Shatha Yaish
+972 Magazine / July 24, 2026
The army is expropriating thousands of dunams in Sebastia and Nabi Samwil, using archaeology as a pretext to further isolate Palestinian communities.
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.
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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.
This dearth of tourists is now a secondary concern, however. As Ghazal told +972 Magazine, Sebastia is being taken “piece by piece.” She hopes UNESCO recognition might at least ensure that its history “can be salvaged.”
What is happening in Sebastia is part of a broader Israeli push to seize heritage sites across the occupied West Bank. Israeli authorities are increasingly using archaeological preservation as a pretext to assert control over Palestinian land through expropriation orders and expanded excavations. At the same time, the Israeli government is seeking to bring archaeological sites under direct Israeli civilian authority, representing yet another step toward annexation.
This campaign appears to be picking up speed. According to Talya Ezrahi of the Israeli NGO Emek Shaveh, two Israeli cabinet decisions, in 2024 and early 2026, have expanded the authority of the Civil Administration’s archaeology unit to take enforcement action beyond Area C, the parts of the West Bank under Israel civil control, and into Areas A and B, where the PA ostensibly holds that authority under the Oslo Accords.
New land seizures have targeted other major heritage sites, too, including in the village of Nabi Samwil, just north of Jerusalem. Israeli officials and Jewish settler groups are also pushing to extend control over Soloman’s Pools near Bethlehem — three monumental reservoirs forming part of an ancient water system that supplied Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and surrounding communities for centuries.
In May, the Knesset advanced legislation that would have transferred authority over archaeology in the occupied West Bank from the Defense Ministry and the army to a civilian body operating under Israeli law. The bill was shelved early last month, at least for now. But for critics, the legislation represented the clearest expression yet of a process already underway on the ground: using archaeology not simply to excavate the past, but to redraw who controls the present.
The bill, Ezrahi explained, “would basically be annexation through legislation, bringing the entire archaeological apparatus in Area C under the [heritage] minister directly.” And she does not believe the halting of the bill will slow things down; instead, “we see an increase in [the state’s] motivation to change the situation on the ground.”
Sebastia’s mayor, Mohammad Azzam, said the expropriation threatens not only privately owned land but the town’s archaeological heritage and what remains of its tourism-based economy. Although the municipality succeeded in temporarily suspending the confiscation order until Aug. 30, he said, “Israeli excavation work has not stopped for a single minute. Heavy machinery has continued to operate inside the archaeological site, despite the irreversible damage it poses to this unique cultural heritage.
The municipality itself, meanwhile, is barred from performing even basic upkeep at the site, according to Azzam. “Our crews have been threatened, expelled, and warned not to perform routine work such as cleaning the site or removing overgrown vegetation,” he said.
Israeli authorities have presented their archaeological work as an innocent search for Jewish history, and as necessary for research and preservation of the site. But Azzam says they privilege a particular, unsubstantiated historical narrative while Palestinians are denied the ability to manage a site embedded within their own town.
“What we are witnessing is not archaeology for the sake of scientific research,” he said. “It is an attempt to reshape history and impose a new reality through facts on the ground. When historical evidence cannot be altered, the occupation tries to impose its narrative through the barrel of a gun.”
‘The aim is to completely erase Palestinian identity’
Roughly 50 kilometers south of Sebastia, another expropriation order shows how the same logic is being applied elsewhere.
Nabi Samwil, a small Palestinian village northwest of Jerusalem, is already hemmed in by Israeli restrictions and largely cut off from both Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. At its center lies an archaeological and religious site believed to house the tomb of the Prophet Samuel.
A recent seizure order, issued by the Civil Administration in Arabic and Hebrew and accompanied by a map, covers approximately 110 dunams — encompassing the village mosque, the surrounding archaeological area, a spring at the base of the site, and adjacent agricultural land.
The stated purpose of the seizure is “public benefit,” specifically a project to “preserve the archaeological site of the Prophet Samuel’s tomb.” For residents, the language of preservation is difficult to separate from the decades-long restrictions that have already transformed life in the village.
In 1971, Israel displaced the residents to a nearby area and destroyed their homes in order to create a luxury Jewish settlement that was never built. In 1995, Israel declared the area a nature reserve, which is now run by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.
Today, around 250 Palestinians live there. Religious Jews often visit the site to pray, many of them unaware they might be in a Palestinian village.
The mosque, which is included in the seizure order, is part of a Muslim waqf or religious endowment. According to the Israeli NGO Peace Now, the order marks the first known case in which a religious site owned by the waqf in the West Bank has been included in an expropriation order of this kind.
