Shahinda Nassar and her family have grown accustomed to the sound of the heavy tread of military boots echoing through Bethlehem’s ancient streets. Down the steps from Manger Square, just beyond the weathered stones of the Church of the Nativity, where, since the fourth century, pilgrims have kneeled at the place of Jesus’ birth, the Nassar family has learned to distinguish between ordinary footsteps and the ominous cadence of soldiers on patrol.

The metallic screech of military vehicles, the commands shouted through megaphones and the low rumble of armored jeeps idling outside have replaced the screech of tourist bus wheels and the mutters of translators and tour guides, which they miss.

Mrs. Nassar, a 42-year-old administrator at Bethlehem University, spends her days battling the normalization of military occupation. The Catholic institution where she works, which has operated in the Lasallian tradition since its foundation by the Holy See in 1973, was the first university in the West Bank. Mrs. Nassar coordinates scholarship programs, builds professional networks and crafts arguments to convince students that remaining in their homeland is possible. 

But when night falls and the distant glow of settlements in the surrounding hills between Bethlehem and Jerusalem twinkles like taunting stars, she lies awake wrestling with the same question that torments her daughter: Is survival possible for Palestinians in Palestine?

For Palestinians across the West Bank, the past 20 months of the Israel-Hamas war have brought not just another cycle of violence, but a fundamental shift in the Israeli government’s strategy against them — a strategy that combines military force, economic suffocation and psychological warfare, making daily life unbearable. The roadblocks that turn 10-minute drives into three-hour ordeals, the settler gangs that attack with impunity, the demolition orders that hang over entire neighborhoods, the midnight arrests that snatch fathers from their beds — each serves as another turn in the vise grip tightening around Palestinian society. 

United Nations statistics point to a “displacement strategy.” Since the start of the war, settler violence in the West Bank has surged dramatically. Between October 2023 and July 2024, Israeli settlers, often accompanied by Israeli soldiers, launched more than 1,225 attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, forcibly displacing at least 23 Palestinian communities. By the end of last year, they had seized more than 8,150 acres of Palestinian land for additional settlements — which are illegal according to international law — or restricted military zones, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). 

In the two months after the cease-fire declared in January 2025, attacks on Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank caused the displacement of about 40,000 people, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. 

Beyond displacements, OCHA reported 926 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in such attacks, from October 2023 to May this year, including at least 196 children. 

The U.N., as well as Israeli and Palestinian rights groups, say these attacks form a coordinated campaign of terror designed to fracture Palestinian communities. Each torched olive grove — some containing trees dating to Ottoman times — severs another connection to the land. Every vandalized home, every desecrated cemetery, every child threatened while walking to school reinforces the same message: You are not safe here.

In her office at the university, Mrs. Nassar sees the consequences of these events in the resigned expression of her students. 

“The most common thing I hear is, ‘I want to leave,’ ” she says. “But they don’t say it with excitement. It’s something they’re coerced into.” 

The documents on her desk tell a different story: scholarship applications; lists of donors and funding proposals; and plans to expand student support. As a resource development manager, her role is to help students stay — by securing aid, building partnerships, and fundraising to keep the university going. 

However, coerced migration persists and transcends political or social categories, evolving into an existential crisis for Palestinian society, particularly its Christian minority.

With Israel’s government aggressively expanding settlements and the formal annexation of West Bank territory proceeding in bureaucratic increments, Palestinians confront the visceral reality their homeland is being taken parcel by parcel.

In 2023, the Israeli government oversaw the most rapid settlement expansion in more than a decade, with more than 30,000 housing units advanced in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, according to the Office of the European Union Representative in the West Bank. 

The watchdog group Peace Now reports 59 illegal settler outposts were established in 2024, compared with an average of seven per year in the previous 20 years, giving rise to the claim of an Israeli policy to exploit wartime focus on Gaza to entrench permanent control over the West Bank.

Last year, the government accelerated de facto annexation, the construction of settler-only roads, the legalization and increased funding of formerly illegal outposts and the transfer of civilian control of West Bank land from the Israeli Defense Forces to the Settlement Administration in the Defense Ministry. 

The international community’s muted response — occasional statements of “concern” without substantive action — has only emboldened the architects of this demographic engineering, Mrs. Nassar says.

Despite her efforts to provide scholarships for undergraduates who now stand at roughly 3,000 — nearly 200 left since the war began — Mrs. Nassar says educational opportunities are not enough to keep young Palestinians in their homeland.

“We try to give them the tools to build futures,” she says, “but the lived reality destroys the foundations those futures require.”

Israeli policy restricts Palestinian movement through a military permit system and more than 800 checkpoints and other obstacles, according to OCHA. West Bank Palestinians need permits to work in Israel or settlements, access hospitals or visit family in Jerusalem, or farm near settlements. For instance, OCHA reported in January that 44 percent of the 67,116 requests, submitted between October 2023 and December 2024, by West Bank Palestinians to access health care in Jerusalem were denied or pending. Even internal West Bank movement is controlled through sudden checkpoints, gates and restricted military zones that ban Palestinians from their farmland. 

The Cremisan Valley, once a lush tapestry of terraced vineyards and ancient olive groves tended by Christian families for generations, now testifies to this attrition. The separation wall’s concrete slabs and razor wire slice through the landscape, isolating 87 percent of Christian-owned farmland from those families who cultivated it, according to a 2023 report by B’Tselem.

