A Complete 3-Day Plan for Palestine

This 3-day route is for travelers who want to stay in one base and get to know the southern West Bank on foot: a sacred city, a farming village on UNESCO-listed terraces, and Hebron, the most intense and complicated city in Palestine. The pace is relaxed, with two nights in the same bed and no long travel days. All you need are service taxis and the occasional local taxi, plus one half-day walk between villages.

Day 1: Bethlehem

Settle into Bethlehem for two nights. Choose a guesthouse in the old town near Star Street, where the stone alleys are close to everything and taxi drivers know their way around. Visit the Church of the Nativity late in the afternoon, when the crowds are thinner and low light comes through the high windows across the Byzantine columns. Then walk down Manger Square into the souq for falafel and knafeh. Spend the rest of the day at Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel, beside the separation wall. The gallery there features work by Palestinian artists, and the hotel’s small museum … read more 👉

This 3-day route is for travelers who want to stay in one base and get to know the southern West Bank on foot: a sacred city, a farming village on UNESCO-listed terraces, and Hebron, the most intense and complicated city in Palestine. The pace is relaxed, with two nights in the same bed and no long travel days. All you need are service taxis and the occasional local taxi, plus one half-day walk between villages.

Day 1: Bethlehem

Settle into Bethlehem for two nights. Choose a guesthouse in the old town near Star Street, where the stone alleys are close to everything and taxi drivers know their way around. Visit the Church of the Nativity late in the afternoon, when the crowds are thinner and low light comes through the high windows across the Byzantine columns. Then walk down Manger Square into the souq for falafel and knafeh. Spend the rest of the day at Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel, beside the separation wall. The gallery there features work by Palestinian artists, and the hotel’s small museum offers the clearest short introduction to the wall and the checkpoint system you will see over the next two days.

Day 2: Battir to Beit Jala on foot

Take a taxi about 20 minutes west to the Village of Battir, whose dry-stone terraces form the core of the Battir Landscape World Heritage site. Families still share water from a Roman-era spring and its system of channels in rotation, and the small, purple Battiri eggplant grown on these terraces is prized across the region. The railway line between Jaffa and Jerusalem runs along the valley floor below. From the village, follow the Battir to Beit Jala trail uphill through olive groves and old stone watchtowers. Allow three to four hours with stops, and start early in summer, because shade is rare. You end in Beit Jala, a hill town of honey-colored stone houses with views across the valley toward Jerusalem. Have a glass of wine from the Salesian winery at Cremisan nearby before taking a short taxi ride back to Bethlehem.

Day 3: Hebron

Service taxis from Bethlehem reach Hebron in 30 to 45 minutes, and this is the day to slow down and look carefully. The old city souq is covered by netting that shopkeepers stretched above the alleys to catch rubbish thrown from the settler homes overhead, and soldiers guard the checkpoints that divide the H1 and H2 zones a few streets apart. Enter the Ibrahimi Mosque / Cave of the Patriarchs through its security checkpoint. Since 1994 the building has been split into a mosque and a synagogue, and the cenotaphs of Abraham and Sarah are visible through grilles on the Muslim side. It closes to visitors during prayer times, so go mid-morning. Before heading back to Bethlehem, visit a glass workshop on the outskirts, where furnaces turn out blue Hebron glass, and the Hirbawi factory, the last mill in Palestine weaving keffiyehs.

If you can find another morning, take a taxi east from Beit Sahour to Mar Saba, a Greek Orthodox monastery hanging over the Kidron gorge in the desert, where only men are allowed inside but anyone can take in the view from the opposite cliff.