By MELANIE LIDMAN

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) — Thousands of people flocked to Bethlehem’s Manger Square on Christmas Eve as families heralded a much-needed boost of holiday spirit. The giant Christmas tree that was absent during the Israel-Hamas war returned on Wednesday.

The city where Christians believe Jesus was born had cancelled Christmas celebrations for the past two years. Manger Square instead had featured a nativity scene of baby Jesus surrounded by rubble and barbed wire in homage to the situation in Gaza.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the top Catholic leader in the Holy Land, kicked off this year’s celebrations during the traditional procession from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, calling for “a Christmas full of light.”

Arriving in Manger Square, Pizzaballa said he came bearing greetings from Gaza’s tiny Christian community, where he held a pre-Christmas Mass on Sunday. In the devastation, he saw a desire to rebuild.

“We, all together, we decide to be the light, and the light of Bethlehem is the light of the world,” he told thousands of people, Christian and Muslim.

Despite the holiday cheer, the impact of the war in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is acute, especially in Bethlehem, where around 80% of the Muslim-majority city’s residents depend upon tourism-related businesses, according to the local government.

The vast majority of people celebrating were residents, with a handful of foreigners. But some residents said they are starting to see signs of change as tourism slowly returns.

‘Hope in very dark situations’

“Today is a day of joy, a day of hope, the beginning of the return of normal life here,” said Bethlehem resident Georgette Jackaman, a tour guide. She and her husband, Michael Jackaman, another guide, are from Christian Bethlehem families that stretch back generations.

This is the first real Christmas celebration for their two children, aged 2 1/2 and 10 months.

During the war, the Jackamans pivoted to create a website selling Palestinian handicrafts to support others who lost their livelihoods. The unemployment rate in the city jumped from 14% to 65%, Bethlehem Mayor Maher Nicola Canawati said earlier this month.

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A visitor from France, Mona Riewer, said that “I came because I wanted to better understand what people in Palestine are going through, and you can sense people have been through a very hard time.”

Friends and family cautioned her against coming due to the volatile situation, but Riewer said being in Bethlehem helped her appreciate the meaning of the holiday.

“Christmas is like hope in very dark situations,” she said.

Despite the Gaza ceasefire that began in October, tensions remain high across much of the West Bank.

Israel’s military continues to carry out raids in what it calls a crackdown on militants. Attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians have reached their highest level since the United Nations humanitarian office started collecting data in 2006. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war. The internationally recognized Palestinian Authority has limited autonomy in parts of the territory, including Bethlehem.

As poverty and unemployment have soared, 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. Christians account for less than 2% of the West Bank’s roughly 3 million residents.

The beginning of a return to normal life

Fadi Zoughbi, who previously worked overseeing logistics for tour groups, said his children were ecstatic to see marching bands streaming through Bethlehem’s streets.

The scouts represent cities and towns across the West Bank, with Palestinian flags and tartan draped on their bagpipes. For the past two years, the scouts marched silently as a protest against the war.

Irene Kirmiz, who grew up in Bethlehem and lives in Ramallah, said the scout parade is among her favorite Christmas traditions. Her 15-year-old daughter plays the tenor drum with the Ramallah scouts.

But her family had to wake up at 5 a.m. to arrive for the parade and waited upwards of three hours at Israeli checkpoints. The drive previously took 40 minutes without the checkpoints that have increasingly made travel difficult for Palestinians, she said.

“It’s very emotional seeing people trying to bounce back, trying to celebrate peace and love,” Kirmiz said.

During the previous two years, the heads of churches in Jerusalem urged congregations to forgo “any unnecessarily festive activities.” They encouraged priests and the faithful to focus on Christmas’ spiritual meaning and called for “fervent prayers for a just and lasting peace for our beloved Holy Land.”

Other Middle East events mark the faithful’s resilience

Santas were everywhere as the traditional parade returned to Nazareth in northern Israel, revered by Christians as the place where the archangel Gabriel announced to Mary she would give birth to Jesus.

The hilltop town filled with children. Some starred in live Nativity scenes, and others lined the route waiting for floats and candy under a bright, warm sun.

On the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, hundreds of congregants planned to return for Christmas Masses at a Greek Orthodox church where a suicide attack killed 25 people in June. On Tuesday, they gathered to light a neon image of a Christmas tree in its courtyard.

Festivities around the world

Along Florida’s Space Coast, Santas hopped on surfboards, not sleighs. Hundreds of surfers dressed as Santa took to the waves off Cocoa Beach in what has become an annual tradition for the past 17 years.

