A manger among rubble with a baby Jesus wrapped in a Palestinian kufiya, placed in a Lutheran church in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, has gone viral on social networks and the media for its sorrowful Christmas message in the horror of war.
The manger and the figurine are not in the Gaza Strip, but Munther Isaac, pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, refers to that Palestinian territory punished by Israeli bombings. “We want to send a message to the world that this is what Christmas looks like in Gaza and throughout Palestine; This is Christmas in the birthplace of Jesus: murdered children, destroyed houses and displaced families,” Isaac told international media. “If Jesus were born again in our days,” he lamented, “he would do so under the rubble of a house in Gaza.”
The brutal forcefulness of the Israeli military response to the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, in which 1,200 Israeli civilians died and 240 were kidnapped, hits us daily with images of the lost Palestinian childhood of Gaza: corpses of girls and boys wrapped in shrouds, bloody creatures carried by terrified relatives, or premature babies condemned to die in forcibly evacuated hospitals.
In parts of the world where birth rates are high and conflict is perennial, minors are always victims. Of the 20,000 Palestinians who have died in Gaza due to Israeli military action in these almost three months of war, around 70% are children (8,000) and women (6,200), according to the Ministry of Health of the Strip, controlled by Hamas. These figures are disputed because they do not distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters, but common sense indicates that the figures of dead women and children are not only plausible but are probably higher, since it is estimated that there are at least 7,500 bodies trapped under the debris.
Massacres hurt anywhere in the world, and those that occur in the Holy Land are invested with a symbolic meaning that cries out to heaven for a ceasefire that prevents more blood, more hunger and more destruction.
About 47,000 Christians live in Palestine, the cradle of Christianity, according to the latest census of the Palestinian Central Statistics Office, compiled in 2017. The majority are Orthodox, although almost all Christian denominations are represented. Two of La Vanguardia’s special envoys to cover the conflict on the ground, our colleagues Joaquín Luna and Robert Mur, have recounted in recent days what they feel and experience in the Palestinian city where, according to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mary and Joseph were there when Jesus was born.
On his tour of Belén, Luna portrayed a city without tourists and without a Christmas campaign, the basis of employment, because 90% of tourism is lived there and now the hotels have closed. Mur went on Sunday to the Basilica of the Nativity – where tradition places the birth of Jesus – and saw an Orthodox man praying with a piece of paper with the names of Palestinian friends who could not be there due to the war in Gaza.
Bethlehem, a dozen kilometers south of Jerusalem, is surrounded by Israeli settlements, and its 30,000 inhabitants suffer from the atmosphere of war tension. The City Council has decided not to light Christmas lights or decorate the streets. Only masses and religious services are maintained for the local Christian community. And a manger in a church remembers the tragedy.
