Bravery comes in many guises, but in those whose work demands courage on a near-daily basis, it often takes the form of a certain studied nonchalance. Lasha Bluashvili, who makes his living clearing landmines, is a case in point. He would rather go to the trouble of making me a cup of tea – here in the Judean desert, the kettle stands on a gas canister inside an old oil drum – than talk of what I regard as his everyday heroism.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he says, fingers lightly tapping a cigarette packet. “We never forget the dangers. But everyone here knows their job. We are all very well trained.”

Is this project important to him?

“I don’t think about that.”

Well, is it satisfying?

“Let’s speak of this when we’re finished.”

I push him. Can he imagine that day? How will he feel then? For a few moments, he looks impassively around the tented area in which we’re sitting – at the jars of instant coffee, and the plastic tubs of hummus – until, finally, something inside him gives way.

Gleaming tour buses full of tourists to the River Jordan sweep swiftly past these crumbling, spectral churches

“Of course I’ll be happy,” he says, turning to face me again. He smiles. “We will have made history.”

Bluashvili, a bear of a man who wears his preternatural calmness like a suit of armour, is the leader of a 16-strong team of de-miners that since last March has been working on a site close to a section of the west bank of the River Jordan that tradition holds to be the spot where Jesus Christ was baptised by John the Baptist. The third most holy site in Christianity (after the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem) this place, known in Arabic as Qasr al-Yahud, was for hundreds of years one of pilgrimage – there are records of monasteries on the site dating from 400AD – and in the 1930s, seven churches were built here, each of them on a plot of 10,000 square metres (the land was parcelled up and sold to them by the British, during the period of its Mandate in Palestine). One, a Franciscan chapel, belongs to the Roman Catholic church; the others belong to six Orthodox churches: Coptic, Ethiopian, Greek, Romanian, Russian and Syriac (the Armenian Apostolic Church was also sold a plot by the British, but for some reason never built on it).

In these compounds – most also contain small dwelling places – lived the priests and monks who conducted services here, performed baptisms in the nearby river, and celebrated Epiphany, a feast day that in the Orthodox Church traditionally involves water rites.

But then, in June 1967, came the six-day war, in which Israel, anticipating attack from three of its Arab neighbours, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, struck first. Afterwards, a victorious Israel, having seized the West Bank from Jordan, turned the western side of the valley into a restricted military area and bordered it with 2,600 anti-tank mines. The churches, abandoned by order of the Israeli government, were reportedly booby-trapped, surrounded with antipersonnel mines, and left to fall into ruin. In the decades that followed, no one was able to worship in them; though this land lies within the West Bank, it remains an Israeli military zone, classified as Area C under the Oslo Accords.

Today, pilgrims have once again begun to flock here, but the gleaming tour buses that deliver them to the River Jordan sweep swiftly past these crumbling, spectral churches, along a narrow strip of land that was de-mined by the Israeli army in 2000, ahead of the visit of Pope John Paul II to the baptismal site (this strip, at the urging of the Pope, was opened to the public, albeit during tightly controlled hours, in 2011).

It is an extraordinary situation: one that could perhaps only happen here, in a country where so many things are so extreme. Is there anywhere else in the world where such numbers of tourists – annually, around 650,000 make the journey – find themselves in such close proximity to thousands of landmines? What on earth do these visitors think when they see the signs warning them of the dangers behind the chainlink fence that separates the minefield from the asphalt expanse of the car park, from the squat little building where they buy their postcards and wooden crosses and bottles of holy water?

I have wanted to write about Qasr al-Yahud since 2016, when I first heard of the plan to clear its minefield. The project to make safe this area is complex, and for many reasons. While mine clearance is always dangerous, laborious and expensive (it costs $10 to lay a mine, and $2,000 to lift one), here there are many additional problems: military maps that have proved to be inaccurate; mines that have been degraded by the desert conditions and are now highly unstable; the fact that in summertime, temperatures can reach 45C. And then there is the political situation. The chapels are owned by the various churches, institutions that are often rivalrous with one another, and which are also currently burdened in financial terms with supporting their imperilled communities in Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, the area itself – a Holy Site, governed by Israel’s Protection of Holy Places Law – is Palestinian territory, but managed by the (Israeli) Nature and Parks Authority on behalf of Cogat (Co-ordination of Government Activities in the Territories). To translate, even in a place where almost all land is contested, this hallowed ground has a number of competing claims on it.

