BETHLEHEM: The Nativity Store in Manger Square has sold handmade olive wood carvings and religious items to people visiting the traditional birthplace of Jesus since 1927. But as Bethlehem prepares to mark its second Christmas under the shadow of the war in Gaza, there are almost no tourists, leaving the Nativity Store and other businesses unsure of how much longer they can hold on.
For the second straight year, Bethlehem’s Christmas celebrations will be somber and muted, in deference to ongoing war in Gaza. There will be no giant Christmas tree in Manger Square, no raucous scout marching bands, no public lights twinkling and very few public decorations or displays.
“Last year before Christmas, we had more hope, but now again we are close to Christmas and we don’t have anything,” said Rony Tabash, the third-generation owner of Nativity Store.
Israel’s war against Hamas has been raging for nearly 15 months, and there still is no end in sight. Repeated ceasefire efforts have stalled.
Since the war began, tourism to Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank has plummeted. And after Israel barred entry to most of the 150,000 Palestinians in the West Bank who had jobs in Israel, the Palestinian economy contracted by 25 percent in the past year.
The yearly Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem — shared among Armenian, Catholic and Orthodox denominations — are usually major boons for the city, where tourism accounts for 70 percent of its yearly income. But the streets are empty this season.
Tabash said he continues to open the store every day, but often an entire week will go by without a sale. Tabash works with more than 25 local families who create hand-carved religious items out of the region’s storied olive wood. But with no buyers, work has dried up for these families.
Lots of room at the inn
The number of visitors to the city plunged from a pre-COVID high of around 2 million visitors per year in 2019 to fewer than 100,000 visitors in 2024, said Jiries Qumsiyeh, the spokesperson for the Palestinian tourism ministry.
According to the Christmas story, Mary was forced to give birth to Jesus in a stable because there was no room at the inn. Today, nearly all of Bethlehem’s 5,500 hotel rooms are empty.
The city’s hotel occupancy rate plunged from around 80 percent in early 2023 to around 3 percent today, said Elias Al Arja, the head of Bethlehem Hoteliers Association. At his own hotel, the Bethlehem Hotel, he said he has laid off a staff of more than 120 people and retains just five employees.
The city hosts more than 100 stores and 450 workshops dealing with traditional Palestinian handicraft, Qumsiyeh said. But just a week before Christmas, when the city should be bursting with visitors, Manger Square was mostly empty save for a few locals selling coffee and tea. Only two of the eight stores in the main drag of the square were open for business.
Qumsiyeh worries that when the war ends and tourism eventually rebounds, many of the families that have handed down traditional skills for generations will no longer be making the items that reflect Palestinian heritage and culture.
Many are leaving the region entirely. “We have witnessed a very high rate of emigration since the beginning of the aggression, especially among those working in the tourism sector,” said Qumsiyeh.
A Christmas without joy
Almost 500 families have left Bethlehem in the past year, said Mayor Anton Salman. And those are just the families who moved abroad with official residency visas. Many others have moved abroad on temporary tourist visas and are working illegally, and it’s unclear if they will return, Salman said.
Around half of the population in the Bethlehem area, including nearby villages, works in either tourism or in jobs in Israel.
The unemployment rate in Bethlehem is roughly 50 percent, said Salman. Unemployment across the West Bank is around 30 percent, according to the Palestinian Economy Ministry.
Canceling Christmas festivities is one way to draw attention to the difficult situation in Bethlehem and across the Palestinian territories, said Salman. “This year we want to show the world that the Palestinian people are still suffering and they haven’t the joy that everybody else in the world having,” said Salman.
It is another blow to the Holy Land’s dwindling population over the decade due to emigration and a low birthrate.
Christians are a small percentage of the population. 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.
Finding the light in the night
Father Issa Thaljieh, the parish priest of the Greek Orthodox Church in the Church of the Nativity, said many families are struggling financially, leaving them unable to pay rent or school fees, much less buy Christmas presents or celebrate the holiday in other ways. The church’s social services have tried to help, but the needs are great, he said.
Thaljieh said his Christmas message this year focused on encouraging Palestinians in Bethlehem to stay despite the challenges.
“A church without Christians is not a church,” he said, as workers hand-polished the ornate brass candelabras in the cavernous, empty church a week before the holiday.
“The light that was born when Jesus Christ was born here is the light that moves beyond darkness, so we have to wait, we have to be patient, we have to pray a lot, and we have to stay with our roots because our roots are in Bethlehem,” he said.
Some families are finding ways to bring back pockets of joy.
Bethlehem resident Nihal Bandak, 39, gave into her three children’s requests to have a Christmas tree this year, after not having one last year. Decorating the tree is the favorite part of Christmas of her youngest daughter, 8-year-old Stephanie.
