How Israel is weaponising archaeology to annex the West Bank

Occupied West Bank - In late September, Israeli troops raided the Tulkarem area and posted notices on the Banat Yaqub shrine in Irtah, south of the city.

The two-story building, with its Roman-era lower floor and Mamluk-era prayer room above, would now be under the control of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The shrine and its grounds cover no more than 300 square meters, according to Suhail Salman of the Popular Campaign Against the Wall and Settlements, a Palestinian grassroots group, yet the notices claimed more than 10 dunams (about 2.5 acres) of surrounding land, taking in dozens of inhabited homes.

The shrine is the latest site in a campaign that uses heritage protection to seize land and override Palestinian jurisdiction, rights groups and archaeologists say.

From Silwan in East Jerusalem to Shiloh, Tel Rumeida in Hebron, and Sebastia near Nablus, excavations have arrived alongside roads, visitor centres, and restrictions on access that turn Palestinian land into settler-run tourist sites.

The campaign has accelerated this year, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announcing 113 million shekels ($37 million) in August to take control of more than 70 historical sites.

Since 2023, the Israeli government has invested about $82 million in West Bank archaeological sites through a program called "Road, Land, Heritage," overseen by Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu of the far-right Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party.

Palestinian researchers and archaeologists who have worked on these sites say the social and political changes that come with archaeological discoveries are already visible.

They point to the price local Palestinian communities pay as new roads and tourist facilities are built, restrictions on construction and access worsen, and the area’s multilayered history is distorted.

Reshaping historical memory

Daoud Ghoul, a researcher at al-Quds University, tells The New Arab that the West Bank’s heritage sites have become a major arena where “archaeology is used to reshape memory and place,” particularly through the way archaeological sites and their histories are presented to the public.

“Take Silwan, for example,” he said, referring to the area in East Jerusalem where the archaeological site known as the City of David has become a focal point of competing historical narratives.

“What is happening there reflects what colonial literature describes as the ‘logic of elimination’. It is a process of erasing memory, making the Palestinian presence less visible in the official story of the place.” 

The term refers to a process in which the presence and history of a people is gradually removed from the narrative of a place. It can also happen through changes to the landscape, heritage sites, and the way that one version of the past is made more prominent than another.

Roughly 2,200 Palestinians in Silwan face forced displacement, about 1,500 of them in al-Bustan and another 700 in Batn al-Hawa neighbourhoods.

B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, has recorded 33 families, or 77 people including 37 children, evicted from Batn al-Hawa between October 2015 and April 2026, with 15 of those families in March 2026 alone. Between October 2023 and April 2026, 48 homes were demolished in neighbouring al-Bustan.

Human Rights Watch reported in June that Israeli authorities are speeding up demolitions and forced evictions across Silwan, and in early September local media reported that Israeli forces sealed off entrances to Bir Ayoub and al-Bustan ahead of a planned demolition operation.

Once a site is declared a protected area or national park, Ghoul argues, everyday life can start to change around it. Construction may be restricted, and roads and tourist facilities create restrictions on movement for local Palestinian residents, who require permits to reach their own land.

Ghoul argues that the problem is not the study and research of the historical presence of Jews or other groups in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, but its weaponisation by the Israeli state.

“It’s always been about the selection of one layer and its conversion into the basis for defining the place in the present,” he explains. “In Silwan, for example, the area known as Wadi Hilweh is being presented as the ‘City of David’, putting the focus only on its biblical and Jewish history.”

The case of Sebastia

The most far-reaching case is Sebastia, a Palestinian town of olive groves northwest of Nablus built beside one of the richest archaeological sites in the West Bank.

Archaeologists identify the hilltop as Samaria, capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. Herod the Great later rebuilt it as a Roman city named Sebaste in honour of Emperor Augustus, and Christians and Muslims venerate it as the burial place of John the Baptist, known in Arabic as the Prophet Yahya. 

Sebastia's acropolis lies in Area C, but the village and parts of the ancient site fall in Area B, where the 1995 Oslo II agreement gives the Palestinian Authority (PA) civil control, including over antiquities.

