The World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) continues its four-week campaign focused on Bethlehem and the Ush Ghurab area of Beit Sahour, entering now into its second week.
To understand what is happening at Ush Ghurab, it is necessary first to understand what has been happening across the occupied West Bank.
Over the past three years, Israeli settlement expansion has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent decades. In 2024 alone, the Israeli government advanced plans for nearly 29,000 housing units across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The United Nations has said Israeli settlement expansions in 2025 reached their highest level since 2017. By the close of that year, the Israeli cabinet had approved the construction of 103 new West Bank settlements under the ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — including a single batch of 34 new settlements, the largest approved in decades. This expansion has not been passive. A UN report covering the twelve months to October 2025 documented 1,732 incidents of settler violence resulting in casualties or property damage, with the report finding that “settler violence continued in a coordinated, strategic and largely unchallenged manner, with Israeli authorities playing the central role in directing, participating in or enabling this conduct.” October 2025 alone recorded the highest monthly number of settler attacks since OCHA began documenting such incidents in 2006 — more than 260 attacks, an average of eight incidents per day.
The Bethlehem governorate sits at the centre of this pressure. A plan to expand the illegal settlement of Ma’ale Adumim through a tender for more than 3,400 housing units in the E1 area east of Jerusalem would sever the West Bank in two, permanently rupturing urban Palestinian contiguity between Ramallah, occupied East Jerusalem, and Bethlehem.
It is in this context that Ush Ghurab must be read. Ush Ghurab is not a distant symbol. It is the last substantial reserve of public land available to Beit Sahour — and it is under threat. Israeli settlement expansion has steadily encircled Beit Sahour, fragmenting the land available to its residents and severing connections between Palestinian communities across the Bethlehem governorate. Ush Ghurab sits at the pressure point of this expansion: were it to be lost to settlement construction or military appropriation, Beit Sahour would be effectively landlocked, its ability to grow, breathe, and remain a living community permanently foreclosed.
Beit Sahour is one of the oldest Palestinian Christian communities in the West Bank and is home to a Christian population that now represents less than one per cent of the West Bank’s inhabitants. The fate of Ush Ghurab is therefore not only a question of land — it is a question of whether this community has a future.
The conversation this week continues with partners from Kairos Palestine and inhabitants of Beit Sahour town, who engage in advocacy and witness to protect the Ush Ghurab area and the living Palestinian Christian community it sustains. Kairos Palestine shared their responses to questions from Muna Nassar, WCRC’s executive secretary for mission and advocacy.
What does the Ush Ghurab area mean to the people of Beit Sahour — not only as land, but as memory, identity, and future? What would its loss represent that a map or a legal document cannot fully capture?
For the people of Beit Sahour, Ush Ghurab is far more than a piece of land within their town. It represents memory, identity, livelihood, and the remaining horizon for the town’s future.
Residents of Beit Sahour speak about the area with deep emotional attachment — as a place tied to family histories, agriculture, olive trees, childhood memories, and the natural expansion of the community. Many describe it as one of the last spaces through which Beit Sahour can breathe and grow.
Its loss would therefore represent far more than a legal, political, or territorial change. What maps, official documents, and media reports often fail to capture is the profound emotional and existential reality of Palestinians who are constantly watching, waiting, and slowly losing not only their land, but also their memories, sense of belonging, and future upon this land. It also reflects a growing loss of security, stability, and the feeling that people still have the power to shape or change their own reality. For Palestinians, each confiscated hill, settlement expansion, or act of displacement deepens the sense that the future is being decided without them and gradually taken away from them. The continued loss of land and space weakens the connection between younger generations and their homeland, contributing to the forced displacement of one of the world’s oldest living Christian communities from the land where Christianity was born, and leaving many questioning whether future generations will still have a place, a voice, and a future in Palestine.
