Christmas celebrated once again in Bethlehem but West Bank suffering persists

By Mostafa Salem, CNN

(CNN) — Christmas celebrations have returned to the birthplace of Jesus after a two-year hiatus, but the joy remains overshadowed by another turbulent year for Palestinians living under Israeli-occupation in the West Bank.

Morning mass was held at the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem on Thursday, a day after crowds of Palestinians and foreign tourists flocked onto Manger Square to attend celebrations for the first time since they were halted in solidarity with Palestinians suffering a two-year deadly war in Gaza.

Despite the festivities, the numbers of people attending remained limited, which, according to Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti, is due to Israeli military checkpoints blocking roads in the West Bank.

“The West Bank is completely under siege,” Barghouti told CNN’s Matthew Chance in Bethlehem on Wednesday. “Israel has blocked the roads. Of course many people couldn’t come. … Many people cannot afford to come, and many people find great difficulty moving from one place to another.”

As the war in Gaza raged on, the occupied West Bank experienced a sharp escalation in Israeli military operations, record numbers of Palestinian home demolitions and unprecedented expansion of Jewish settlements amid a Palestinian leadership plagued by allegations of corruption and stagnant decision-making.

In 2025, more than 30,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in cities in the West Bank in “what has become the longest and largest displacement crisis in the West Bank since 1967,” the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) said in a report published November.

The West Bank, which lies west of the Jordan River between Israel and Jordan, has been occupied by the Israeli military since 1967 and is home to more than 3.3 million Palestinians.

This year saw a record number of Palestinian home and structures demolition in the West Bank over building permits, but human rights group, like the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said in October that the destruction is a “deliberate policy of dispossession.”

“Families are being stripped of homes, water and livelihoods in a calculated effort to drive them from their land and make way for settlements,” said Angelita Caredda, NRC’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa. “This is not accidental destruction. It is a deliberate policy of dispossession.”

Killings have also continued in the West Bank, with at least 233 Palestinians killed this year alone, including 52 children, most of whom by Israeli forces using live ammunition, according to data from OCHA. Israeli forces have launched several widescale military operations against Palestinian militant groups in cities in the West Bank.

The violence hasd coincided with record illegal settlement building across the Palestinian territories.

This month, the Israeli cabinet approved the legalization and establishment of 19 settler outposts and in May, Israel announced it would establish 22 new settlements in what Israeli settlement watchdog organization Peace Now said was the largest expansion of settlements in more than 30 years.

Israeli settlements overall are considered illegal under international law. Outposts, in addition to being illegal under international law, are also banned under Israeli law.

“Such unilateral actions, as part of a wider intensification of the settlement policies in the West Bank, not only violate international law but also risk fueling instability,” 14 countries said in a joint statement criticizing the 19 new settlements.

Israeli leaders have become ever more explicit in their rejection of a future Palestinian state in the leadup to and since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, despite international calls for a negotiated solution to the decades-long occupation.

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, announced the settlement expansion in a statement earlier this month.

“We are blocking on the ground the establishment of a Palestinian terror state,” he said. “We will continue to develop, build, and settle in the land of our forefathers’ inheritance, with faith in the justice of our path.”

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