The Santa-surfing brought to the beach thousands of spectators dressed in Christmas costumes who danced to live music and took part in a holiday costume contest.

The event raises money for the Florida Surf Museum and a nonprofit that helps people with cancer.

Associated Press journalists Abby Sewell in Beirut, Ariel Schalit in Nazareth, Israel, and Michael Schneider in Orlando, Florida, contributed to this report.

By LAURA UNGAR, AP Health Writer

Suze Lopez holds her baby boy on her lap and marvels at the remarkable way he came into the world.

Before little Ryu was born, he developed outside his mom’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst — a dangerous situation so rare that his doctors plan to write about the case for a medical journal.

Just 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen instead of the uterus, and those that make it to full term “are essentially unheard of — far, far less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles where Ryu was born. “I mean, this is really insane.”

Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives in Bakersfield, California, didn’t know she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth.

When her belly began to grow earlier this year, she thought it was her ovarian cyst getting bigger. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since her 20s, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.

Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Though she didn’t have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.

For months, she and her husband Andrew Lopez went about their lives and traveled abroad.

But gradually, the pain and pressure in her abdomen got worse, and Lopez figured it was finally time to get the 22-pound cyst removed. She needed a CT scan, which required a pregnancy test first because of the radiation exposure. To her great surprise, the test came back positive.

Lopez shared the news with her husband at a Dodgers baseball game in August, handing him a package with a note and a onesie.

“I just saw her face,” he recalled, “and she just looked like she wanted to weep and smile and cry at the same time.”

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Shortly after the game, Lopez began feeling unwell and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out she had dangerously high blood pressure, which the medical team stabilized. They also did blood work and gave her an ultrasound and an MRI. The scans found that her uterus was empty, but a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac was hiding in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.

“It did not look like it was directly invading any organs,” Ozimek said. “It looked like it was mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”

Dr. Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah not involved with the case, said almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — go on to rupture and hemorrhage if not removed. Most commonly, they occur in the fallopian tubes.

A 2023 medical journal article by doctors in Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which mother and baby survived, pointing out that fetal mortality can be as high as 90% in such cases and birth defects are seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.

But Lopez and her son beat all the odds.

On August 18, a medical team delivered the 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) baby while she was under full anesthesia, removing the cyst during the same surgery. She lost nearly all of her blood, Ozimek said, but the team got the bleeding under control and gave her transfusions.

Doctors continually updated her husband about what was happening.

“The whole time, I might have seemed calm on the outside, but I was doing nothing but praying on the inside,” Andrew Lopez said. “It was just something that scared me half to death, knowing that at any point I could lose my wife or my child.”

Instead, they both recovered well.

“It was really, really remarkable,” Ozimek said.

Since then, Ryu — named after a baseball player and a character in the Street Fighter video game series — has been healthy and thriving. His parents love watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister, Kaila, and say he completes their family.

With Ryu’s first Christmas approaching, Lopez describes feeling blessed beyond measure.

“I do believe in miracles,” she said, looking down at her baby. “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By JULIA FRANKEL

JERUSALEM (AP) — An explosive device detonated in Gaza on Wednesday, injuring one Israeli soldier and prompting Israel to accuse Hamas of violating the U.S.-brokered ceasefire. It was the latest incident to threaten the tenuous truce that has held since Oct. 10 as each side accuses the other of violations.

The blast came as Hamas met with Turkish officials in the country’s capital, Ankara, to discuss the second stage of the ceasefire. Though the agreement has mostly held, its progress has slowed.

All but one of the 251 hostages taken in the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that sparked the war have been released, alive or dead, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and detainees. The mother of the last hostage whose remains are still in Gaza called for their return before negotiators move to the ceasefire’s second phase.

That phase has even bigger challenges: the deployment of an international stabilization force, a technocratic governing body for Gaza, the disarmament of Hamas and further Israeli troop withdrawals from the territory.

Israel vows to ‘respond accordingly’

Israel’s military said the explosion on Wednesday detonated under a military vehicle as soldiers were “dismantling” combatant infrastructure in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. The lightly wounded soldier was in a hospital, the military said.

Hamas senior official Mahmoud Mrdawi said on social media that the blast was a result of unexploded ordnance and the group had informed mediators. In a later statement, Hamas denied responsibility for what it called “war remnants” placed by Israel in an Israeli-controlled zone.

Israel’s military denied Hamas’ claim. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the incident a violation of the ceasefire and said Israel would “respond accordingly.”

