Navigating the old city of Jerusalem is usually a challenge.
The narrow, labyrinthine streets are typically crowded with pilgrims and tourists mingling with local Jews, Arabs and Christians.
Since the events of 7 October, however, the avenues where Jesus may have once walked are deserted.
Weaving through the main thoroughfare in the Christian quarter, a typical route taken by pilgrims to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, most of the shop shutters are down.
The tourism industry in Israel came to a near standstill after the shocking attack by Hamas on 7 October 2024. Independent flight monitors estimate that Ben Gurion Airport saw an 80 per cent cut in air traffic, as many countries issued travel warnings for Israel.
One shopkeeper, Zuzu, welcomes me into his store and explains how difficult things have been with the loss of the usual footfall from pilgrims.
“Most days it’s nothing. If we are lucky, I sell two, three things,” he says. “We need our shops to see the sun.” Zuzu is talking about more than just the risk of dampness when shutting the ancient shops. For him, and many others, the old city is their lifeline. “I’m here for a long time. I cannot be without the old city,” he adds.
Many Christians living in East Jerusalem and the occupied Palestinian territories rely on pilgrims for their livelihoods.
Working in the shop since the age of 15, Zuzu says he is one of the lucky ones financially—he has two shops and runs a supermarket.
For Gabi Hanni, owner of Versavee Restaurant in the Christian quarter, the situation is dire. He explains that he initially shut his shop out of fear, expecting retaliatory attacks in the old city due to the scale of Israel’s losses.
Since the October attack, Gabi has only opened for a few days now and again, mostly for private occasions. He has had to let go of most of his staff and rely on his savings to make it through the subsequent months.
The pilgrimage industry in the Holy Land is a complex ecosystem, with bus and tour companies, gift shops and religious sites all interconnected. Gabi has lost most of his customers from the tour company Terra Dei. Focusing on tours for Catholic pilgrims, Terra Dei had three groups in the country on October 7. Fabien Safar, the company’s head, describes how the company had to suddenly terminate all contracts with suppliers, hotels and restaurants.
“I didn’t sleep from both a professional and personal point of view,” says Fabien. After frantically working to get tours out of the country in that first week, Terra Dei had 75 tours cancelled between October and Christmas.
“If you take an average person from the US, they won’t come here,” says Fabien, adding that there “are almost no Catholics coming”.
“We feel like we have been abandoned – the tour guides, the agencies and restaurants.”
Since October, organisations like Terra Dei have been counting on the Israeli State to help them, but payments to companies and employees only lasted for a few months following the outbreak of war. For many, the crippling hit to the industry seems a repeat of what happened during Covid-19. But, unlike now, Fabien notes that during the pandemic they received help for over ten months.
Although 80 groups have cancelled for 2024, the four staff left at Terra Dei are still open for business, even if just for a few individual travellers.
“We need to be optimistic, otherwise we would’ve closed a long time ago,” says Fabien.
For many working in the industry, the current conflict is only one of multiple wars and escalations of violence they have lived through. Father David Steffy from Notre Dame of Jerusalem Centre describes the resilience he’s seen among his staff and congregation over the past six years as the Chargé of the Holy See.
“This is a very resilient people on all sides. They are very aware that every couple of years there’s going to be something that probably pulls the rug out from them – and their spirit is so beautiful.”
“What was especially tragic about everything [with] the war was the timing, which undercut a spirit of hope and normality coming back,” he added, referring to the pandemic and everyone trying to move on and rebuild from that experience.
High hopes had started to build for when the celebrations of Ramadan,
Passover and Easter were due to fall over the same holy period in the
holy city in 2024.
“We are waiting for you. Do not be afraid,
return to Jerusalem and to the Holy Land!” was the message from
Jerusalem’s Latin Patriarchate Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa before
the start of the holy period – typically the busiest time of year for
the industry. “Your presence is always a presence of peace, and we
sincerely need peace today; may you come and bring us your peace.”
Instead, the holy period began with the shutters often remaining down as war raged on and hardly any pilgrims came.
Terra Dei believes they can conduct tours safely, but many customers come from countries advising against travel to the region. Fabien says it’s easy to convince individuals, but media reports make it hard to attract larger groups.
“The most difficult is to convince the diocese to organise official pilgrimages and come,” says Fabien
The night of Iran’s missile attack in April added to the concerns of those Fabian is trying to persuade.
According to Zohar Marom from ABT Global, an Israeli tour company, the few groups that had chosen to come back then cancelled again. “We saw growing interest in March and April, but since the night of the Iran attacks, everything changed,” she said. “It was exactly like the night of October 7.”
Some individual pilgrims are still making the journey themselves. I met Roser and her husband Humberto on the steps of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Coming to the Holy Land for the third time in her life, she speaks about how special Jerusalem is to her, but this perspective is not one her family and friends share back home.
