Bethlehem abandons Christmas festivities

For the first time in living memory, the West Bank city of Bethlehem has no plans to put up a tree or decorations in Manger Square this Christmas.

"We shall hold midnight Mass on Christmas Eve," the Palestinian Catholic mayor, Hanna Nasser, said last night, "but nothing more. Our people are in no mood to celebrate."

The 30,000 residents – 65 per cent Muslim, 35 per cent Christian – were back under curfew last night after Israeli troops granted them a few hours to buy food and other necessities. "Even if we wanted to put up decorations," the mayor explained, "we wouldn't have enough time."

Mr Nasser was speaking after Israel announced that it would bar the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, from going there for the festivities.

The army added that it would not withdraw before Christmas from the holy city, which it reoccupied on 22 November after a suicide bomber killed 11 passengers on a Jerusalem bus.

Israel was unimpressed by Mr Arafat's efforts to distance himself from al-Qa'ida, which killed three Israelis and 10 Kenyan workers in a hotel in Mombasa last month. In an interview with a British Sunday newspaper, he urged al-Qa'ida's leader, Osama bin Laden, "not to hide behind the Palestinian cause". Mr Arafat complained that Bin Laden had never done anything to help.

Mr Arafat, a Muslim, has been confined to his headquarters in Ramallah for most of the past year. He attended Christmas Mass in the Church of the Nativity for the first six years after Bethlehem came under Palestinian rule in 1995, but last year Israel stopped him after he refused to hand over the suspected killers of its Tourism Minister, Rechavam Ze'evi.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, Mr Arafat's spokesman, accused the Israelis of violating a promise of evacuation from Bethlehem that President Moshe Katsav made to the Pope in Rome last week.

On Israel's domestic front, the police began to investigate allegations of corruption in the ruling Likud's selection of candidates for the 28 January general election. Several unsuccessful contenders reported that brokers offered votes in return for cash, while others accused shady businessmen of contributing huge sums to individual campaign funds. One of the also-rans protested to the daily paper Ma'ariv: "There were vote contractors, operated by businessmen and perhaps even criminal elements, who simply bought MPs as if they were items off the shelf."