Judea and Samaria Heritage Authority bill fast-tracks through committee as evidence mounts of systematic PA destruction of Jewish archaeological sites
The Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee is racing against a parliamentary clock to advance a bill that would place Judea and Samaria, Israel’s biblical heartland, under direct Israeli civilian authority when it comes to its thousands of archaeological sites. The bill’s opponents call it de facto annexation. Its supporters call it rescue. The ground itself, scarred by bulldozers and looters’ pits, tells a story that is hard to argue with.
The legislation, sponsored by Likud MK Amit Halevi, would establish a new “Judea and Samaria Heritage Authority,” replacing the Defense Ministry’s Archaeology Unit of the Civil Administration, a branch of COGAT (the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories), as the body responsible for sites that include some of the most significant holy sites named in the Hebrew Bible. The bill passed its first reading on May 12. With Knesset dissolution proceedings expected to begin this week, the committee met Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to push it through its second and third readings before the window closes.
What hangs in the balance of this bureaucratic reshuffling is the physical evidence of Jewish civilization stretching back three thousand years. These sites are the stage on which the entire narrative of the Jewish people unfolds. And in Judea and Samaria, that stage is literally buried underfoot, waiting to be uncovered…or destroyed.
The Scale of the Crisis
According to data cited by the Regavim movement, a research-based advocacy organization focusing on land use and sovereignty issues, there are approximately 6,000 sites of historical and archaeological importance in Judea and Samaria recognized by the scientific community, of which about 2,300 have been officially declared protected archaeological sites. That leaves roughly 3,700 sites legally unprotected and exposed.
A comprehensive survey of those sites produced alarming results. The survey found that 80% of the important archaeological sites in Judea and Samaria, most of which date back to the Second Temple period, were damaged, with half of them in immediate danger of total eradication. The worst devastation was at sites in Area B, where, despite technical Israeli security control alongside Palestinian civilian control, there is effectively no Israeli control, no law, and no enforcement.
A separate survey by a group of Palestinian archaeologists in 2024 found evidence of looting at 309 of 440 sites examined. Findings presented to the Knesset showed that 90% of the sites being destroyed are being destroyed by the PA for development purposes, and 10% are destroyed for robbery.
What the Bill Would Do and Why Critics Object
The proposed Judea and Samaria Heritage Authority would assume all responsibilities currently held by COGAT’s Archaeology Unit. It would have the power to excavate, conserve, restore, manage, and develop archaeological sites and artifacts, conduct research, and acquire or expropriate land for the purpose of protecting and developing sites. Crucially, it would operate as a civilian Israeli body directly under the Heritage Ministry, and would not be subordinate to the military commander in the area.
Attorney Ayala Roash, from the Defense Ministry’s legal office, warned the committee: “The bill would essentially create a new situation in Judea and Samaria in which Israeli governmental authority will be exercised directly, not subordinate to the military commander in the area, but to the heritage minister. In essence, this proposal removes the military commander’s authority, taking away his powers. This is essentially a contradiction of the paradigm according to which Israel manages the territories of the region.”
The committee’s legal adviser, Tamar Sela, added that if passed into law, this would mark the first time the Knesset exercises direct power over expropriation and acquisition of land in Judea and Samaria, powers that would also apply to Palestinian residents in areas A and B.
For critics on the left and in the international legal community, that is precisely the definition of de facto annexation: the extension of Israeli civilian law, not military administration, into territory where international law treats Israel as an occupying power.
Halevi himself makes no effort to obscure the ideological underpinning. “The fact that we approach this as if Israel was occupying its own land,” he said during Monday’s committee meeting, “and the whole application of international treaties, as if they are relevant to the Jewish people in Sebastia or the Cave of the Patriarchs, is unacceptable.” The Sages would recognize this argument immediately. A people cannot be an occupier on the land God gave them. Eretz Yisrael was not acquired by international treaty. It was promised by covenant.