Mathew Bandak, 11 was thrilled his family brought back some of their traditions, but also torn.
“I was happy because we get to decorate and celebrate, but people are in Gaza who don’t have anything to celebrate,” he said.
Rony Tabash, the third-generation owner of Nativity Store, said he will continue to open the store, because it’s part of his family’s history.
“We are not feeling Christmas, but in the end, Christmas is in our hearts,” he said, adding that the entire city was praying for a ceasefire and peace. “We have a big faith that always, when we see Christmas, it will give us the light in the night.”
Bethlehem plans another somber Christmas under the shadow of war in Gaza
https://arab.news/mww4a
Bethlehem plans another somber Christmas under the shadow of war in Gaza
- Manger Square is empty of tourists and many businesses aren’t sure how much longer they can hold on
- The city’s hotel occupancy rate plunged from around 80 percent in early 2023 to around 3 percent today
‘No food, nothing’: Famine grips Sudan
- Country’s economy bludgeoned by war and mismanagement
CAIRO: Mona Ibrahim has already buried two of her children.
In the span of just two months, the Sudanese mother watched helplessly as severe malnutrition killed her 10-year-old daughter, Rania, and her eight-month-old son, Montasir, in the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp.
“I could only hold them as they faded away,” Ibrahim, 40, said via video call, sitting outside her straw-and-plastic shelter near North Darfur state’s besieged capital El-Fasher.
Rania was the first to succumb. In El-Fasher’s only functioning hospital, understaffed and unequipped, she died in November just three days after being admitted with acute diarrhea.
Her baby boy Montasir followed weeks later, his tiny body bloated from severe malnutrition.
El-Fasher, under paramilitary siege since May, is only one grim battlefield in the 21-month war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces.
In July, a UN-backed review declared famine in Zamzam, a decades-old displacement camp home to between 500,000 and a million people.
By December, it had spread to two more camps in the area, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam, as well as parts of the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification determined.
Now, Ibrahim fears for her four-year-old daughter, Rashida, who battles severe anemia with no access to medical care.
“I am terrified I will lose her too,” she said. “We’re abandoned. There is no food, no medicine, nothing.”
At Salam 56, one of Zamzam’s 48 overcrowded shelters, exhaustion was etched onto mothers’ faces as they cradled their children, too weak to stand.
Multiple families gathered around bowls with a few scraps of peanut residue traditionally used as animal feed. “It’s all we have,” said Rawiya Ali, a 35-year-old mother of five.
Contaminated water collects in a shallow reservoir during the rainy season, which the women trudge 3 km to fetch.
“Animals drink from it and so do we,” Ali said.
Salam 56 is home to over 700 families, according to its coordinator Adam Mahmoud Abdullah.
Since war began in April 2023, it has received only four food aid deliveries, the most recent in September, a mere 10 tonnes of flour, he said. “Since then, nothing has come,” Abdullah said.
The desolation in Zamzam lays bare the true cost of the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted over 12 million others, and created the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee. About 700 km southeast of Zamzam, the situation was just as dire.
Outside one of the last functioning community kitchens in the town of Dilling in South Kordofan state, queues stretched endlessly, according to Nazik Kabalo, who leads a Sudanese women’s rights group overseeing the kitchen.
Photos show men, women and children standing hollow-eyed and frail — their bellies swollen and skin pulled taut over fragile bones.
After days without a single morsel, “some collapse where they stand,” Kabalo said. “For others, even when they get food ... they vomit it back up,” she said.
In South Kordofan state, where agriculture once thrived, farmers are eating seeds meant for planting, while others boil tree leaves in water to stave off hunger.
“We are seeing hunger in areas that have never seen famine in Sudan’s history,” Kabalo said.
With vast oil and gold reserves and fertile agricultural land, Sudan has had its economy bludgeoned by war and decades of mismanagement, and now, hunger is everywhere.
Jordan hospital offers injured Gazans hope for recovery
- Israel’s 15-month offensive in Gaza left the coastal enclave a wasteland of rubble that will take years to rebuild
AMMAN: Karam Nawjaa, 17, was so badly injured when an Israeli strike hit his home in Gaza nearly a year ago that his own cousin, pulling him from the rubble, did not recognize him.
After rushing Karam to hospital he returned to continue searching for his cousin all night in the rubble.
In that strike on Feb. 14, 2024, Karam lost his mother, a sister and two brothers. As well as receiving serious burns to his face and body, he lost the ability to use his arms and hands.
Now, the burns are largely healed and he is slowly regaining the use of his limbs after months of treatment at a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the Jordanian capital Amman which operates a program of reconstructive surgery.
