A Lebanese School Brought Christmas Cheer. Then Came the War.

The predominantly Shiite city of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon once boasted the nation’s largest Christmas tree, erected to symbolize good relations between local Muslims and the tiny Christian minority of only 20 families.

The local evangelical school—with a 99 percent Shiite student body—had celebrated the holiday for years, and in 2018 it built a 100-foot wrought-iron conic structure topped with a radiant star. (The use of natural firs or pines is uncommon in Lebanon). Several of the hundreds of students, parents, neighbors, and dignitaries in attendance wore Santa hats. Many had trees in their homes and gifts to open on Christmas day.

Earlier that December, Ahmed Kahil, the Hezbollah-affiliated president of the municipality, continued the annual tradition of erecting a smaller tree in the souk, the traditional marketplace and heart of the city. And at both events—alongside Shadi El-Hajjar, the principal of the National Evangelical School of Nabatieh (NESN), heads of other private schools in the city, and various government and religious officials—Kahil wished Christians a Merry Christmas.

Lebanon’s economic crisis made 2018 the last year NESN could afford to erect its massive Yuletide construction. But over the following years, elementary school classrooms still featured Christmas trees, students exchanged secret Santa gifts, and teachers enjoyed the annual holiday dinner. “If Christmas isn’t found in your hearts,” the school reminded, “you won’t find it under a tree.”

NESN celebrating Christmas in 2018 with an 100-foot wrought-iron Christmas tree.National Evangelical School of Nabatieh (NESN)
NESN celebrating Christmas in 2018 with an 100-foot wrought-iron Christmas tree.

But there was no Christmas celebration in Nabatieh last month, after over a year of war between Israel and Hezbollah. On October 8, 2023, the Shiite militia launched rockets into Israel in support of Hamas following its attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and took around 250 hostages. The subsequent daily missile exchange drove tens of thousands from the border regions of both nations.

A year later, most of Nabatieh’s 80,000 residents fled their homes as Israel intensified its military campaign against Hezbollah. On October 16, an Israeli missile killed Kahil and 10 others at the Nabatieh town hall as they coordinated the daily distribution of food and medicine to the 200 families who remained in the largely evacuated city.

Initially, NESN stayed open for its 1,400 students. Located 35 miles south of Beirut and only 7 miles from Israel, the historic evangelical institution won local respect over the years by offering a nonreligious but values-based educational environment that consistently ranked among the top high schools in Lebanon. The September 2024 pager attack delayed the start of the academic year, and the exodus from the city eventually shifted education online. But within a week NESN opened its doors as a shelter for the locally displaced.

Over the course of the war, its staff stood by the Shiite community, including one who rescued Kahil’s colleague after the October 16 strike.

“When you see your hometown destroyed and the damage at the school,” Hajjar said, “you have to ask: Why is this happening to those who are not involved?”

A safe haven

In the early stages of the war, Nabatieh mostly avoided Israeli targeting. But each time a missile hit the surrounding area, the sound of blasts sent students scurrying under their desks. Parents called NESN to take their kids home. Yet after a few weeks, the war became the community’s new normal as Hajjar convinced families the safest place for students was at school.

Outside the school was a different story. On February 14, an Israeli missile killed Mahmoud Amer, a NESN kindergarten student, his mother, and five other civilians in their homes. The IDF targeted the apartment below, where Ali al-Debs, a Hezbollah senior commander, was present at the time. Israel accused Debs of masterminding a cross-border terrorist attack nearly a year earlier that injured a civilian. NESN held two days of mourning for Amer and offered his family a full K-12 scholarship for Hussein, his 3-year-old brother. The school’s annual Ramadan bake sale fundraiser gave them an iPad.

As the war continued, NESN grieved other victims in its community. According to the principal, an Israeli missile killed the sister of a kindergarten teacher living next door to the IDF target, while another attack killed the school nurse’s brother, a medic affiliated with Hezbollah. Four teachers lost their homes, collateral damage in a war that has resulted in $1.5 billion in losses for the city of Nabatieh, according to a World Bank report.

On October 12, Israel bombed the souk and other targets in Nabatieh, including a building next door to NESN. The home belonged to the parents of the local head of the Hezbollah-affiliated Mustafa school network, though no one was there at the time, Hajjar said. The resulting shockwave blew out the school’s windows and knocked doors off their hinges. Inside, it damaged computers, projectors, and air conditioning units. In the parking lot, chunks of cement blocks hit buses and vehicles, covering the asphalt and warping the permanently grounded iron base of the Christmas tree.

About 30 displaced individuals were sheltering at the campus, where they received daily provisions from municipality officials. All but a few left the school after the blast.

