Gaza sends you a Merry Christmas

In Bethlehem, baby Jesus is seen wrapped in the Palestinian keffiyeh, lying amid the rubble. No softly lit manger opened its door for him, and certainly no wise man was there to bless the unforetold future.

The future, as the babies of Bethlehem know by now, is nothing to look forward to.

The birthplace of Jesus Christ announced the cancellation of the Christmas celebration this year. The city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank is reeling from the Israeli attack and as the president of Dar al-Kalima University Reverend Mitri Raheb tells Democracy Now, this could be "the end of the Christian presence in Gaza."

Gaza, before the occupation, was home to a diverse community. Though it is now a majority Muslim population, the Christian presence is 2,000 years old. Today there are just 182,000 Christians in Israel, 50,000 in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and 1,300 in Gaza, US State Department estimates. Three thousand Christians lived in the strip when Hamas seized control in 2007.

Israel's ongoing attack on Gaza is decimating the already small Christian community in the bolted territory.

"If Christ were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble," said Reverend Isaac Munther, the Palestinian pastor of the Lutheran Evangelical church in Bethlehem, while addressing his congregation earlier this month in front of that nativity scene with Jesus Christ dressed in a keffiyeh, surrounded by rubble.

In Gaza, Israel recently attacked a church and a convent, even though Washington Congressional staffers urged Israel to protect the sites and provided the church coordinates, according to Politico.

This information when presented, poses a darkly ridiculous question: So the mosques, hospitals, universities, libraries, and the Muslim masses are all fair game?

Does annihilation work like that? A sky holds no bar, and the air carrying the bombshells doesn't redirect itself finding a church.

The deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, appeared on the British news programme LBC just days back and claimed there are no Christians in Gaza, saying, "There are no Christians because they were driven out by Hamas."

In response to that Reverend Raheb said to Democracy Now, as the Christian population is not a large one and because they regularly apply for permits to come over at Christmas, the Israeli authorities "know everyone by name, by picture, by age, by gender".

This is all to say, does showing a life similar to yours open your eyes to the atrocities? Do you need to see a face of your skin tone and a religion same as your Sunday, to see that a death is a death?

It is impossible to keep the heartbreaks at bay despite propping up a wall that separates the two holy cities, Jerusalem and Bethlehem. They are just 10km away from each other, and the blood that is wasted on Gaza is bound to paint the wall in Jerusalem.

So Gaza sends you a merry Christmas. The children dead and barely living, know that your adorable, crucified Christ was not blue-eyed and blond-haired and rather looked just like them. And every pregnant woman running away from drones holding their belly knows they are no Mary.

Gaza sends you a Merry Christmas, where people like Reverend Isaac Munther live who know death is death, as he says the celebration is cancelled but Christmas is not, "for our hope cannot be cancelled".