In the days before I visit, the news from Israel isn’t good. There is trouble in Gaza following a botched Israeli covert operation in the territory that kills seven alleged Palestinian militants and one Israeli soldier; in retaliation, Gazan militants fire missiles into Israel. It seems so unlikely – nothing short of a miracle, in fact – that a project such as this one, which involves both sides of the conflict, could ever have got off the ground. But it has, and for this the credit must go to the Halo Trust, the world’s largest humanitarian mine clearance organisation (and the NGO that famously arranged for Princess Diana to walk through a minefield in Angola in 1997).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tourists queue to be baptised in the River Jordan. Tradition holds Qasr al-Yahud to be the spot where Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist. Photograph: Dalit Shacham/The Observer

It was Halo that secured the support of the churches (they and their congregations are a source of funding), and it is Halo that has enabled the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government to work together effectively at Qasr al-Yahud by acting as a neutral buffer between them. (This neutrality explains why, while some medical and engineering staff on the site are Palestinian, the mine clearers are neither Palestinian nor Israeli but Georgians, like Lasha Bluashvili, men who were originally trained by Halo to clear mines in their own country following the conflict with Russia in 2008.)

The Israeli National Mine Action Authority (INMAA) and the Palestinian Mine Action Centre (PMAC) might not talk directly to each other, but so far the Israeli government has contributed $535,000 in total to the project, while PMAC seems to be doing everything it can to make plain its support for the plan, albeit without ever quite acknowledging the Israelis’ contribution. “The Halo Trust is an honest broker,” said a smiling Osama Abu Hananah, the Palestinian general who runs PMAC, when I met him in Ramallah. (He also insisted we pose for photographs.)

Why, though, should anyone other than the churches regard this project as a priority? No one lives in this desolate spot; ostensibly, it has no obvious humanitarian benefits. The West Bank, where Halo has been clearing mines since 2014, is riddled with minefields, many of which are located inside villages; shouldn’t they come first? In his office at the Ministry of the Interior, General Hananah showed me photographs of the devastating injuries caused to Palestinians by landmines; one boy’s second degree burns at first made him so ashamed he spent his days hiding under his bed. A PMAC database estimates that there have been at least 1,000 casualties since 1967. Nowhere else in the world, Hananah insists, are landmines situated in such close proximity to civilians’ homes as they are in crowded Palestine.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theophilos III, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem: ‘We are a buffer zone between the Israelis and the Palestinians.’ Photograph: Rachel Cooke

Halo’s line is that it is promoting “interfaith dialogue”. But the project is also a newsworthy means of conveying its work to the world, which so often ignores the issue of minefields. Israel has not signed up to the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, so from its point of view, perhaps this project makes for some good international PR. It seems likely, too, that the Israelis feel competitive with Jordan, which has successfully developed the east side of the river bank (cleared of mines in 2012, it was subsequently declared a Unesco World Heritage Site). The Palestinians, meanwhile, know that there will be financial benefits for nearby Jericho, and for East Jerusalem, if tourist numbers rise once the churches reopen.

Above all, both sides seem to regard it as a sign of hope, a symbol of all that can be done when people find a way to work together – and perhaps this is why the project feels to me so remarkable, one of the most quietly significant stories I’ve ever worked on. I lived in Israel as a child; I’ve worked here regularly as an adult. I deeply love both it and the West Bank. But there is also no ignoring the fact that each time I arrive, the situation always feels a little worse, a little more intractable. At Qasr al-Yahud, though, I can’t help but feel just the smallest bit optimistic. Here is a chink of light. “What a wonderful thing this is,” says Moshe Hilman, a passing official from INMAA on the day of my visit. He opens his arms, as if he would embrace the place. His smile is almost as big as the desert sky.

