For the second straight year, Christmas celebrations will be somber and muted: no giant Christmas tree in Manger Square, no raucous scout marching bands, no public lights twinkling, and very few public decorations or displays.
The small Christian community has begun to fracture under pressure from forces they say threaten them and the multifaith character of the Old City.
Leaders from a variety of denominations and organizations gathered on International Human Rights Day to call for Christians to stand for justice and dignity for Palestinians.
The pro-Palestinian creche is intended to point out the disconnect between the idealized Bethlehem of most representations and the reality in present-day Gaza and the West Bank.
Alice Kisiya leads an interfaith effort to defend her family’s land against encroachment by Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
There are 182,000 Christians in Israel, 50,000 in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and 1,300 in Gaza, according to the U.S. State Department. The vast majority are Palestinians.
May 15, 1948 — 75 years ago — a human rights travesty began. Palestinians and those of us who are in solidarity with their liberation and human rights movement commemorate what is referred to as the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic.
Christmas is normally peak season for tourism in Bethlehem, located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank just a few miles southeast of Jerusalem. In pre-pandemic times, thousands of pilgrims and tourists from around the world came to celebrate.
JERUSALEM (RNS) — When pieces of ancient pottery and never-before-seen scroll fragments began making their way to the antiquities black market a few years ago, archaeologists suspected that looters had found a new cache of Dead Sea Scrolls.
NABI SALEH, West Bank (RNS) — Nabi Saleh is the last place one might expect to find a group of evangelical Christians, a demographic known