This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Israeli forces seized ancient stone columns on Thursday after raiding a hilly area in the town of Al-Mazra’a Al-Sharqiya, east of Ramallah, in the central occupied West Bank.
Witnesses told Anadolu Agency that Israeli troops, accompanied by teams from the Israeli Civil Administration, raided a mountainous area in Al-Mazra’a Al-Sharqiya and took around five columns from an archaeological site dating back to the Byzantine era.
In previous periods, various areas of the West Bank have seen Israeli forces looting archaeological sites from ancient historical periods.
Israel claimed it recovered dozens of artefacts from a site where Palestinians had built a structure in its centre, which allegedly damaged the remaining historical remains, according to Hebrew media.
The Hebrew site i24 reported that “the Civil Administration forces, on Thursday, worked through the monitoring unit of the Israeli Defence Forces and under the supervision of the archaeology unit, to recover archaeological findings from the Lasana Tower site in Area B.”
It added that “this came after Palestinians built a structure in the middle of the site, causing damage to the remaining archaeological remains,” according to the report.
On Thursday, Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Hani Al-Hayek said that Israel had completely or partially destroyed more than 316 archaeological sites in Gaza and the West Bank during its war on the Gaza Strip, warning of what he described as a “systematic targeting” of Palestinian historical sites.
READ: Israel plans to take 4,600 dunams in northern West Bank, citing archaeology protection
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