Israel has previously launched strikes in Gaza in response to alleged ceasefire violations. On Oct. 19, Israel said two soldiers were killed by Hamas fire and it responded with a series of strikes that killed over 40 Palestinians, according to local health officials.

Hamas accuses Israel of violating the ceasefire by not allowing enough aid into the territory and continuing to strike civilians. Gaza’s Health Ministry says that over 400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the truce.

The ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its count and operates under the Hamas-run government, is staffed by medical professionals and maintains detailed records viewed as generally reliable by the international community.

Turkish officials meet with Hamas

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met with a Hamas delegation led by Khalil al-Haya to discuss the ceasefire’s second phase, according to ministry officials.

Fidan reaffirmed Turkey’s efforts to defend the rights of Palestinians and outlined ongoing efforts to address shelter and other humanitarian needs in Gaza, the officials said.

The Hamas delegation said they had fulfilled the ceasefire’s conditions but that Israel’s continued attacks were blocking progress toward the next stage. They also asserted that 60% of the trucks allowed into Gaza were carrying commercial goods rather than aid.

According to the officials, the meeting also discussed reconciliation efforts between the Palestinian factions and the situation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, stressing that Israel’s actions there were “unacceptable.”

Family of last hostage in Gaza urges his return

Ran Gvili’s mother said she will join Netanyahu on his upcoming trip to the United States, and urged him and U.S. President Donald Trump to not move to the ceasefire’s next phase until her son’s remains are returned — a condition of the first phase of the truce.

“I will not accept a situation where towers are being built and Gaza is being rehabilitated while my Ran is abandoned in the field,” Talik Gvili said. “I am traveling to the United States to remind everyone that Ran is not a number. He is an Israeli hero.”

The 24-year-old police officer was killed while fighting Hamas fighters who were attacking a kibbutz on Oct. 7, 2023.

Also on Wednesday, Gal Hirsch, Israel’s coordinator for the hostages and the missing, met in Cairo with senior officials and representatives of the mediating countries to discuss the return of Gvili’s remains, Netanyahu’s office said.

Find more of AP’s Israel-Hamas coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.

Let’s be clear about something. This isn’t a story about tanking. The concept of trying to lose games with hopes of garnering a better draft pick is nearly impossible to pull off in the NFL.

Not only are players too prideful to sacrifice the limited amount of opportunities they have to play, they also run the risk of suffering a major injury if they aren’t at the top of their games.

No, the Vikings won’t be trying to lose to the Detroit Lions on Thursday afternoon at U.S. Bank Stadium, even if that’s what a large chunk of the fan base might secretly be cheering for when they tune in.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the Vikings beating the Lions on Christmas would be the best outcome based on how everything has gone this season. Not when looking at the ramifications a win could have on the schedule next season.

Though the actual order of games won’t be released for a while, the Vikings already know almost all of their upcoming opponents on the schedule.

The rotational formula the NFL uses has the Vikings playing every team in the NFC North twice, as well as every team in the NFC South and AFC East once. Aside from that, the Vikings also will play the same-place finisher in the NFC East, NFC West, and AFC South.

If the Vikings beat the Lions on Christmas, they would leapfrog them in the NFC North and as a result of no longer being at the bottom of the standings, they would likely sacrifice a more favorable schedule next season.

Let’s take a look at what that look at what’s at stake:

If the Vikings beat the Lions …

A win would vault the Vikings into third place in the NFC North. Though their placement could actually flip flop once more depending on what happens in the final week; the Vikings would hold the tiebreaker over the Lions if they finished with the same record.

In that scenario, the Vikings would be position to play the Washington Commanders (NFC East), either the San Francisco 49ers or Los Angeles Rams (NFC West), and the Indianapolis Colts (AFC South) next season.

That would certainly make life harder on the Vikings compared to the alternative. All of those teams present their own set of challenges on paper, which, in turn, means the Vikings couldn’t pencil in a win over any of them.

If the Vikings lose to the Lions …

A loss would lock the Vikings into last place in the NFC North. It would also finalize their upcoming opponents on the schedule because all of the same-place finishers would be set across the board.

That means the Vikings would know they are playing the New York Giants (NFC East), Arizona Cardinals (NFC West), and the Tennessee Titans (AFC South) next season — a much easier road for the Vikings compared to the alternative. All of those teams are in the midst of their own rebuilds, and while nothing can be assumed, the Vikings would probably be favored in each matchup.

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