The Palestinian Ministry of Waqf and Religious Affairs condemned the move, describing it as part of a policy aimed at isolating the mosque from its surrounding Palestinian communities and forcibly converting it into a Jewish archaeological site. “This is a gradual process, and they won’t stop until they Judaize the area and displace the residents,” Amir Obeid, head of the village council, told +972 Magazine.
For George Rishmawi, general manager of the Palestine Heritage Trail, a local tourism nonprofit, the growing focus on archaeological and heritage sites cannot be separated from the fragmentation of Palestinian territory around them.
“There is also control over all the strategic sites outside the Palestinian cities, effectively surrounding those cities and isolating them,” he said. “In the past, it was the settlements that were isolated; today, it is the Palestinian cities themselves.”
That inversion, Rishmawi argues, is what makes the current archaeological push significant beyond the question of who excavates or administers any individual ruin. Sites presented as discrete matters of heritage preservation can become footholds for controlling the land between Palestinian population centers, while attaching them to an exclusively Jewish-Israeli historical narrative.
“The aim is to completely erase the Palestinian identity,” Rishmawi said. “It is a tool to take over heritage sites and tie them to a different identity. All of these excavations are then used to write history. In the end, the stronger side writes history however it wants.”
‘Almost anything is being brought under Israeli control’
For Ezrahi of Emek Shaveh, it is a mistake to focus on the particulars of individual excavation projects. She sees Sebastia and Nabi Samwil as part of a much wider effort by the current Israeli government to bring strategically located areas under Israeli control.
“Almost anything, from springs to nature reserves, is being brought under Israeli control,” Ezrahi told +972 Magazine. “It has been happening incrementally for years, but now it is happening on steroids.”
The expropriation orders themselves, she said, are telling, because archaeological excavation does not require permanent seizure of the surrounding land. “Even according to international law, there is no need to expropriate land in order to conduct archaeological work,” she explained. “Excavations can happen without these orders. The expropriations are clearly about taking land and not solely about archaeology.”
Israeli officials and settler organizations have long accused Palestinians of neglecting and deliberately damaging Jewish archaeological heritage in the West Bank. Ezrahi disputes that premise. “The claim that Palestinians are neglecting antiquities in Area C is ridiculous because Palestinians have never been able to take any protection measures in Area C.”
The persistence of expropriation orders and legislative attempts to formalize Israeli control over West Bank antiquities is what has given new urgency to the Palestinian bid for UNESCO recognition of Sebastia. The State of Palestine submitted an urgent request to inscribe the site on the UNESCO World Heritage List amid a meeting of the World Heritage Committee in Busan, South Korea.
The committee was also considering draft resolutions concerning four Palestinian sites already on the list: the Old City of Jerusalem and its walls, Hebron’s Old City and Ibrahimi Mosque, Battir, and the Monastery of St. Hilarion/Tell Umm Amer in Gaza.
UNESCO designation would create an additional layer of international scrutiny, but Ezrahi cautioned against seeing it as a shield. “If it passes, it does not mean the site will automatically be protected from settlers,” she said. “It is not a guarantee.”
Its importance, she explained, lies partly in the legal obligations it creates when development threatens a listed site. Although Israel withdrew from UNESCO in 2019, it remains a party to — and thus bound by — the 1972 World Heritage Convention. “Every state has an obligation not to destroy or threaten the World Heritage Site within another state entity,” Ezrahi said.
The Palestinian village of Battir in the southern West Bank, designated a World Heritage Site in Danger since 2014, demonstrates the limits of that protection. There, armed Jewish settlers have for years been trying to displace Palestinians from their homes in the area, and have succeeded in cutting off residents’ access to large portions of their land amid the war in Gaza. “In Battir, we see those obligations being violated every day,” Ezrahi said.
+972 Magazine approached COGAT, the Israeli military unit responsible for the affairs of civilians under occupation, for comment on the recent seizure operations. A spokesperson stated that the army had notified landowners in Sebastia that it had “initiated proceedings for the temporary expropriation of the land for the purpose of preserving the site, improving visitor accessibility, and developing the archaeological area.”
The spokesperson added that the move was advanced “in light of the site’s prolonged neglect, as well as the failure of the landowners and the Palestinian authorities to address the damage and destruction occurring at the site.”
Regarding Nabi Samwil, the COGAT spokesperson stated that “an urgent need has arisen to carry out extensive renovation work at the site in order to ensure the safety of visitors and worshippers,” and claimed that the waqf authorities had “declined to cooperate.” As a result, the army “temporarily expropriated portions of the land under their ownership” in a move that “does not alter the status quo at the tomb complex.”
Shatha Yaish is a journalist covering East Jerusalem and the West Bank
