"No Holiday Atmosphere"

 

"Three quarters of the village  has fled. The people who stayed are in a state of sadness and no one has put up decorations or even a tree in their house."

"As soon as there is a ceasefire, we will re-open the school."

"We've been living war in every sense of the word."

Sister Maya Beaino, head, Saint Joseph des Saints-Coeurs School, Ain Ebel, Lebanon

 

"The people who have children took them out of here, first of all because of their safety and secondly so they don't miss out on school."

"The ones who remained are older, like me."

Wassin Al-Khalil, municipal council member, Rashaya al-Fukhar, Lebanon

 

"[My family is] separated and scattered in different places."

"It's possible if the situation is stable that we'll get together for the holidays."

"I hope there will be peace and quiet, especially on this day of celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who gave peace and goodwill to the Earth."

Marwan Abdullah, village resident

A priest leads mass at a church on the Lebanese southern border with Israel

It's Christmas in Beirut, Lebanon, and its Christian population is celebrating as usual. Restaurants are full of celebrants, hundreds of Lebanese have gone to Christmas markets leading up to Christmas. The mood is completely different in border towns where houses are empty and businesses shuttered, where residents have left their homes to be with relatives or to stay in rented apartments in Beirut; anywhere further from the conflict that has broken out on the border between Lebanon and Israel. 

 

A U.N French peacekeeper, centre, gives a gift to a girl at Saint-Joseph des Saints-Coeurs School in Ain Ebel, a Lebanese Christian border village with Israel, in south Lebanon, on Saturday, Dec. 23, 2023. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

 

Israel is at war on its southern border with Gaza. Responding to the October 7 surprise attack by Hamas  terrorists on Israeli border communities. Where Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives followed by Palestinian civilians flooded through gaps they produced breaking down the protective border wall to enter on foot, by truck or motorcycle Israeli villages and kibbutzim closest to the border. The Nova music festival nearby was another target of the Palestinians, shooting to kill as many Israelis as possible.

Israel responded to the savagery of mutilation, rape, torture and mass murder by sending the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza to destroy the death-cult whose singular purpose of existence is to murder Jews and extinguish the  Jewish state. Palestinians in Gaza have paid dearly for their leadership deliberately placing them in harm's way, by using them as human shields, building tunnels for weapons storage and terrorist activities and attacks in a vast network under the towns and cities of the Gaza Strip.

 

The intentional placing of rocket launchers beside and inside hospitals, schools and dense civilian enclaves is a hallmark of the Hamas strategy to sacrifice the lives of Palestinians to their psychopathic drive to annihilate Jewish life and presence in the Middle East. And while Hamas continues to send rockets into Israeli border towns and reaching into central Israel, the Israel Defense Forces are bombing Gaza, aiming at the tunnels and the command centres of the terrorist group.

 

Hamas's alter ego in Lebanon on Israel's northern border has been busy attacking Israeli communities over the border into Israel, drawing IDF forces to the north and in the conflict there border towns in Lebanon have come under return fire causing residents to empty the villages. Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy terror group that holds Lebanon hostage to its similar aspiration to destroy Israel, has emulated Hamas, placing Lebanese lives at risk of injury and death. 

 

Clashes on a near-daily basis on the border have led to the death of around 150 people on Lebanon's border; most representing Hezbollah operatives and allied terror groups, but among them an estimated 17 civilians. Roughly 72,437 Lebanese are estimated to have been displaced. Schools in border communities have been closed as a result of the fighting. Three sisters, aged 14, 12 and 10 were killed with their grandmother when an Israeli strike hit the car they were in, in early November. 

 

It hasn't been a happy time for border Lebanese. Heavy storms flooded roads in Lebanon, cars floated on the floods, and four Syrian refugee children died in northern Lebanon when their home's ceiling collapsed and the building flooded. Smoke rises daily from surrounding hills in the southern village of Remeish, from shelling and airstrikes, leading the village mayor to say, there is "no holiday atmosphere at all". 

Hezbollah is not Christian, but Muslim, and it has no conscience over spoiling the Christmas holidays for Christian Lebanese. And far, far from the Middle East, Muslims that have settled in Europe, and in North America have been busy championing Hamas terrorism as cause for 'liberation' celebration, disrupting life in towns and cities in the West, marching into Christmas markets vociferously shouting 'Palestine will be free from the river to the sea!' and 'gas the Jews'.

 

 

Bewildered children brought to malls and shopping centres decorated with bright Christmas lights, lining up to sit on Santa's knee, become fearful, seeing loud, unruly men and women carrying Palestinian and Hamas flags, shouting and pushing people about. Christmas joy and celebrations are being disrupted everywhere by those claiming their support for Palestinians when what they are really supporting is 'death to Jews!'.