The Easter Alert 2026 describes Beit Sahour as ‘the first Palestinian Christian community and the largest remaining one in the West Bank,’ now accounting for less than 1% of the West Bank population. How do you experience that statistical reality in daily life — and what does it feel like to be a living statistic of disappearance?
For us as Palestinian Christians, the experience is complex and deeply emotional, but we do not primarily see ourselves as a “minority.” We are Palestinians: part of Palestine, its people, its land, its history, its struggle, and of its future. Our identity is not separate from our society; it is woven into it. At the same time, we are painfully aware that our numbers are decreasing, to the point where many genuinely fear disappearance.
That reality is not something abstract or statistical for us. It is visible in daily life. You notice it in the shrinking number of children in schools, in families emigrating one after another, in the growing absence of young people, in homes left empty, and in the increasing burden placed on the few who remain to sustain institutions, churches, social initiatives, advocacy efforts, and community life. In a society like ours, which is also shaped by tribal and extended family structures, where numbers and the size of families matter socially and politically, being few, carries a real psychological and social weight. Sometimes it feels as if the same small group of people must carry responsibilities on many fronts simultaneously: politically, spiritually, socially, ecumenically, educationally, and internationally. We stretch ourselves constantly to keep our presence alive and meaningful. There is exhaustion in that.
But there is also resilience and dignity to it. Despite our small numbers, Palestinian Christians remain extraordinarily active. Historically, we have played an important role in education, health care, business, culture, national and social movements, human rights, advocacy, theology, and international solidarity work. We are often able to mobilize internationally and communicate our people’s reality to the world in ways that exceed our demographic size. In many ways, our visibility and contribution are larger than our numbers.
This is why we are respected within Palestinian society. People recognize that Palestinian Christians have consistently contributed to the common good and the national cause far beyond what statistics would suggest. Our churches, schools, hospitals, cultural institutions, and advocacy initiatives serve everyone, not only Christians.
At a deeper level, being described as a “living statistic of disappearance” creates a painful existential feeling. It means constantly wondering whether Christianity, in the land where Christianity was born, can survive as a living indigenous presence and not merely as museums, holy sites, or pilgrimage destinations. The danger is not only demographic disappearance, but the loss of a living community with memory, language, traditions, and rootedness.
Yet we refuse to define ourselves only through fear or decline. Our continued presence itself is an act of hope, steadfastness, and witness. Remaining here is not merely about survival; it is about affirming that Palestinian Christians are not relics of the past but an integral part of the present and future of this land.
The settlement outpost Yatziv was established at the end of 2025 on land adjacent to Ush Ghurab. What has changed in Beit Sahour since its arrival — in the streets, in homes, in the way people speak about the future?
While the establishment of the settlement “Yatziv” in the form of caravans is relatively recent, it has already created a pervasive atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and despair among the residents of Beit Sahour, prompting many more families to question their future in their ancestral homeland. Residents living in or owning land in the affected area are increasingly concerned about the fate of their property, including the possibility of home demolitions (18 active home demolition orders), damage and vandalism to their lands and property, or even forced displacement. At the same time, Beit Sahour residents are already experiencing settler terror and intimidation, alongside a noticeable increase in Israeli military activity in and around the town. Movement restrictions have also intensified, at times preventing residents from accessing essential services, including schools. The new settlement development, in addition to the overall Israeli policy of “encouraging voluntary migration” as expressed by the Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich, oversees the production of a coercive environment that aggravates the impacts of the new settlement. For example, Beit Sahour suffers from increasing water cuts and movement restrictions, deliberately induced by Israel, that eventually elevate the level of coercion and largely impact daily life.
Advocate Dalia Qumsieh writes that settlements must be understood as a ‘multidimensional system of displacement, replacement and inevitable annexation’ – not merely illegal buildings. From what you have witnessed in Beit Sahour, how does that system actually operate in daily life?
