Next week’s visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Israel and the Palestinian territories has aroused conflicting emotions among Christians, Muslims and Jews in the region. To the small Catholic community in the Gaza Strip, his arrival offers the rare chance to escape, if only for a day, the misery of the war-ravaged territory.

Like most of the Strip’s 286 Catholics, Jabrah al-Najjar, a 61-year-old who lives with his wife in Gaza City, has applied for an Israeli permit to attend the Pope’s mass in Bethlehem next Wednesday. The Israeli government has promised to lift the normally stringent travel ban on Gazans for the occasion, but church leaders expect there will be at most 250 permits, not all of which will go to Catholics.