But there’s something else at play here, too, and it has to do with faith – or, if you prefer, with myth. People in this part of the world tend to believe, and this takes its effect. Even to a non-believer, such an atmosphere can be both infectious and moving. “I am a religious person,” says Anwar Ermiliah, the young Palestinian (and Muslim) doctor whose job it will be to treat the wounded should there be an accident on the site. “So I’m very happy people will be able to pray here again.” Dispassionate and jokey as they are (they shrug like teenagers at the merest hint of praise), the phlegmatic Lasha Bluashvili and his team are all Orthodox, attending the Georgian church in Jerusalem every Sunday; they know their Bible, and though this makes no difference to the day-to-day nature of their work, it gilds it somehow – which is why he speaks of making history. This isn’t just any desert. These aren’t just any piles of rubble. What a story this is: something to tell their children, and their children’s children.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aba Zebeaman Samuel, who manages the Ethiopian Orthodox church and monastery. Photograph: Rachel Cooke

I arrive at Qasr al-Yahud one late November morning shortly after 7am, having driven from Jerusalem with Ronen Shimoni, Halo’s programme manager in the West Bank. Bluashvili and his team are already here eager to get started before the sun grows too warm, they usually have to wait for the Israeli army to open the gate – but things are still peaceful. The tourist coaches are yet to appear (from 8am, they will begin arriving in their dozens – which is slightly surreal given that, from a distance of less than a kilometre, I will then be contemplating the twisted remains of an Israeli army vehicle that reversed into a land mine earlier this year). But for now we have the place to ourselves. Except, of course, that we don’t, or not in the sense that we can just stroll around. At this point, some seven months from the date Halo expects the site to be fully cleared, the greater part of these 100 hectares is still strictly off-limits.

The first thing we do is climb to the top of a dune close to the tent that serves as the mine clearers’ rest area (they work for 40 minutes at a time, after which they must then rest for 20). Fifty years ago, this was an Israeli gun position: a concrete bunker marks the place where the soldiers would have crouched, gazing across at the enemy in Jordan. It’s a good vantage point. Shimoni explains which church is which, and then he points out the clearly visible lines of the anti-tank mines that surround the site, as neat as the animal footprints – probably a gazelle’s – I can also see. From here, you get not only a sense of the scale of the work Halo is doing, but also of something more ghostly. At what point exactly were these holy places abandoned, and how fast did this have to happen? No one seems to know the answer to these questions. But it must have been swift. Shimoni takes out his phone. Two of the churches are now clear of land mines: the Franciscan, and the Ethiopian. “This is what we found inside the Franciscan church,” he says, showing me a photograph. The image is of a cupboard, stacked with perfectly preserved china tea cups, plates and tins of food.

Shimoni and his colleague Tim Porter, who is visiting from Halo’s head office in Scotland, explain the various methods involved in 21st-century mine clearance. Nowadays, the technology available includes a sophisticated magnetometer that measures distortions in the earth’s magnetic field caused by the presence of buried metal, and then generates a map of their location. Sometimes, though, there is no substitute for the human hand. On occasion, the de-miners use a technique known as the “bucket rake” to inspect contaminated soil that may contain smaller, harder-to-detect (but still dangerous) mine remnants and other bits of unexploded ordnance, and as we look down on the road that runs through the site, it is this method they’re currently deploying now work has begun. It is heart-stopping to see. An area of land having been mechanically excavated to a minimum depth of 35cm, the soil is then spread along the road by an armoured front loader. The de-miners, wearing their blue kevlar aprons and polycarbonate visors, stand at intervals alongside it. Each one has in his hand a rake, with which he then picks through it. Is this dangerous? “Well, the rakes have quite long handles,” says Shimoni. I think that means yes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Halo project manager Ronen Shimoni, left, Rachel Cooke and visiting Halo colleague Tim Porter survey the Qasr al-Yahud site from the dunes. Photograph: Dalit Shacham/The Observer