Mahmoud Amer, a kindergarten student at NESN, was killed by an Israeli missile.
Mahmoud Amer, a kindergarten student at NESN, was killed by an Israeli missile.

An acclaimed school

American Presbyterian missionaries founded NESN as a school for girls in 1925, in a building rented in the souk from a Shiite sheikh. Although for decades the missionaries maintained a reading room for the public—alongside community facilities for a chess club and volleyball court—they did not build a church in Nabatieh. Instead, they focused on an educational mission and relocated to the city’s 400-year-old Christian quarter in 1948. But the school always celebrated the birth of Jesus.

“I was shocked to discover how Shiites loved Christmas,” said Hajjar, who became principal in 2013. “Families choose our school because of this spirit, no matter what party they belong to.”

Muslim parents originally accepted Bible teaching at the school, though very few people accepted the faith. Yet many came to appreciate the school’s English language instruction and access to Western culture. In 1972, the school screened Nabatieh’s first public cartoons—Tom and Jerry. Today, the school is owned by the local Presbyterian synod and is part of the Association of Evangelical Schools in Lebanon.

At that time there were 100 Christian families in Nabatieh, but many fled the city along with their Shiite neighbors when Palestinians established control of the south and attacked Israel during Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, which began in 1975. The school persevered but relocated temporarily to the city of Sidon about 20 miles away in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon to subdue the militants and occupied Nabatieh for the next three years.

During the civil war, Shiite neighbors intervened when Palestinian militants detained local believers. And when other Shiites moved into deserted Christian homes, they assisted returning Christians in reclaiming their property. But with the rise of Hezbollah, a surge in Islamic ideology compelled NESN to drop its Bible curriculum.

Chamoun Assaf, a PE teacher and one of the 10 percent of the staff who are Christian, said that Palestinians had once detained his father. As an adult, he worked to remove land mines from the civil war and volunteered with the Red Cross. But when he joined NESN, he enjoyed a short walk to school every morning instead. His great-grandfather had moved to Nabatieh in 1890, so Assaf knew his neighbors well.

In October, Israeli missiles hit at least 15 Christian-owned homes in his neighborhood, including one 10 feet from his own, Assaf told CT. Another demolished a 100-year-old building next to the Assumption of Mary Catholic Church hall. Israel issued its first evacuation order for Nabatieh on October 3, but Assaf and his Shiite wife, Lina—there are 17 local mixed marriages, he said—had already left two weeks earlier.

During the war, Israeli spokespeople stated that the missiles targeting Nabatieh struck military installations and arms depots near civilian buildings. Assaf said he does not know if this was true: He has hundreds of friends in the Shiite community, and even their families are unaware if their relatives are militants. He doubts the souk could contain heavy weaponry. As it is a popular area, everyone would have noticed.

He does know Hezbollah was present in the forests surrounding the city. An amateur hunter, Assaf recalled encounters in the woods where suddenly a fighter appeared and asked him to leave. But he gave every assurance that city leaders were not soldiers. He played volleyball with Kahil every week.

“Maybe in some places they are hitting Hezbollah,” Assaf said. “But why did they hit my neighbor?”

A municipal bombing

Assaf’s brother, Nimr, is the municipality’s sole Christian on its 21-person council. Nimr was not at the office on the day of the October 16 bombing, but his colleague, Sadek Ismail, who personally distributed aid to a remaining Christian resident, was just beginning daily operations. The missile killed him instantly.

At the time, Ali Shokor, the NESN high school superintendent and a Shiite, was drinking tea with other members of the al-Talaba emergency services volunteer group directly across the street from city hall. His teammate, Abbas Fahd, had just left to join the relief effort when they were startled by the deafening sound of a plane overhead. Within seconds a missile struck the outskirts of Nabatieh. Items spilled out of cupboards as the workers scurried to an interior room. Almost immediately, the next blast hit the city office building.

Glass had shattered everywhere. As Shokor stepped outside, in a state of shock, he noticed that the explosion had started street fires and broken pipelines, which spurted water onto the streets. His adrenaline kicked in.

Shokor rushed through the municipality’s still-upright gate and found Fahd with council member Khodor Kodeih, injured but alive. They had been standing in the parking lot between an ambulance and distribution vehicle, shielded from the worst of the blast. But the overhead structure had collapsed upon Kodeih, and Shokor helped to free him.

Shokor spent the next day at the government hospital in unofficial mental recovery, trying to regain his nerves while being too afraid to move about or sleep anywhere else. He had founded al-Talaba in 1986 and had refused to evacuate in every war since. This was the first time he thought he might die.

But the second day after the attack, he felt emboldened. Gathering his team, Shokor told them, “We do the same things as everyone else in the municipality. Israel could have killed us at any time—but didn’t. God ordained that we should live and continue to serve. Let’s get back to work.”

