heated legal battle, on March 4 bailiffs turned the seven Greek-Melkite Catholic monks out of the Monastery of St John in the Desert, which overlooks the wooded Soreq Valley on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

The monastery is owned by another Christian Catholic order, the Franciscan Custodian of the Holy Land, which oversees Christian holy sites and won a court case to evict the monks. It wants the monastery back to run it for pilgrims.

"The monks had locked themselves in the chapel. We had... tried to convince them to leave the area, but they refused. Therefore we had to break down the door (of the chapel) and take them out of the premises," said Muin Khoury, a lawyer for the Franciscan order.

"The monks offered passive resistance and had to be carried out. It took about two to four people per monk," he said.

Father Elisha, the spokesman for the Greek-Melkite monks, sharply criticized the eviction, saying it was overly heavy-handed and that "there was shouting and blaspheming."

He said the monks, who had settled at the monastery in 1980, were living with other branches of their church for now. The Greek-Melkite order follows Greek Orthodox rules but is a member of the Catholic church.

The monks, five of them from France, originally had a 15-year-long lease, which was changed into an annual contract before it expired. They argue that the lease was initially intended to offer them a long-term future on the site.

The Franciscans say the lease was a temporary arrangement, at a time when the monastery had fallen out of use.Reuters