ISRAELI DEFENCE Minister Ehud Barak has issued month-long permits for 300 of Gaza’s 3,000 Christians to attend Christmas Masses in Bethlehem.
The recipients of the coveted permits must be under the age of 16 or over 35, however.
Catholic Patriarch Fuad Twal conducted a service last Monday in the 1,600-year-old church of St Porphryry for Christians who remain confined to the Strip. The majority are Orthodox, followed by Catholics and Baptists.
A year ago, Christians who made the hour-and-a-half journey across Israel from Gaza to Bethlehem were caught outside the Strip by Israel’s military offensive and were allowed to return only a month later to devastated neighbourhoods and shattered homes.
Before 1991 when Israel clamped restrictions on the movement of Gazans, 5,000 Christians lived in the Strip, among more than a million Muslims. Of those who left, a few were permitted by Israel to go to the West Bank; most went to the US and Europe.
In Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Gaza’s pilgrims will find many of their fellow Christians have emigrated, shrinking their number to less than 2 per cent of the population.
On Monday, Lieut Col Eyad Sirhan of Israel’s Civil Administra- tion told representatives of a dozen Christian sects there would be freedom of movement for 65,000 Christians expected in Bethlehem during the holidays.
The hilltop city of Jesus’s birth is surrounded by Israel’s eight-metre-high West Bank wall, and access is through a massive checkpoint. Pilgrims travel on Israeli buses because Palestinian buses are banned.
On Tuesday, Patriarch Twal said in his annual Christmas message that all the efforts of “politicians and men of good will” to achieve peace had “failed”.
“Palestinians still do not have their own state where they can live in peace and harmony with their Israeli neighbours; they still suffer from occupation, a difficult economic situation, destruction of homes in East Jerusalem, and internal divisions. A year after the war, Gaza still suffers from blockade,” he said.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Christians are keeping a low profile this Christmas. Yesterday, a bomb killed two passers-by and wounded five at the Syrian Orthodox church of St Thomas in the northern city of Mosul. This was the latest in a string of bombings at churches in the city during December and November. Last week, a young Christian man was gunned down in the street.
In Basra and Baghdad, Christians are attending church services and holding family gatherings, but not celebrating publicly. Since the 2003 US occupation of Iraq, its ancient Christian community, once 800,000-one million strong, has been halved.
Christians have not only been subjected to random violence, as have all Iraqis, but are also targeted by Sunni and Shia extremists, who accuse them of collaborating with the occupation.
Kurds have tried to strongarm Christians into supporting their call for the incorporation of oil-rich Kirkuk into the Kurdish autonomous region. Many Christians have fled to the US. More have found refuge in Aleppo and Damascus in Syria or Amman in Jordan, places where 2.25 million Iraqis of all faiths dwell in safety.