“I only remember that on that day, Feb. 14, there was a knock on our door ... I opened it, my brother came in, and after that ... (I remember) nothing,” he said.
“Before the war I was studying, and thank God, I was an outstanding student,” Karam said, adding that his dream had been to become a dentist. Now he does not think about the future.
“What happened, happened ... you feel that all your ambitions have been shattered, that what happened to you has destroyed you.”
Karam is one of many patients from Gaza being treated at Amman’s Specialized Hospital for Reconstructive Surgery, Al-Mowasah Hospital. He shares a room there with his younger sister and their father.
“All these patients are war victims ... with complex injuries, complex burns ... They need very long rehabilitation services, both surgical but also physical and mental,” said Moeen Mahmood Shaief, head of the MSF mission in Jordan.
“The stories around those patients are heartbreaking, a lot of them have lost their families” and require huge support to be reintegrated into normal life, he added.
Israel’s 15-month offensive in Gaza left the coastal enclave a wasteland of rubble that will take years to rebuild.
Displaced Palestinians have been returning to their mostly destroyed homes after a ceasefire came into effect on Jan. 19.
Leader of rebels who toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad is named country’s interim president
- Al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative Council until a new constitution is drafted
- Abdul Ghani announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country
DAMASCUS: The leader of the former rebel group that toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad last month was named on Wednesday the country’s interim president, following a meeting of the former insurgent factions.
The appointment of Ahmad Al-Sharaa, a rebel once aligned with Al-Qaeda, as the country’s president “in the transitional phase,” was expected. The announcement was made by the spokesperson for Syria’s new, de facto government’s military operations sector, Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, the state-run SANA news agency said.
Abdul Ghani also announced the cancelation of the country’s constitution passed in 2012 under Assad’s rule and said Al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative Council until a new constitution is drafted.
He also announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country, which he said would be absorbed into state institutions.
Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al-Golani, is the leader of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an Islamist former insurgent group that led the lightning offensive that toppled Assad last month. The group was once affiliated with Al-Qaeda but has since denounced its former ties, and in recent years Al-Sharaa has sought to cast himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.
The United States had previously placed a $10 million bounty on Al-Sharaa but canceled it last month after a US delegation visited Damascus and met with him.
Since Assad’s fall, HTS has become the de facto ruling party and has set up an interim government largely composed of officials from the local government it previously ran in rebel-held Idlib province.
As the former Syrian army collapsed with Assad’s downfall, Al-Sharaa has called for creation of a new unified national army and security forces, but questions have loomed over how the interim administration can bring together a patchwork of former rebel groups, each with their own leaders and ideology.
Even knottier is the question of the US-backed Kurdish groups that have carved out an autonomous enclave early in Syria’s civil war, never fully siding with the Assad government or the rebels seeking to topple him. Since Assad’s fall, there has been an escalation in clashes between the Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed armed groups allied with HTS in northern Syria.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were not present at Wednesday’s meeting of the country’s armed factions Wednesday and there was no immediate comment from the group.
Al-Sharaa had been expected to appear in a televised speech following the meeting, but it remained unclear if he would. The exact mechanism under which the factions selected him as interim president was also not clear.
Jordan’s king meets Belgian monarch in Brussels
- Parties discuss recent developments in the Middle East
- King Abdullah expresses Jordan’s commitment to enhancing partnership with EU
LONDON: The King of Jordan Abdullah II met King Philippe of Belgium in Brussels on Wednesday, accompanied by Crown Prince Hussein.
The monarchs discussed recent developments in the Middle East and stressed their commitment to supporting efforts for peace and stability in the region, the Jordan News Agency reported.
King Abdullah spoke of Jordan’s commitment to enhancing its partnership with the EU during a meeting with top European officials, including Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission; Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament; and European Council President Antonio Costa.
Jordan and the EU signed a strategic partnership on Wednesday in which the EU pledged €3 billion in financing and investments for Jordan.
In his meeting with EU officials, the Jordanian monarch affirmed his country’s commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories and warned of the escalation of action in the West Bank, the Jordan News Agency added.
He emphasized the importance of increasing the flow of humanitarian aid and maintaining the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which ended the 15-month conflict in Gaza.
Lebanon official media reports Israeli strike in south
- “An enemy drone” carried out a strike targeting a house in Yohmor
BEIRUT: Lebanese official media said an Israeli strike hit south Lebanon on Wednesday, the second consecutive day to see such a raid despite a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
“An enemy drone” carried out a strike targeting a house that “had been destroyed in a previous raid” in south Lebanon’s Yohmor Al-Shaqeef, the National News Agency said.