This fragmentation extends beyond agriculture into religious observance and practice. The 40 percent decline in church participation among Christian youth since 2020 reflects not declining faith, but the complicated logistics of religious practice under occupation, according to the ecumenical Diyar Consortium in Bethlehem.

The journey for a Christian from Bethlehem to pray in Jerusalem’s holy sites — once a short pilgrimage of under six miles — now requires permits that are routinely denied, checkpoints where armed soldiers scrutinize identification papers, and hours of waiting. 

Sally Nassar, Mrs. Nassar’s 16-year-old daughter, articulates the psychological toll with a clarity that belies her youth. 

“I don’t see my future here,” she states matter-of-factly, her eyes glancing at her phone screen as she scrolls through social media. “You never know what will happen or when you’re going to die.”

Her words distill the essence of Palestinian adolescence under occupation — the constant calculation of risk in ordinary activities, the normalization of trauma, the premature acceptance of exile as the only path to safety.

For Sally and her peers, studying abroad represents not just academic opportunity, but survival. 

“A lot of people are leaving not because they don’t like their heritage,” she explains, “but because they feel fear.”

The cumulative effect is a generation coming of age with the grim understanding that remaining in their homeland may hinder their future, their dreams. Economic warfare manifests in every aspect of life in the West Bank. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics recorded 42 percent graduate unemployment in 2024. With overall unemployment exceeding 30 percent that same year, even the most educated face endless struggles to maintain decent standards of living. 

“What are we offering them to stay?” Mrs. Nassar asks rhetorically, her voice tinged with exhaustion. “Can we give them a predictable future? Can we protect them?”

Bethlehem’s tourism-dependent economy, once vibrant with pilgrim buses and souvenir shops, never recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. Even after international travel resumed, Israel’s permit system and increased roadblocks restricted visitor access to Palestinian areas. The industry collapsed after war between Israel and Hamas began in Gaza, prompted by Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023. 

George Saadeh, the former deputy mayor of Bethlehem, has witnessed the consequences. 

“I know two families who left last month — one to Europe, another to the U.S.,” he says. “We can’t blame them. They want safety and food for their children.”

Xavier Abu Eid, a Palestinian Chilean political scientist, interprets these developments as the manifestation of an exclusivist ideology that “pushes indigenous Christians and Muslims to either leave or accept inferior status.”

Mr. Abu Eid speaks from experience, having survived an incident near Jericho, where a settler charged at him with a car, nearly sending him and his pastor in their own car down a ravine.

“We are left with no protection, while soldiers and settlers act with impunity,” he says.

The violence follows predictable patterns, according to Mr. Abu Eid. Israeli roadblocks increasingly cut off Palestinian towns from one another, and sometimes access from markets and medical facilities, while settlement outposts metastasize across hilltops, encircling Palestinian communities in a noose of hostile architecture and a segregated road network that serves the settlements in the West Bank, but not Palestinian villages and cities.

The advancement of the “Greater Jerusalem” plan — a proposed bill in Israel that seeks to extend Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries by unilaterally annexing West Bank settlements, while excluding Palestinian neighborhoods — would expand Israeli sovereignty over occupied territory in violation of international law. Mr. Abu Eid warns “the areas where more than 90 percent of Palestinian Christians remain are at risk of being swallowed.”

In this environment, religious observance becomes an act of defiance. “Praying is an act of defiance,” he insists. “We fight to reach our churches, to keep them alive.”

Access to churches is in fact controlled by Israel’s movement restriction policy, says Mrs. Nassar, which limits access to the cities where the largest churches are located, such as Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazareth. 

“This land isn’t just a spiritual journey — it’s a lived experience of horrors,” she says.

The Church of the Nativity exists in a bizarre duality — a magnet for the few international pilgrims who snap selfies at the Silver Star marking where Jesus was born, while outside its doors Palestinian worshipers navigate a maze of military barriers to attend liturgies.

Mr. Saadeh’s personal tragedy embodies the excruciating choices facing Palestinians. His voice fractures when speaking of Christine, his 11-year-old daughter killed by Israeli forces at a checkpoint in 2005.

“I decided to stay, but I paid a heavy price,” he says.

Now overseeing Shepherd’s High School in Beit Sahour, part of the educational network of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem that serves 20,000 Palestinian children, Mr. Saadeh is unable to advise families to remain.

“The price is getting too high,” he says, his eyes clouding with grief and doubt.

The demographic crisis facing Palestinian Christians — now less than 1.5 percent of the population in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip — reflects the broader existential threat. Mr. Abu Eid clings to fragments of hope, noting that “many with foreign passports choose to stay. Even in Gaza … some refuse to leave.” 

However, the exodus continues unabated, with Mrs. Nassar’s own children pleading, “Don’t wait for what’s happening in Gaza to happen here.”

Her response captures the moral urgency of the moment: “We don’t need Christians who are silent. We need those who challenge power. Your silence is a threat to peace.”

As the West Bank teeters on the brink of irreversible transformation — where “annexation occurs not through declarations but through bulldozers, settlements and systemic violence,” says Mr. Abu Eid — Mr. Saadeh says Palestinians face an impossible calculus: “exile and the loss of homeland or staying and risking losing everything else.”

“Our freedom is not impossible,” Mr. Abu Eid says, but the sands in the hourglass have become perilously thin.

This article was updated on 17 June to clarify Shahinda Nassar’s role at Bethlehem University.