BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Hopes for peace in the Holy Land seemed as empty as Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's seat at Bethlehem's midnight mass after Israel barred his seasonal trip to the town where Jesus was born.
Showing no goodwill toward a man it branded ``irrelevant,'' Israel ignored international appeals -- including one from the Vatican -- to lift the ban, and demanded Arafat first arrest Palestinian militants who killed an Israeli cabinet minister.
Bethlehem, rocked by 15 months of Israeli-Palestinian violence that has turned tourism into a ghost of the past, again celebrated the holiday in a somber mood with Israeli troops parked just outside town.
Further north in the West Bank, an Israeli settler was critically wounded in a roadside shooting that a group belonging to Arafat's Fatah faction said was retaliation for Israel's treatment of their president.
The settler shot dead one of the gunmen in an exchange of fire, just a little over a week after Arafat -- under intense international pressure to rein in militants behind Resistance bombings in Israel -- called for a halt to attacks on Israelis.
Saying his ``heart is heavy with sorrow,'' Arafat told the Palestinian people in a televised speech from the West Bank city of Ramallah that Israel had committed a crime by preventing a ``believer in God and peace'' from traveling to Bethlehem.