The team of 16 is split in two. All are trained in basic medicine, so that, should something go wrong, those who are resting rather than working are on hand to provide support. Meanwhile, Dr Ermiliah and an ambulance driver (both are on site full time) will be radioed; they, in turn, will radio an Israeli army ambulance in Jericho, which will take the casualty to hospital in Jerusalem. When we come down from the dune, Shimoni shows me where the medical supplies, and a fire extinguisher, are kept. Nearby is a pile of mortar cases, gathered from the site over the months. Should the men’s tendency to josh, and their moans about the strictness of Israeli health and safety regulations, distract me, even briefly, from the seriousness of their purpose, here is the corrective – these things, and the way Dr Ermilah casually drops the word “amputation” into our conversation.

After this, we visit the two safe churches. The Franciscan church is small and plain (to walk to it I, too, must wear personal protection; the site is clear, but has not yet been signed off as being so). The monks’ former accommodation is on the ground floor, and the chapel on the roof and open to the air (Epiphany, which in this part of the world marks the baptism of Christ rather than the adoration of the Magi, is traditionally celebrated outside). The building is pockmarked with bullet holes, and for a time I stand at its altar, staring across at Jordan, where its own collection of chapels stands intact and immaculate. I see the line of vegetation that marks the now desperately depleted river, and beyond it the domes of what must be a Russian orthodox church, golden in the sunlight.

But it is the Ethiopian Church that captures my imagination. Apart from the de-miners who spent five months making this compound safe, the Archbishop of the Ethiopian Church in Jerusalem and one of his priests, I am the first person to stand inside this building since it was abandoned in 1967. For all its dereliction, it is hauntingly beautiful. Here is the tomb of some long dead Ethiopian bishop; there, high on a chancel wall, is a painting of the Ascension. The remnants of life that are all about are so poignant. Upstairs, in a room that must once have been occupied by a monk is a flimsy pamphlet entitled Agriculture in Ethiopia – a reminder that the inhabitants of this dry and dusty place had somehow to cultivate their own crops. When I wander on to the church’s roof, I notice that the lightbulbs that would once have made its iron cross visible from miles away are, miraculously, nearly all unbroken. It’s dizzying, the way the years seem suddenly to concertina, past and present colliding in a manner that is both uncommon and uncommonly powerful.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lasha Bluashvili, right, with Tim Porter of the Halo Trust. Photograph: Dalit Shacham/The Observer

Before my visit to Qasr al-Yahud, I make house calls on some of those with a stake in what’s happening there. A friend I email from my hotel says that these encounters sound like something out of Robert Byron (the Englishman who made his name writing about the Middle East in the 1930s), and it’s true: for 48 hours, I feel like some slightly confused time-traveller, one who must strive to get her head round her interviewees’ capacity for embellishment and a certain kind of myth-making even as she shows her respect for their traditions, rituals and customs. Not that this isn’t exciting. As I wait for my audience with His Beatitude Theophilos III, the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem – a retainer brings me a tiny glass of cognac and a large bowl of sweets – I have a rising sense of elation: so many doors are swinging open for me. But I feel more and more that I’m sitting on top of a giant onion. What layers are here, and how tricky it can be to peel them.

Those I meet are keen to tell me of their own church’s long history in the Holy Land in general, and at the baptismal site in particular. It’s a kind of competition. Father Sergey Loktionov, a Franciscan monk at St Saviour’s Monastery in Jerusalem, begins by telling me that Franciscan pilgrims certainly visited the site in the 15th century, and probably before that. He then shows me a series of photographs of the Franciscans at Qasr al-Yahud that date back to the late 19th century – in one, the fathers are performing a baptism in the river from a tiny wooden boat – as well as the chapel’s last visitor book. “Look,” he says, turning its pristine pages, “the final entry is from January 1967: pilgrims from Nigeria.” What does the clearance of the site mean to him? “It means life,” he says.

