Israel seizing West Bank heritage sites ‘piece by piece’
Samuel’s Tomb in the Palestinian village of Nabi Samwil, occupied West Bank, 28 April 2014
Shatha Yaish reports in +972 on 24 July 2026:
On a summer evening in Sebastia, in the northern occupied West Bank, children play in a small park as the day’s heat begins to fade. Families gather beside the ruins of a Byzantine basilica, while a giant Palestinian flag flutters over the archaeological park nearby.
For the Palestinian residents here, these ruins are not simply relics of the past. They are part of the village’s daily life — and, increasingly, part of a political struggle over who controls its land and how its history is told.
In February, Israel’s Civil Administration — the bureaucratic arm of the occupation — issued an expropriation order covering more than 2,000 dunams around Sebastia’s archaeological site, including privately owned agricultural land. The move represents Israel’s largest ever land seizure for antiquities.
In response, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has urgently sought UNESCO World Heritage status for Sebastia, in the hope that international recognition might offer some protection. On Friday, the PA’s tourism minister announced that this effort had succeeded — though it remains to be seen what impact, if any, this recognition will have on the ground.
Inside Sebastia’s two-room archaeological museum, located within the remains of the Church of St. John the Baptist, artifacts spanning the Bronze Age through the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods trace the succession of civilizations that have inhabited the area. But since October 2023, curator Walaa Ghazal explained, the war has all but destroyed the town’s tourism industry, leaving the museum and archaeological park largely empty.