Will Papa Noel make it to Gaza?

To reenact Jesus’ birth this season, the 8-year-old Palestinians dressed as Mary and Joseph had to brave nearly two weeks of urban combat.

Their Bible studies center canceled one rehearsal because of gunfire around the parliament building next door. Wasim Amash, the third-grader who played Joseph, was late for another after the fighting between the Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas halted his bus.

Lily and Marian Saba, sisters who sing in the choir behind the manger, got out of harm’s way just before an ambush on a Fatah official’s car near their school killed his three young sons.

“We almost canceled the Nativity play,” said Steve Mashni, a Baptist missionary in the audience when it was finally staged Friday evening. “We are reluctant to celebrate while others are suffering. But the children have been practicing for months.”

Christmas invariably draws attention to the plight of the Holy Land’s dwindling Christian minority. In the early years of this decade, the holiday fell in the midst of a raging conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Then a massive barrier Israel began erecting to defend itself isolated Bethlehem, imposing a military checkpoint on the path followed by pilgrims between Jerusalem and the West Bank city believed to be Jesus’ birthplace.

But to the 3,000 Christians in the Gaza Strip, the Grinch in this year’s Christmas narrative is not Israel, but the violent conflict inside their own Palestinian community.

“This is deeply frustrating,” said Bernard Sabella, a Christian member of the Palestinian Authority parliament. “Instead of joining forces to confront our problems, the factional leaders have turned us against each other. It is the last thing we expected from them.”

The conflict is about political power and policy toward Israel, not religion. Christians are divided in their loyalties, with most leaning toward Fatah, but have taken little part in the fighting. Like most other Palestinians, they profess to be appalled by it.

Hamas, a militant Islamist movement sworn to seek Israel’s destruction, has dominated the Cabinet and parliament since March after winning an election that ended years of Fatah rule. Seeking to force Hamas to renounce violence and recognize the Jewish state, Israel and Western nations imposed a financial blockade on the Palestinian Authority, leaving it unable to pay full salaries to its 165,000 employees.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah leader elected in 2005, tried for months to broker a powersharing deal that would produce a new government acceptable to the international community and supportive of the negotiations he opened with Israel on Saturday. But after Hamas resisted, Abbas called for early elections, prompting the rival armed factions to test each other in street clashes that have killed 17 people since Dec. 10.

Among the casualties is the holiday spirit of Christian children in Gaza City, scene of most of the fighting.

By the time a shaky truce took hold Wednesday, both Catholic-run schools here had called off the annual gift-giving appearances by a white-bearded Papa Noel.

Jawal, the Palestinian cellphone company, decided not to dress up its own Santa, as it had done last year. Hotels and restaurants in Gaza City canceled special Christmas Eve dinner offerings. Offices called off Christmas parties.

Most Christians in Gaza belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, which celebrates Christmas on Jan. 7. Archbishop Alexios, its leader in Gaza, said there was still time to decide whether the truce was durable enough for the Orthodox Papa Noel to make his traditional door-to-door rounds of Christian homes.

“My girls keep asking, ‘Is Papa Noel coming?’ and ‘Does he know what we want?’ ” said Samer Saba, a worried 32-year-old father.

“I’ll tell you what I want,” he added. “I want to see my people living in peace, like one family, so my girls can feel some joy at Christmas.” Saba and his Ukrainian wife, Alexandra, who are Orthodox Christians, plan to put a tree in the corner by the living room television set Dec. 28, decorate it a little at a time until Jan. 6, and leave the girls some modest gifts.

The couple usually buy a few new ornaments each year and prepare an elaborate dinner, but this year they will skimp, Saba said, because he has collected only a little more than half his $500 monthly government salary as an athletic trainer.

Thanks only to his wife’s earnings as a hair stylist, he said, can the family afford a tree and gifts at all.

Like many Palestinians, Saba blames Israel’s blockade for his economic squeeze. But since Israel’s unilateral military withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005, Palestinian factional feuds have become a larger threat to his family’s safety.

Saba’s daughters are Lily, 9, and Marian, 6 -- the sisters who sang in the Christmas choir after escaping gunfire near their school.

Playing with a doll at her father’s side, Lily recalled the Dec. 11 shooting in a matter-of-fact tone: “One of my classmates, Lina Awadi, was walking near that car when the men shot at it. Her legs were bleeding when she ran into the school. All the kids were crying. We were frightened. We kept asking our teacher to let us go home.

“We’ve had enough of this,” she added glumly.

But the shooting didn’t stop. Last week it raged around the police intelligence compound across the street from the Saba home and forced the girls’ school to close for one day.

Saba, who voted for Fatah in this year’s election, said he was alarmed by the rigidity of both sides. He said he believed that Hamas was irresponsible to resist Abbas’ power-sharing plan and that Abbas was unrealistic to think he could hold elections over Hamas’ objections.

“We need a third party to show us the way out,” he said, encouraged by Egypt’s cease-fire mediation last week.

Saba’s family lives easily among Muslims. His daughters’ school is public and Muslim-run. Saba works for a government led by a party that, much more so than Fatah, is guided by Islam.

Some Christian missionaries here feel threatened by Hamas’ rise to power. They fear that some of the factional violence will be turned against their churches, speeding an exodus that has reduced the Christian population of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip by 10%, to about 45,000, since 2000.

Such anxieties rose in September when a grenade exploded near the Greek Orthodox church here after remarks by Pope Benedict XVI implicitly linking Islam with violence.

Hamas leaders took steps to reassure Christians, arranging police protection for churches for several days after the attack. Senior Hamas officials attended a special pre-Christmas Mass led here by Archbishop Michel Sabah of Jerusalem, the region’s senior Catholic prelate.

“Here, Muslims and Christians suffer with each other but not from each other,” said Msgr. Manuel Musallam, the Palestinian head of Gaza’s Catholic community.

Musallam is using his Christmas pulpit to denounce his customary targets -- Israel and the financial blockade. He speaks less openly about the Palestinian factional violence, although he did organize a student assembly last week to explore its causes.

“It is healthy to battle over such strong differences, but not with weapons,” the priest said. “This problem of violence can be solved quietly. It is not imposed on us from outside. It is an accident. It will pass.”

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boudreaux@latimes.com