As a Muslim, he learned much about the Christian spirit of sacrifice over the years at NESN, but his longstanding motivations—learned as a boy scout—had always been humanitarian.

Obtaining necessities for the 92 families he helped in the city became more difficult after the souk was destroyed. Shokor was still afraid during subsequent trips to Sidon in his American-made GMC ambulance, where he would drop off evacuating families and then return with supplies. Israel had struck such vehicles before, suspecting they carried militants under the cover of charitable work. But with each trip, his confidence grew. Al-Talaba, which means “students” in Arabic, was not registered with any political party. He felt safe.

But so had many who affiliated with Hezbollah, including its share of council members. Kahil, for example, had pledged to stay in Nabatieh when thousands were evacuating. While the Geneva Conventions forbid targeting civilians in international conflicts unless they take a direct part in hostilities, the Red Cross and the United States have different standards for what might allow Israel to go after Hezbollah’s nonfighting members. The European Union, meanwhile, distinguishes between the Shiite movement’s political party and its military wing—which it labels a terrorist organization.

Shokor avoided transporting the wounded to Nabatieh’s Hezbollah-linked hospital. Instead he brought Kodeih to the city’s governmental health center, which then transferred him to the American University of Beirut Medical Center in the capital. Kodeih was unable to move for a month, recovering from fractures in his back, left leg, and pelvis.

A muted Christmas

On November 27, the cease-fire declaration spurred many Hezbollah supporters in Beirut to flood the streets, waving the group’s green-and-yellow flag. Though the terms required the militia to withdraw from Lebanon’s southern region, they had provided stiff resistance to the Israeli ground invasion. Israel’s air attack decimated Hezbollah’s senior leadership and its military arsenal, yet Hezbollah considered simply surviving a victory.

Hollowed-out Nabatieh was far more somber. Though the cease-fire came in time for Christmas, Kodeih told CT the city was not able to commemorate the holiday or put up a tree in the ruined souk. In mid-December, a diminished municipal council elected Kodeih as president. By early January, seeking to encourage hope, officials put up posters declaring that the city would come back more beautiful than before. Reconstruction, however, has been slow.

At times grimacing in pain, Kodeih condemned the “tyrannical raid of the Zionist entity,” using a widespread Arabic rendering to avoid saying the name of Israel.

“The Messiah”—he used a shared designation for Jesus rather than choosing between Christian and Muslim names for him—was weeping over the martyrs. Though the common prophet is “in our hearts” and intercedes for all, he said it was not appropriate for the municipality to celebrate when so many in Nabatieh are mourning. His assistant, equally solemn, wore a head covering with a pendant of Kahil draped around her neck.

Kodeih’s remarks were measured and monotone. Christmas would return next year. Muslims and Christians were one people. NESN was a respected school. And there were no militants, he said, present in Nabatieh. But he smiled at the mention of his children. The family had a tree in his home and planned to exchange presents.

Elsewhere in the city, the Christmas spirit suffered. For years, a local carpenter had feted the Greek Catholic sanctuary with an ornate crèche, drawing admirers from Christian villages around Nabatieh. Muslims would come also, seeking divine intercession then and throughout the year. But this December there was no display. The carpenter had evacuated Nabatieh to safety.

Shokor had a tree in his home but also did not celebrate the holiday this year. His father was a Shiite cleric who loved Christmas, giving gifts and placing figurines of Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus in the living area. Muslims generally do not portray prophets in visual form but do believe in the virgin birth. Shokor followed his father’s traditions, including at his family-owned restaurant. He had welcomed customers the previous Christmas despite the war, but business was scant. He would wait and see if the cease-fire held before opening again.

Shokor did propose seasonal decorating at NESN as a statement of normalcy. The high school had reopened for some in-person classes a week before Christmas. But elementary students did not return until early January, as repairs were still ongoing. Teachers were also distracted, having to both prepare lessons and scramble to fix their own damaged homes.

Back in 2023, Hajjar, NESN’s principal, had been defiant. His holiday message told students the Christmas spirit was contrary to war and terror, restating the reasons for an evangelical school to exist in a Shiite city. The message of love and compassion builds bridges between communities, he said, in a Lebanon often torn by sectarian division.

But during the recent holiday season, he was depressed, taking medication to sleep at night and finding comfort in his three dogs. He feared the school might close if parents were unable to pay their fees. He was angry and frustrated—but he ended each day with a prayer of thanks. From Christian faith, he had forgiven those who attacked his beloved city.

“I believe God will hear this prayer,” Hajjar said, “and put it on his agenda.”

The post A Lebanese School Brought Christmas Cheer. Then Came the War. appeared first on Christianity Today.

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