The West Bank holds one of the densest concentrations of sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam anywhere, and access to almost all of them is administered as a security question rather than a religious one.
Bethlehem holds the Church of the Nativity, built over a cave identified in the fourth century as the birthplace of Jesus and one of the oldest churches in continuous use in the world, run under the same status quo arrangement as the Holy Sepulchre. Hebron holds the enclosure over the cave of the patriarchs, a Herodian structure venerated by Jews as the burial place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with their wives, and by Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. Nablus sits below Mount Gerizim. Jericho, Bethany, Mar Saba and a dozen desert monasteries are in the same territory.
The name itself is contested. West Bank is a modern geographic term describing the land west of the Jordan river; Judea and Samaria are the older names, and their use in modern political speech signals a position on sovereignty. The atlas records the dispute rather than resolving it, and uses the more neutral term for the row.
The situation has been legally disputed since 1967, and religious access has been a recurring flashpoint. UNESCO inscribed the old town of Hebron on the World Heritage list in 2017, a decision that was itself the subject of political protest.