In Southern Lebanon, Trauma and Grief Mark a Somber Christmas

One by one, the churchgoers trudged into the bare-brick cathedral in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre for the last Sunday Mass before Christmas, their clothes sodden by rain and their minds haunted by war.There were no parties this year for the children, no music recitals and no Christmas tree in the city square.Much of the city is gone.

Flattened apartment buildings.Mangled cars.

Blown-out and abandoned mom-and-pop stores.After months of Israeli airstrikes, the holiday season began not with celebration, but with funerals as church members tended to their dead.The pastor, Yaacoub Saab, did his best to lift spirits as he stepped up to the altar.

“It’s a great blessing to gather and pray together,” he said.But later, out of earshot of his parishioners, he conceded that “we are finding it difficult to celebrate.”Amid a cease-fire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Tyre’s ancient Christian community has resigned itself to a muted Christmas this year.

While most of Tyre’s 125,000 residents fled during the war, the city’s Christian quarter, nestled alongside the harbor with its winding alleyways, was one of the few neighborhoods where some people remained.For months, they survived largely on handouts of bread, cut off from the outside world as water, electricity and medicine dwindled....