Israeli authorities have announced plans to seize a sprawling archaeological site overlooking the Palestinian town of Sebastia in the West Bank, sparking outrage among the roughly 3,500 Palestinians who depend on tourism to the site and nearby olive groves for their livelihoods.
Residents of Sebastia have denounced the planned seizure as a pretext for expanding illegal Jewish settlements and as a means of erasing Palestinian identity through the appropriation of heritage sites, the Guardian reported Monday.
Sebastia’s mayor, Mahmud Azem, received notice from Israeli authorities in November, according to the Guardian. Talk of settlement expansion, however, has circulated for years, amid an escalating pattern of land seizures across the West Bank by Israeli settlers. The current development plan calls for a visitor center, a parking lot, and a fence that would separate the archaeological site from the town, cutting off Palestinian access to both the ruins and the surrounding olive trees.
“Unfortunately, Sebastia has gone into a dark tunnel,” Azem, 50, told the Guardian. “It is an aggression against Palestinian landowners, against olive trees, against tourist sites, and it is a violation of the history and the heritage of Palestine.”
At 182 hectares (roughly 450 acres), Sebastia would be the largest land seizure for an archaeological project in the West Bank since the occupation began in 1967. Israeli authorities have sought to redesignate the area as Israeli territory, citing biblical references and Sebastia’s role as the capital of the northern Israelite kingdom of Samaria between the 9th and 8th centuries B.C.E.
Critics situate the multimillion-dollar heritage project within the broader expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Because much of the land slated for confiscation is privately owned, opponents warn that the move sets a troubling precedent under Israel’s current government, driven in part by the ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit party.
Alon Arad of Emek Shaveh, an Israeli NGO dedicated to maintaining archaeological sites “as public assets that belong to members of all communities, faiths and peoples,” said in a statement that archaeology was being “weaponized.”
“What is planned for Sebastia is really unprecedented in its scale,” Arad added. He described the plan as “very cynical,” saying it “is not about history… it is really just about land and annexation.”
Amichai Eliyahu, Israel’s minister of heritage and a member of Otzma Yehudit who lives in a West Bank settlement, has been an outspoken advocate for the outright annexation of the territory.
“Our desire is to breathe new life into the site and make it an attraction for hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, which will strengthen the connection between the people, their heritage, and their country,” Eliyahu said in a statement last year.
Settlement movement leaders often refer to the area by the names of the Iron Age kingdoms that once ruled there—Judaea in the south and Samaria (Shomron in Hebrew) in the north—while Israeli and Palestinian representatives accuse one another of emphasizing different aspects of the region’s history to suit competing political agendas. Under Israeli plans, the new development in Sebastia would be called Shomron National Park.
Wala’a Ghazal, curator of a small museum housed in the courtyard of a 13th-century mosque in Sebastia, decried the politicization of archaeological sites and emphasized the area’s layered history. The mosque, rebuilt by the Ottomans, was once a Crusader cathedral, which itself had previously been a Byzantine church and today houses the tomb of John the Baptist.
“There has been continual habitation,” she said. “It is not right just to focus on one period or another. Samaria happened in the Iron Age, but there were people living here before then.”
In July 2023, the Palestinian Authority reported multiple raids on Sebastia, near the northern city of Nablus, by Israeli military forces and settler militias. The PA called on UNESCO to intervene, citing an ongoing UNESCO-supervised renovation project in Sebastia’s public plaza.
“This is an attack that falls within a plan to take over Palestinian archaeological sites throughout the West Bank and to impose Israeli control over them and annex them,” the PA’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
