Faith leaders and residents in Bethlehem are grappling with how to mark the festive holiday while fellow Palestinians continue to be killed.

In November, over a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a report by the Gaza-based Community Training Center for Crisis Management produced a grim statistic: “Nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believe their death is imminent — and nearly half of them want to die.”

Israeli troops forced the evacuation of the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza and many patients, some of them on foot, arrived at another hospital miles away in Gaza City, the territory's health ministry said on Tuesday.

Israeli soldiers raided a hospital in isolated northern Gaza after forcing all the patients and most of the doctors to leave, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Tuesday. The Israeli military confirmed its troops had entered the Indonesian Hospital in the town of Jabaliya as part of an operation searching for Hamas

An investigation by the Israeli military has found that the actions of their forces on the ground likely influenced the killing of six hostages in Gaza in August by Hamas. It said the "ground activities in the area,

The Israeli official threatened to take similar action against the leadership of the Houthi rebel group in Yemen.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz admitted on Monday (December 23) for the first time publicly to Israel's killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran in July, further risking tensions between Tehran and its arch-enemy Israel in a region shaken by Israel's war in Gaza and the conflict in Lebanon.