By Al Mayadeen English

For the third consecutive year, Christmas has arrived in Gaza without lights, without music, and without celebration. Church bells have not been ringing. Streets once briefly softened by decorations have remained dark, stripped even of symbolic comfort.

In an essay published by Truthout, Dalia Abu Ramadan, a Palestinian storyteller and aspiring graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza, describes a Christmas shaped not by festivity but by exhaustion, loss, and unanswered questions.

In 2023, Christmas came amid fear, when the war was only two months old. Many Palestinians, Christians and Muslims alike, believed it was impossible for a new year to begin with the war still raging. There was a shared hope that 2024 would bring an end to the devastation.

When “Israeli” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that 2024 would be “a year of war,” the statement was initially met with disbelief. Few believed the world would allow such a reality to unfold. What followed, Abu Ramadan writes, surpassed even Gaza’s darkest expectations.

Now, at the end of 2025, Christmas arrives after what has been described as a ceasefire. Yet daily life raises troubling questions about what the end of the war truly means. The killing may have slowed, but the consequences remain omnipresent: infants freezing to death, widespread malnutrition, and families living in tents that flood during winter storms.

No Christmas where Christ was born

For Gaza’s small Christian community, the holiday once represented resilience and shared joy. Muslim families joined in, lighting Christmas trees and exchanging greetings. This year, there will be no lights and little warmth, only the lingering weight of a war that has not truly ended.

Abu Ramadan recalls speaking to her father’s Christian friend, Tawfiq al-Amash, and asking how he viewed Christmas this year.

“What can I say to you?” he replied, his voice heavy with grief.

He described rejecting a proposal from a Muslim colleague at the Gaza municipality to erect Christmas trees. “How could Christmas even be possible now?” he asked.

Al-Amash remembered a time when shops were decorated, streets glowed, and Christians gathered at the Christian Youth Association for celebrations that brought both communities together. Gifts were exchanged with Muslim neighbors. Travel to Beit Lahm for Christmas prayers was once a cherished tradition.

None of that is possible now. “All we can do is attend Holy Mass,” he said. “That is all.” Even so, families have tried to do something small, arranging simple gifts for children in the church courtyard.

For Gaza’s Christians, Christmas has been reduced to prayer and remembrance.

Abu Ramadan writes that Christians in Gaza endured the same suffering as Muslims during the war. Many were killed. The violence spared no one, people, animals, homes, or places of worship.

She recalls the October 2023 “Israeli” airstrike on a church sheltering forcibly displaced families, which killed 17 Christians, most of them women and children. Funerals were held in the courtyard of the Greek Orthodox church as bells rang in mourning, a scene unprecedented in Gaza’s history.

Abu Ramadan hesitated to contact Anton’s brother, a family friend. Grief, she writes, has become too heavy to intrude upon.

Happiness, she concludes, has become a distant dream in Gaza. Loss has stripped life of its rhythms and rituals. With Ramadan approaching, many Muslims ask what the holy month and Eid that follows will look like this year.

In Gaza, “Israel’s” genocide has hollowed out every religious celebration, leaving behind only endurance and silence.

In first Christmas sermon, Pope Leo decries conditions for Palestinians in Gaza

In his Christmas sermon, Pope Leo decried conditions for Palestinians in Gaza, in an unusually direct appeal.

Leo, the first US pope, said the story of Jesus being born in a stable showed that God had “pitched his fragile tent” among the people of the world.

“How, then, can we not think of the tents in Gaza, exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold?” he asked.

Leo, celebrating his first Christmas after being elected in May by the world’s cardinals to succeed the late Pope Francis, has a quieter, more diplomatic style than his predecessor and usually refrains from making political references in his sermons.

The new pope has lamented the conditions for Palestinians in Gaza several times recently and told journalists last month that the only solution in the decades-long struggle between “Israel” and the Palestinian people must include a Palestinian state.

In Thursday’s service with thousands in St. Peter’s Basilica, Leo also lamented conditions for the homeless across the globe and the destruction caused by war more generally.

“Fragile is the flesh of defenseless populations, tried by so many wars, ongoing or concluded, leaving behind rubble and open wounds,” said the pope.

“Fragile are the minds and lives of young people forced to take up arms, who on the front lines feel the senselessness of what is asked of them and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths,” he added.