In June 2024, the Israeli cabinet granted the Civil Administration's Staff Officer for Archaeology, the military-run unit that manages antiquities in the occupied territory, powers of supervision and enforcement in Area B. 

A month later, a military order seized 1.3 dunams at the summit to put up a watchtower, and in May 2025 Israel's Heritage Ministry began new excavations without consulting Palestinian antiquities officials. 

On 19 November 2025, the Civil Administration announced its intention to expropriate the entire acropolis and its surroundings, some 1,800 dunams (about 445 acres), including privately owned land belonging to residents.

After rejecting residents' objections, it issued a second, more definitive order on 11 February 2026. This is considered the largest seizure for an archaeological project in the occupied West Bank since 1967.

In July, UNESCO inscribed Sebastia on both the World Heritage List and the List of World Heritage in Danger, over Israeli objections. Palestinian Tourism Minister Hani al-Hayek said the danger listing reflected threats including land confiscation, changes to the site's historical character, and restrictions on conservation work. Israel called the decision political. 

But according to Nazmi al-Jubeh, a historian and archaeologist at Birzeit University, the listing carries no enforcement power. UNESCO's 2017 inscription of Hebron's Old City did not stop Israel from keeping settlers in its centre or from recently taking over administration of the Ibrahimi Mosque.

“And now, any new archaeological discovery in the area is given a biblical name, even when there is no evidence to support it,” he tells The New Arab.

Al-Jubeh has traced this pattern in his study of excavations in Jerusalem since 1967, arguing that archaeology in Palestine was never separate from politics and that much of the "biblical archaeology" tradition has set out to match the Old Testament to the land, an effort written into the maps, names, and terminology used to describe sites.

“Sebastia’s story is more complicated than a dispute over its name,” he explains. “There are many different layers of history here. Even the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities documents remains from the Early Bronze Age, the Iron Age II, the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and Crusader periods,” he adds.

“There is broad agreement among historians that the hilltop was the capital of the northern kingdom, but there are also different interpretations of what happened here and how those different periods should be understood.”

Israel says the order will protect the site and open it to visitors, part of a roughly $8 million plan for what it calls the Shomron National Park, tied to the hill's history as the capital of the biblical northern Israelite kingdom. Palestinian officials and Israeli critics of the order argue that the seizure reaches far beyond what protecting the acropolis requires. 

Spatial control: Changing the West Bank's map

It is the same pattern beyond Sebastia and Silwan. The archaeological site associated with the biblical city of Shiloh is part of the tourism and educational programmes run by the nearby settlement, bringing the ancient site and the settlement into the same visitor experience. 

In Tel Rumeida, a Palestinian neighbourhood in the Israeli-controlled H2 section of Hebron, excavations directed by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Ariel University between 2014 and 2016 were intended to create a park managed by the city's settler leadership, and the state acknowledged in court that the project was meant to strengthen the settlement. 

A petition by Emek Shaveh and Breaking the Silence blocked that arrangement, but the park opened in 2018 under the Civil Administration, among Palestinian homes whose residents live with checkpoints and movement restrictions.

Herodium, the palace-fortress built by Herod the Great near Bethlehem, and Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, were among six sites in the occupied territories included in Israel's 400 million shekel National Heritage Sites Project in 2010. 

According to Hamdan Taha, who used to head the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, these archaeological sites become part of the way the surrounding areas are presented and managed.

“Protecting heritage does not mean cutting a site off from the community that lives around it,” he told The New Arab. “The Palestinian projects I led at Tell Balata near Nablus and at Jericho approached history as multilayered and brought local institutions and communities into managing the sites.” 

At Tell Balata, joint Palestinian-Dutch excavations uncovered a sequence of settlement stretching from prehistoric times to the Roman period, which, he said, shows that the site cannot be reduced to a single historical identity.

“Archaeological protection,” he argued, “can become a system of spatial control when it is coupled with barring residents from reaching their land, restricting construction, or turning a site into a tourist zone tied to a settlement.”

Aseel Mafarjeh is a Palestinian journalist based in the West Bank

This story was produced in collaboration with Egab

Edited by Charlie Hoyle