30,000 tourists expected to visit Bethlehem for Christmas

Days after Palestinian gunmen briefly took over Bethlehem’s city hall to demand jobs and wages, dozens of Palestinian police and security officers packed the festively decorated square below Saturday to ensure quiet during one of the town’s most important tourism events: Christmas. The forces – most of them unarmed – directed traffic, kept people along the sides of the roads to make room for various processions and just generally made their presence known. In the Church of the Nativity, built over the biblical grotto of Jesus’ birth, a Palestinian bomb squad armed with hand-held metal detectors searched behind images of Jesus and Mary for any suspicious objects. „It will go very well. It will be joyful and a very merry Christmas,” said Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh. „There is enough police and security. It will be very peaceful.? For the first time in six years, tourists are flocking to Bethlehem. Some 30,000 tourists were expected to visit the town of Jesus’ birth for Christmas, said Palestinian Tourism Minister Ziad Bandak. Of the town’s 5,000 hotel rooms, 70 percent are booked, Bandak said. Since Israeli-Palestinian fighting erupted in Sept. 2000, just a few thousand visitors came to Bethlehem during the entire year, he said. Last year, only 5,000 tourists celebrated Christmas in Bethlehem, still a significant increase over recent years when just a few hundred braved the violence and Israeli military siege to come to the town, Bandak said. But even 30,000 tourists is a far cry from Bethlehem’s heyday in the 1990s when peace was in the air and 150,000 pilgrims celebrated Christmas in the town and 1 million other tourists flocked into the area throughout the year. Yet shopkeepers, hotel owners and Bethlehem residents were optimistic that the sharp drop in fighting would revive their town’s economy, which is heavily dependent on tourists and Christian pilgrims. „I wanted to see where Jesus was born. You feel like Jesus was here for a period. I was so excited, so touched because it’s the place of Jesus. Finally I got to come here,? said Jingyi Liang, of Shanghai, China, her voice cracking with emotion.