Let us first remember that even at the level of merely illegal buildings, they were erected on land dedicated to much-needed communal development of Beit Sahour. It has caused the loss of approximately 100 dunums of strategic municipal land that had been earmarked for public facilities, including a children’s hospital to be built, recreational areas, cultural center, green space, and community hall, the establishment further reduces the already-limited space available for Palestinian expansion: only about 7% of Beit Sahour’s administrative land remains accessible for building due to settlement encirclement and the Annexation Wall. This intensifies demographic pressure on the city, and largely constrains urban development. Yet, beyond that, the settlement enterprise operates far beyond the construction of physical structures; it functions as a systematic process of displacement, fragmentation, and gradual annexation that reshapes every aspect of daily life. The presence of caravans is accompanied by increased military activity, settler violence and intimidation, prohibitive movement restrictions, and growing limitations on Palestinians’ access to their lands and essential services. Beit Sahour residents live under constant uncertainty regarding the future of their homes, property, and livelihoods, while fear and instability pressure families to reconsider their ability to remain in their community. In this way, settlements alter the landscape geographically, but also erode the fundamental rights and the social, economic, and psychological conditions necessary for Palestinians to continue living on their land.
The Nakba Day Liturgy invokes Sumud — Arabic for steadfastness — ‘the spirit endowed by the Holy Spirit’. How do you understand the relationship between political steadfastness and theological hope? Is Sumud an act of faith, or is it something that faith must eventually transform?
For Palestinian Christians, faith informs and shapes Sumud. Sumud is an act of faith with political implications. Faith also deepens with Sumud. It teaches us that there is a reality that transcends our current circumstances. There is resurrection beyond crucifixion and redemption after oppression. Therefore, we have to practice resilience. Sumud nurtures our faith and reinforces our belief in a God who stands on the side of the vulnerable.
Given that Pentecost represents Spirit-empowered, boundary-crossing, politically engaged witness—and in light of the Accra Confession’s rejection of neutrality amid systems that destroy life—what would it mean for the global church to take Pentecost seriously in relation to Ush Ghurab? What forms of political solidarity (advocacy, economic pressure, public naming) does the Spirit demand of ecumenical partners right now, from your perspective in Beit Sahour and the Palestinian Christian community?
For the community of Beit Sahour and Palestinian Christians more broadly, taking Pentecost seriously in relation to Ush Ghurab means moving from compassionate observation to costly solidarity. The question is not only the fate of a hill — it is whether the church will stand with a vulnerable community struggling to remain on its land and preserve the possibility of life, continuity, and hope.
That solidarity takes concrete form. It begins with public truth-telling: naming realities on the ground without ambiguity or false symmetry, rejecting language that conceals structural injustice, and listening directly to Palestinian voices rather than speaking about them. It requires political advocacy: pressuring governments and institutions to uphold international law consistently — opposing settlement expansion, land confiscation, and forced displacement — not as a departure from faith but as an expression of the prophetic tradition. It demands economic accountability: examining whether investments and partnerships contribute to systems of oppression, and recognising that nonviolent pressure — including BDS — is not hatred but a tool of accountability where political mechanisms have failed. And it calls for accompaniment: sustaining relationships, visiting communities, amplifying local initiatives, and protecting the social and cultural fabric of places like Beit Sahour. Presence itself becomes a form of resistance against erasure.
Finally, in the spirit of Kairos, hope is not optimism detached from reality — it is the decision to keep witnessing, resisting nonviolently, and believing that truth and justice remain possible even in dark times. Taking Pentecost seriously today means the global church must ask not only what do we believe, but whom do we stand beside when the cost of truth becomes political?
Grounded in the WCRC’s own identity: It is precisely this witness — discerning, confessing, and standing beside the vulnerable — that the World Communion of Reformed Churches, a global communion, is called to embody; and it is why the WCRC’s focus on Ush Ghurab is not an act of political commentary, but an expression of its deepest theological commitments to communion and justice.
The WCRC is grateful to the witness and work of Kairos Palestine. Next week, the focus on Ush Ghurab continues with more responses from Kairos Palestine.
