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The birthplace of Jesus is marking a second subdued Christmas as locals continue to live under the shadow of the war in Gaza.
The town of Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, normally welcomes thousands of tourists around the holidays, but Manger Square was empty and the Christmas tree and festive lights were nowhere to be found this year.
Palestinian security forces arranged barriers near the Nativity Church, built atop the spot where Jesus is believed to have been born.
Mayor Anton Salman said: ‘Always the message of Bethlehem is a message of peace and hope. And these days, we are also sending our message to the world: peace and hope, but insisting that the world must work to end our suffering as Palestinian people.’
Bethlehem has suffered since war broke out between Israel and Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Visitors to the town plunged from around 2,000,000 in 2019 to just 100,000 in 2024, according to Jiries Qumsiyeh, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Tourism Ministry.
Tourism accounts for an estimated 70% of Bethlehem’s income – almost all of it from the Christmas season. Unemployment has also skyrocketed to around 50%, according to Mayor Salman.
Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the top Roman Catholic cleric in the Holy Land, said he hoped next year would be better.
‘This has to be the last Christmas that is so sad. I bring you the greetings, the prayers, of our brothers and sisters in Gaza,’ he told a crowd of hundreds in Manger Square.
Cardinal Pizzaballa held a special pre-Christmas mass at Holy Family Church in Gaza City on Sunday.
‘I saw everything destroyed, poverty, disaster, but I also saw life. They don’t give up, so we don’t give up,’ he added.
Bethlehem is an important centre in the history of Christianity, but Christians make up only a small percentage of the roughly 14 million people spread across the Holy Land.
There are about 182,000 in Israel, 50,000 in the West Bank and Jerusalem and 1,300 in Gaza, according to the US State Department.
The war in Gaza has deterred tourists and pilgrims from visiting the area but has also prompted a surge of violence in the West Bank, with more than 800 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire and dozens of Israelis killed in militant attacks.
Since the war began, travel to and from Bethlehem and other Palestinian towns in the West Bank has been difficult, with long lines of motorists waiting to pass Israeli military checkpoints.
More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials there, while some 90% of the territory’s 2,300,000 residents have been displaced.
Officials say more than half of the dead are women and children, though they do not give a breakdown of how many are civilians and how many fighters.
In the October 7 assault on southern Israel, Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took more than 250 hostages.
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