“In Spain, what they see on the news is horrible. People think we’re crazy.”
Travelling from Valencia amid various travel restrictions, Roser joins a group of 40 other pilgrims on a ten-day trip through the Holy Land.
“We go to the Sea of Galilee. We go to the Church of Temptation and we are alone!” “There aren’t cars, there aren’t buses, it’s only us.”
In 2019, over 4.5 million tourists visited Israel, according to the country’s tourism ministry. However, from January to March 2024, tourist numbers plummeted to just one-fifth of the previous year’s figures.
While Jerusalem still sees a small trickle of tourists, the same can’t be said for the rest of the country.
In Nazareth, its proximity to the north of Israel where fighting is ongoing is hindering pilgrims. Walking through the town that Jesus called home, only a handful of shops are open. Standing outside the Church of the Annunciation, the soaring war planes overhead drown out the organ inside.
“I’ve worked in tourism for the past 12 years and we’ve never had this kind of war,” says Roatem Avisar, general manager of Abraham Tours, which also runs a hostel where I stayed, as one of only two guests. “When [the war of] 2014 happened, it took about eight months to get back on track. Every time it takes a while, but we always recover,” she said.
“I think this is even bigger than us right now.” She noted that, as with other places, they were only just stabilising their numbers since the Covid-19 pandemic in the last quarter of 2023 when the war broke out.
In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, the industry is crippled by two factors – the decrease in tourists and the movement restrictions for Palestinians. This, coupled with the rise in settler violence across the occupied West Bank, has hurt the local economy.
Every shopkeeper I speak to says they haven’t seen tourists in months. Some used to work in the pilgrimage industry in East Jerusalem but have not been able to leave Bethlehem since October, due to the change in permit policy by the Israeli authorities.
Yousef owns the closest gift shop to the Church of the Nativity – a spot that would have typically seen hundreds queue for hours each day to visit the birthplace of Christ.
“There has been nothing for nearly eight months now. Every day it costs me 40 to 50 dollars to run the shop: for light, electricity, rent. There’s no work, no life.”
Yousef explains that he keeps the shop open in order to see people and to keep up his own spirits – but is unsure how long he can go on like this.
“If it’s like this for a long time, then there will be a big problem – nearly everyone has lost their job. If you finish your money, then what?”
There is now no queue to see the site of Jesus’s birth; a privilege for the very few who have made it to the holy site.
Randy Malick from Incredible Journeys Tours in the US normally always
takes a group to Bethlehem, but the lack of pilgrims has meant he has
started to re-route his tours to destinations like Rome or Cyprus.
“You’re safer going to Israel than to dinner in any major metropolitan city in the US,” he quips.
For
Randy, a return to the Holy Land is also more than just an economic
venture: he is anxious to get back for spiritual reasons.
“My experience has been that once you have been there, it’s as if the land lives inside of you,” he says. “It literally grounds your faith inside of you. There is nowhere like it in the world. It’s where it all started.”
Father David Steffy from the Notre Dame of Jerusalem Centre echoes the importance of the return of pilgrims for the spiritual life of the Holy Land. One of the most popular guesthouses and religious centres in Jerusalem, Notre Dame has seen hundreds of empty rooms and pews over the past few months.
“There’s no place in the world where pilgrims experience the love of Jesus [like] here. The war is also interrupting the spiritual journey of thousands and millions of people,” says Father David.
Walking into the Church of All Nations at the Garden of Gethsemane, I understand what he means. I am the only person sitting in the body of the church. The priest sits quietly, his eyes shut and head hung, as a few locals sing the Alleluia.
A sombre mood pervades the Holy Land right now. Nearly eight months into the war, with tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza, over 500 killed in the occupied West Bank, and over 1,200 people killed in Israel during the attack by Hamas.
Father David speaks of a collective heartbreak that marks the region:
“There’s nobody here that’s not suffering some form of discouragement,” he said. “I think for the priests it’s made us more fervent and more desirous to celebrate that sacrifice, the cross, which is the sacrifice of God’s presence among us through pain and suffering.”
As I enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I find a few pilgrims lighting candles and blessing items bought from a few lucky shopkeepers. They have made their own sacrifices to come for the ceremony of the Holy Fire on the eve of Orthodox Easter.
Leaving the church, a shopkeeper’s eyes catch mine. He asks me if
I’ll come inside while insisting that I don’t need to buy anything – a
marker of just how lonely life in Jerusalem has become for its
shopkeepers of all faiths.
In the Vatican’s recent announcement on pilgrimage as an opportunity for indulgences during Jubilee 2025,
it highlighted that pilgrims can obtain the jubilee indulgence by
visiting one of the three basilicas in the Holy Land: The Basilica of
the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the Basilica of the Nativity in
Bethlehem, or the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth.