BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) — At midnight on Christmas Eve, the words of the traditional hymn “The Night of Christmas” will ring out in the tiny grotto in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, built on the site where Christians believe Jesus Christ was born.
“On the night of Christmas, war is buried, On the night of Christmas, love is born,” a local choir sings each year during the midnight service. As they rehearsed ahead of this year's service, many choir members said the words echoed with deeper meaning following the ceasefire in Gaza.
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Palestinians pose for the pictures with performers in Manger Square in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
Palestinians watch performances in Manger Square in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
Joseph Hazboun, left, leads the rehearsal of a choir in St. Catherine's Church in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
Palestinian vendors wait for clients in Manger Square in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
People pose for a picture in Manger Square in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
“It reminds us that no matter the difficulties, the darkness, there is always a light and that hope is always alive,” said Joseph Hazboun, the conductor of the lay choir made up of local Catholics.
For the past two years, as the war in Gaza dragged on, Christmas in Bethlehem has been a somber affair, without the traditional festivities and decorations and music. But this year, families are flocking again to Manger Square, signaling hope about the fragile ceasefire and providing a much-needed economic boost to Bethlehem.
On a recent visit, Manger Square was crowded and buzzing with festive lights, a Christmas market, and music shows for children.
“You can see the town come alive again,” said Zoya Thalgia, a resident of Bethlehem. “Everyone’s happy, everyone’s coming out to celebrate, no matter religion, no matter their stance, everyone is here.”
Christmas and religious pilgrims have always been a prime economic engine for Bethlehem. Around 80% of the Muslim-majority city’s residents depend upon tourism-related businesses, according to the local government. During good times, their earnings ripple out to communities across the West Bank, a territory occupied by Israel since 1967 that has long struggled with poverty.
But during the Gaza war, the unemployment rate in the city jumped from 14% to 65%, Bethlehem Mayor Maher Nicola Canawati said earlier this month. And in previous years, as an act of protest, some churches created Nativity scenes with Jesus as an infant surrounded by rubble and barbed wire.
Despite the ceasefire that began in October, tensions remain high across much of the West Bank.
Israel’s military has said it is cracking down on militants in the territory and carrying out frequent raids. Attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank this year reached their highest level since the U.N. humanitarian office started collecting data in 2006.
Odette Al Sliby, a Bethlehem resident, has sung in choirs since she was seven years old, but she said few things compare to being able to sing in the grotto at the midnight Mass.
“It’s very holy, the place and the atmosphere and the songs and the words,” she said. Singing those songs is a message of hope, she said, and a reminder to Christians of the significance of endurance. “As Christians in the Holy Land, there is a big message of being here,” she said.
Christians account for less than 2% of the West Bank’s roughly 3 million residents, a presence that has been shrinking.
As poverty and unemployment have soared during the war, about 4,000 people have left Bethlehem in search of work, the mayor said. It’s part of a worrying trend for Christians, who are leaving the region in droves.
Across the Middle East, the Christian population has steadily declined as people have fled conflict and attacks.
Hazboun said he will pray this Christmas that the Christian population of Bethlehem and of other areas in the region important to Christianity don’t shrink any further.
The return of Christmas festivities across the West Bank, including a Christmas market in Ramallah thronged with visitors, is a much-needed break for local children, said Hazboun.
While Palestinians in the West Bank are still devastated by the images coming out of Gaza, lighting the community Christmas tree in Bethlehem's Manger Square for the first time in two years earlier this month provided a boost of much-needed holiday joy.
“We continue to pray for peace. This is the land of peace, it’s the land where the Prince of Peace was born, and we continue to pray and hope that one day we all will enjoy peace,” Hazboun said.
Palestinians pose for the pictures with performers in Manger Square in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
Palestinians watch performances in Manger Square in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
Joseph Hazboun, left, leads the rehearsal of a choir in St. Catherine's Church in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Friday, Dec. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
Palestinian vendors wait for clients in Manger Square in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
People pose for a picture in Manger Square in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — More than a decade ago, a frenzied 5-day search for the Boston Marathon bombers left some lessons in its aftermath.
One was that increasingly pervasive surveillance technology could help catch the culprits. Another was that amateur online sleuths on Reddit could not.
But the intense search this week for a suspect in a Brown University shooting that killed two students and wounded nine other people turned the tables on those expectations.
Sweeping surveillance, now found in doorbells, cars and a vast network of vehicle-tracking cameras, did eventually help track down the whereabouts of Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old former Brown graduate student investigators believe was responsible for the Dec. 13 shooting and another killing two days later of an MIT professor in Brookline, Massachusetts.
But the latest artificial intelligence-powered surveillance was of little use in the early search for a gunman who walked away from the Brown campus after the shooting and slipped unnoticed into the surrounding neighborhoods of Providence, Rhode Island. He evaded detection for days, using a hard-to-trace phone, avoiding facial recognition software by obscuring his face with a medical-type mask and switching the license plates on his rental cars.
It wasn't until a local Reddit user "blew this case right open” with an old-fashioned tip first posted on the social media platform that police were able to connect a car to Neves Valente, said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha. They finally found the suspect dead Thursday in Salem, New Hampshire, days after he likely killed himself.
The Reddit tipster known only as John is “no less than a hero,” Providence Mayor Brett Smiley wrote Friday to FBI Director Kash Patel, asking for the entirety of the FBI's $50,000 award for information leading investigators to the suspect.
Strangers have invited him to Christmas dinner and suggested he get a “key to the city and free coffee and doughnuts for life,” according to fellow contributors to Reddit's Providence forum.
It was a stark turn from 2013 when commentators on Reddit and other online discussion boards falsely smeared a Brown University student as a potential suspect in the deadly attack at Boston's famed marathon, just an hour's north of Providence, because of a supposed resemblance to a grainy suspect image.
“Hey Reddit, enough Boston bombing vigilantism,” declared a headline in The Atlantic at the time.
“It definitely went sideways in the Boston Marathon situation,” said Liza Potts, a professor at Michigan State University and director of a digital humanities lab that studied the online response. “That’s why folks will jokingly refer to the ‘Reddit Detective Agency’ or the ‘Reddit Bureau of Investigations.’”
The mistaken connection between the 2013 bombers and a missing Brown student — who was later found dead of an apparent suicide — is still remembered by many at the Ivy League school and its surrounding community.
Brown officials this week sought to swiftly tamp down another smear campaign circulating on X and other social media platforms falsely tying a current Brown student to the campus shooting because of his ethnicity, perceived political views and supposed resemblance to a police video of a person of interest. The “unimaginable nightmare” of false accusations led to “non-stop death threats and hate speech,” the student said in a statement.
Frustrated that tip lines could be jammed with nonsense, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and former state attorney general, urged social media speculators to “just shut up.”
“There is simply no need from an investigative point of view for people who have no idea what they’re talking about to offer their stupid and ill-informed views about what happened all over the internet,” Whitehouse said from Congress on Wednesday.
But Potts said some social media has been working better than others, and “of all the spaces that I study, Reddit seems to be getting it right more than not."
Harmful accusations were largely absent from Reddit's Providence forum, in part because volunteer moderators who manage Reddit's subject matter forums — known as subreddits — are largely responsible for keeping the peace.
Reddit's chief moderator for the Providence subreddit said in an interview that he's been on the platform for about 15 years and remembers the trauma that false Boston Marathon report caused.
“The Providence subreddit is very sensitive about (not) trying to go on a witch hunt or the mob mentality,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid doxing and because of the platform's culture of anonymity.
The Associated Press also reached out to the tipster on Tuesday, a day after he wrote on Reddit urging police to look into a Nissan sedan with Florida license plates. Fellow Redditors urged him to contact the FBI, and he said he did.
He didn’t respond to requests for comment and later posted that he doesn’t plan to talk with media. When he finally met with police on Wednesday — after approaching them on the street and identifying himself as the Reddit tipster — his information gave new life to a stalled investigation.
With a known vehicle, Providence police started looking through the footage from dozens of AI-powered cameras positioned around the city that can read license plates as well as other identifying details about a car, such as make, color, side damage or even bird droppings on the window.
The cameras, run by surveillance company Flock Safety, spotted his vehicle at least 14 times starting nearly two weeks before the shooting, according to a police affidavit. Providence police could then ask Flock-using police agencies in nearby cities and states to look for the same car, although New Hampshire — because of privacy restrictions on how long they can hold images — doesn't have any.
It was a breakthrough Flock was happy to boast about, especially as wariness remains in Providence's immigrant communities about more aggressive federal immigration enforcement. Flock says each of its customers decides when to share camera data, and the city doesn't share it with federal immigration agents. But some still want more safeguards.
“Once you know what they are, you see them everywhere,” said Madalyn McGunagle, a policy associate at the ACLU of Rhode Island. "People notice because they’re distinct-looking — a solar panel on top with a little oval camera underneath.”
But unlike the residential doorbell cameras that spotted him walking around Providence, had Neves Valente walked by a Flock camera, it wouldn't have detected him.
“It is a technical impossibility. The camera does not have an ability for a user to search for people,” said Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley in an interview Friday. “Our cameras are focused on vehicles because if you look at America, people drive. It is very hard to get anywhere on foot.”
“For the majority of our cities, they want to just know who is coming in and who is leaving,” he said.
Still, without John the tipster — whom local Redditors dubbed “Reddit Guy” — no one would have known how he left.
“Someone who is in the area and sees stuff all the time, they’re going to be better in a lot of ways than a random camera,” said the Providence subreddit's moderator. “John saw this guy going back and forth, unlocking his car and all that, and he just thought it was kind of weird.”
A Providence police car passes by Brown University's Van Wickle gates, in Providence, R.I., two days after a shooting took place on Brown University's campus, Monday, Dec. 15, 2025. (Lily Speredelozzi/The Sun Chronicle via AP)