At the Ethiopian Monastery not many minutes’ walk away, I meet Aba Zebeaman Samuel, the Wani Megabi of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (the Archbishop is in Ethiopia; Megabi is translated for me as “manager”). He wears a navy cassock, and a huge diamante cross. In Jerusalem the Ethiopians are famously marginalised: at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the site where Christ was crucified and was buried, its monks were long ago forced out, and now inhabit the roof (control of the church is shared among six denominations). But this seems hardly to matter to Samuel. Those who “push and push” the Ethiopians are just so many johnny-come-latelys. “The history of the Ethiopian church is like an ocean, it’s so big,” he says, with a smile. “We are the oldest church here.” The Queen of Sheba, he insists, was an Ethiopian; this marked the beginning of the presence of Ethiopians in this land. Later, after the Ascension of Christ, the Queen of Ethiopia sent a messenger to meet St Philip. What about the baptismal site? “For a long time, our monks lived there without any shelter, under the trees. Then the wife of Haile Selassie saw their suffering. She bought the plot, and paid for the church. We’re so happy to get it back.”

Told to the smell of incense and the distant sound of bells ringing, these are beguiling stories, even given the difficulties of translation (Father Sergey, who is Russian, speaks Italian to a Palestinian colleague who then puts everything into English). But they only say so much. It’s left to Jerusalem’s most powerful and wily churchman, Theophilos III, to weigh for me the churches’ power in Israel – and thus to reveal why he in particular has been so encouraging to Halo. This he does in a long receiving room at the Greek Patriarchate, a secluded realm of marble and gold, where he awaits me on a throne-like chair inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In Jerusalem, meeting the Greek Patriarch is not unlike meeting the Pope (around 80,000 Israeli Arabs and Palestinians are Greek Orthodox, a figure that hardly bears testament to the Patriarch’s singular power, especially in Jerusalem). Thrillingly, I have him to myself for 40 minutes: a clear sign of how important the work at Qasr al-Yahud is.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The tail of a mortar shell in front of the abandoned Syriac church at Qasr al-Yahud in the West Bank. Photograph: Dalit Shacham/The Observer

The Patriarch regards what is happening there as a symbol of reconciliation. But he also makes it clear that he believes that once the chapels are in use again, the church will be better able to play a part, if necessary, in keeping this land from appropriation by “radical groups” – by which, even if he doesn’t use the word, he means settlers. After all, this is what it has done elsewhere. “In Jerusalem, our inheritance is a spiritual one,” he says (his English, like his Arabic, is fluent). “We are the mother church. Our first bishop was St James, the brother of Christ. But we have a physical inheritance, too, in the form of the buildings we own: our basilicas, monasteries, and houses. Inside the walls of the Old City, and outside it, too, there are 30 monasteries that belong to us, and their location is of paramount significance from a strategic point of view. They guard and maintain the current religious demography in the city. We are a buffer zone between the various entities, between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

The churches in Israel, he says, have more heft than people imagine. Yes, there are “family problems”. But these days, the denominations are closer, and not averse to using soft power to make a point. When the city of Jerusalem recently announced a plan to tax church properties on which there are no houses of worship, a move the churches believed would affect some of their poorest (Arab) congregants, they took the unprecedented decision to close the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for three days in protest, a move that was reported across the world. It worked; the municipality backed off. “We don’t want to become activists,” he says. “But here, politics is always involved.”

For a while, we talk of Epiphany, a service, not many weeks away now, that is increasingly associated with the green movement. “We bless the waters and all creation,” he says. After this, he presses a buzzer, and in file two priests. They kiss his hand, and one hands him a slim parcel, which he then passes to me: a copy of a famous icon in the Greek Orthodox church in the Garden of Gethsemane. From beneath his kalimavkion – his veiled black hat – he beadily contemplates this visiting journalist from London. Possibly, she is a cynic. Almost certainly, she is godless. “Don’t always look at the past,” he says, with sudden firmness. “Look at the present. Where you see a plant flowering, that should be enough.” Halo must raise more money if it is to complete its work at Qasr al-Yahud next year. It’s his conviction that this will be forthcoming. These green shoots must be watered and He, or someone, will provide.

• This article was amended on 12 December 2018 to clarify a reference to the six-day war in 1967. Israel, anticipating being attacked, struck first.