A New Authority, a Controversial Appointment
The bill’s passage through the Knesset is happening simultaneously with Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu’s (Otzma Yehudit) announcement that he has selected Esther Schreiber to head the Israel Antiquities Authority, a choice that has itself ignited controversy. Schreiber, like the current IAA director, Eli Escozido, and his predecessor, Israel Hasson, has no background in archaeology. According to documents published on the Justice Ministry’s Corporations Authority website, her NGO INEXTG had an annual budget in 2024 of slightly under 26 million shekels and 60 salaried employees, figures far below the numbers cited in the official ministry statement, which claimed a budget of approximately 100 million shekels and 700 employees. The IAA itself has an annual budget of hundreds of millions of shekels and some 800 employees.
Bulldozers Through Jewish History
One example is Sebastiam, the ancient city of Shomron, capital of the biblical northern Kingdom of Israel, where Palestinian Authority workers brought heavy machinery into the archaeological site and paved a road through it. The roadwork destroyed a wall from the Herodian period and exposed burial caves from the Second Temple Period. Investigators also found that someone had thrown pig carcasses into the tombs in order to defile them and apparently to prevent Israeli archaeologists from entering.
In November 2020, the PA inaugurated a “Palestinian” tourist complex in the town of Sebastia in Samaria, the historic capital of the biblical Kingdom of Israel. A flagpole with the PLO flag was affixed to the ancient stones, under the auspices of UNESCO and the Belgian government, without any archaeological or scientific supervision.
At Mount Ebal, the site where Joshua built an altar to God after the Israelite entry into the land, described explicitly in Joshua 8:30, Palestinian road construction destroyed sections of a 3,200-year-old defensive wall. Archaeologist Scott Stripling recently discovered at this site what researchers believe to be the oldest Hebrew inscription ever found in the Land of Israel. Following the wall’s destruction, a nearby Arab municipality began implementing plans for a residential neighborhood directly atop the altar site, complete with access roads, despite the planned development being several kilometers from the existing town boundaries.
The PA’s plan for Mount Ebal was blunt. Construction began for a project of 32 housing units on top of the archaeological site. After the report, the Civil Administration confiscated the construction vehicle. The municipal plans were found inside the cab of the bulldozer.
The destruction of Solomon’s Pools aqueduct, a marvel of ancient engineering described in the Bible, is equally shocking. In 2022, the PA dug an enormous 1,500-dunam quarry pit at Beit Fajar right through a section of the aqueduct. The quarrying caused irreversible damage, with some 100 meters of tunnel and approximately 2,000 meters of aqueduct destroyed. The Government of Israel did nothing to stop it.
At the biblical site of Tel Aroma, identified as a Hasmonean fortress, Civil Administration personnel confiscated an excavator that was being used to pave an illegal road while destroying archaeological finds. The Palestinian Authority had planned to build a “Palestinian heritage site” and a mosque commemorating “martyrs” at the site.
And in 2017, Palestinian Authority bulldozers obliterated the ancient site of Archelais in the Jordan Valley to construct the Arab city of Khirbet al-Buyudat directly over the archaeological remains.
The physical record of the Biblical narrative lies in the ground with hundreds of known archaeological sites, and perhaps thousands of yet undiscovered sites, providing incontrovertible evidence connecting the Jewish People to the Land of Israel. This is precisely why the Palestinian Authority is systematically destroying archaeological sites in Judea and Samaria, purposefully plundering and erasing Jewish antiquities.
The Biblical Stakes
Whatever one thinks of the bill’s legal mechanics, the underlying crisis is real and urgent. The archaeological record of Jewish civilization in Judea and Samaria, such as the altars, the burial caves, the palace walls of Israelite kings, the aqueducts that carried water across har u’gai, mountain and valley, is being ground into road gravel and built over with apartment blocks. Every destroyed site is a page torn from the physical Torah of the land.
The opponents of this bill will call it annexation. The Jewish people have another word for it: geulah, redemption. Taking back not just the land, but the memory buried within it.
