Palestinians are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim — between 97 and 99 per cent in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — with a Christian minority that has fallen to roughly one per cent of the population, and a tiny surviving Samaritan community near Nablus. The headline figure hides the more interesting story, which is the speed of the Christian decline and the very different religious atmospheres of the two territories that make up the Palestinian polity.
Two Territories, Two Religious Climates
The West Bank and Gaza are governed separately and feel different. The West Bank, under the Palestinian Authority, contains almost the entire Christian population and a broadly conservative but not doctrinally enforced Sunni Muslim majority. Ramallah has bars; Bethlehem has a Christmas market; the personal-status courts are religious but the criminal law is not.
Gaza, governed by Hamas since 2007, applied a more assertive interpretation of public Islamic norms — pressure on dress codes, restrictions on mixed-gender events, periodic campaigns against cafes and behaviour deemed un-Islamic — while stopping short of the comprehensive legal Islamisation seen elsewhere in the region. Gaza's Christian population, never large, had fallen to around a thousand people before the current war and is now smaller still.
The two territories also differ in religious infrastructure. Gaza's mosque network was dense and central to civic life; large numbers of mosques have been destroyed since October 2023, along with Gaza's oldest churches and the Great Omari Mosque, a building whose site has carried a place of worship since antiquity.
The Christian Collapse in Numbers
Christians made up something like 10 per cent of the population of Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s. Today the figure across the West Bank and Gaza is around one per cent, perhaps 45,000 to 50,000 people. Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour — the three towns that formed the historic Christian heartland — were majority Christian into the mid-twentieth century and are now majority Muslim.
The causes are mostly not theological. Palestinian Christians were disproportionately urban, educated and connected to institutions abroad through mission schools, which made emigration practical in a way it was not for others. Successive displacements in 1948 and 1967 removed large numbers. Since the 1990s, the separation barrier, the permit system, land confiscation around Bethlehem and the collapse of the pilgrimage economy during closures have removed the local livelihoods that kept families in place.
Birth rates matter too: Christian Palestinian families have long been smaller than Muslim ones, so even without emigration the proportion would have fallen. What emigration did was turn a slow relative decline into an absolute one.
Which Churches, and Why So Many
The Christian minority is denominationally crowded out of all proportion to its size, because the churches of the Holy Land were established by competing imperial patrons over centuries. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem is the largest landowner and has the most adherents. The Latin Patriarchate represents Roman Catholics. The Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land has held Catholic responsibility for the shrines since the fourteenth century.
Alongside them sit the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate, the Syriac Orthodox, the Coptic Orthodox, the Ethiopian Orthodox, the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, the Maronites, and Anglican and Lutheran churches established in the nineteenth century. Each maintains schools, hospitals and property, and the schools in particular serve large numbers of Muslim pupils.
The Status Quo: A Rulebook From 1852
Control of the principal Christian holy sites is governed by an arrangement known as the Status Quo, fixed by Ottoman decree in 1852 and preserved by every subsequent authority — British, Jordanian and Israeli. It freezes the rights of each denomination at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem exactly as they stood on that date.
Its effects are famously literal. A wooden ladder has stood on a ledge above the entrance of the Holy Sepulchre since at least the eighteenth century because no single denomination has the right to move it. Responsibility for cleaning particular steps and columns is allocated to particular churches, and disputes over a few centimetres of floor have produced physical altercations between clergy.
At the Church of the Nativity, the keys to the main door have been held for generations by two Muslim families of Bethlehem, the Nuseibeh and Joudeh arrangement at the Holy Sepulchre being the better-known parallel: Muslim custodians hold the keys precisely because no Christian denomination would accept another holding them.
Al-Aqsa and the Politics of a Compound
The single most consequential religious site in Palestinian life is the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem's Old City — the Noble Sanctuary, known to Jews as the Temple Mount. The compound contains the Dome of the Rock, completed in 691, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and it is the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.
Administration rests with the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, funded and appointed by Jordan under an arrangement confirmed in the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, while Israel controls access. The governing convention has been that Muslims may pray there and non-Muslims may visit but not pray. Pressure on that convention from Israeli religious nationalist groups seeking prayer rights has repeatedly triggered violence, and clashes at the compound have been the proximate trigger for several rounds of wider conflict.
For Palestinians the site functions simultaneously as a place of worship and as the most potent symbol of national claim to Jerusalem, which is why disturbances there mobilise people who are not otherwise religiously observant.
Hebron, Where the Division Is Physical
The Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, known to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs, is held to be the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, and is sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians alike. After a settler gunman killed 29 Muslim worshippers there in 1994, the building was physically partitioned into a mosque and a synagogue, with separate entrances, metal detectors and a schedule allocating exclusive access on particular holy days.
Hebron's Old City around it is divided under a 1997 protocol into zones under Palestinian and Israeli control, and the street life of what was a commercial centre has been largely extinguished by closures. It is the clearest illustration in the territories of what happens when a shared holy site is administered as a security problem.
Bethlehem's Christmas Economy
For the West Bank's Christian towns, religion is also an industry. In an ordinary year, pilgrimage and tourism supply a large share of employment in Bethlehem — hotels, coach operators, guides, restaurants and the olive-wood carving workshops whose nativity sets are sold worldwide. Manger Square at Christmas is the single most photographed scene in the Palestinian territories.
That economy is unusually fragile because it depends on access. During the second intifada, arrivals collapsed and did not recover for years. The separation barrier now runs close to the northern edge of the town, and most international pilgrims arrive through Israeli operators on day trips that return to Jerusalem to sleep, leaving limited spending behind.
The churches of Bethlehem cancelled public Christmas celebrations in 2023 and 2024 in solidarity with Gaza, replacing the tree and the lights with a nativity scene built in rubble. The decision was widely reported abroad, and it made the point local clergy have been making for years: the survival of the Christian community here is an economic question before it is a spiritual one.
The Samaritans, Still on Mount Gerizim
A few hundred Samaritans live at Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim above Nablus, with a related community in Holon inside Israel. They are the remnant of a people who broke with mainstream Judaism in antiquity, accept only the Torah as scripture, and hold that Gerizim rather than Jerusalem is the mountain God chose.
They still perform the Passover sacrifice on the mountain with slaughtered lambs, one of the very few places where an ancient Near Eastern animal sacrifice is still carried out as living liturgy. The community numbered in the low hundreds by the mid-twentieth century and has grown slowly since. Its members hold both Palestinian and Israeli documentation and have historically maintained working relations with both sides, a position no other group in the territory occupies.
Everyday Practice, Not Headline Politics
Beneath the contested sites, ordinary Palestinian religious life follows the pattern of the wider Levant. Ramadan reorganises the working day; the night markets of Nablus and Hebron are at their busiest after sunset. Friday prayer is the fixed point of the week. Popular practice includes visits to the tombs of local saints, a tradition Salafi currents disapprove of and which has thinned but not disappeared.
Christian and Muslim Palestinians share a good deal of this calendar in practice. Muslim families attend Christian weddings and funerals; the Saturday of Light procession in Jerusalem draws Muslim spectators; a number of shrines have historically been visited by both. That shared texture is easy to miss from outside, where the religious story of the territory is usually told only through its flashpoints. The territorial picture is laid out in our Palestine country guide, and the rift valley that determined where any of these communities could settle is described in the geography of the Dead Sea.
