Jewish residents of the Mitzpe Yehoshua outpost chased off heavy equipment paving a road from Shechem toward the 3,200-year-old altar, whose ancient outer wall the Palestinian Authority already ground into gravel in 2021. The assault is part of a wider campaign of archaeological terrorism that has damaged 80% of the most important Jewish heritage sites in Judea and Samaria and reached as far as the Temple Mount.

The heavy equipment appeared on biblical Mount Ebal early Thursday morning, carving a gravel road up the slope from Shechem (Nablus) toward one of the oldest Israelite sites in the Land of Israel. The road was aimed at the altar many believe Joshua built more than 3,000 years ago. Residents of the Mitzpe Yehoshua outpost, established beside the altar after a deadly terror attack this summer, saw the machines and moved in to stop them.

Mount Ebal rises above Shechem opposite Mount Gerizim, and Moses designated the two peaks for their roles before the Israelites ever crossed the Jordan. Gerizim would be the mountain of the blessing, and Ebal the mountain of the curse.

“And it shall come to pass, when the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, that thou shalt set the blessing upon mount Gerizim, and the curse upon mount Ebal.” (Deuteronomy 11:29)

According to Israel National News, the residents alerted the security coordinator of a nearby community, reported the work to the IDF and headed straight for the construction site on October 29. As they approached, the equipment operators abandoned the work and fled back toward Shechem. One of the construction vehicles was left behind and confiscated.

The residents said several pieces of heavy machinery had been paving a road intended to link Shechem to the altar area. They attributed the project to the Palestinian Authority and said it was the latest in a series of attempts to reach the site, each previously blocked by local residents and IDF patrols. One resident said recent heavy equipment activity in the area suggested the PA was “trying to revive its plan to take control of the site of Joshua’s Altar.”

The residents tied the road to a wider PA campaign at heritage sites and water sources across Judea and Samaria, naming Tel Aroma, the Hasmonean palaces at Jericho, the springs of Wadi Zarqa in Binyamin and Nahal Kana in western Samaria.

An outpost born from a murder

The man who led the fight to protect the altar did not live to see Thursday’s confrontation. Benayahu Melet, 32, a father of two, served as the agriculture director of Havat Gilad and a member of its rapid-response security team. On July 24, he rushed to defend a group of Jewish hikers under attack near the community. A Palestinian terrorist seized the weapon of Havat Gilad’s security coordinator and opened fire, killing Melet. IDF Maj. Yuval Ezra, 27, an artillery battery commander, was also killed.

Video and witness accounts later showed that Melet kept fighting after he was mortally wounded and struck several of the attackers. He was buried at Havat Gilad beside Rabbi Raziel Shevach, murdered by terrorists near the same community eight years earlier.

One of the Mitzpe Yehoshua residents said Melet had headed the struggle against the PA road plan. After his murder, residents decided to establish a permanent presence beside the altar, concluding that living on the mountain was the only way to stop the road for good. Thursday’s events, the resident said, proved them right. Mitzpe Yehoshua, “Joshua’s Lookout,” is one of eight new outposts, two of them in Area B, established since the Havat Gilad attack.

A site crushed into gravel

The altar sits on the northern slope of Mount Ebal, north of Shechem. Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal of the University of Haifa discovered the structure in 1980 during a survey of the hill country of Manasseh and excavated it over eight seasons through 1989. He uncovered a large rectangular stone structure dating to the early Iron Age, built over an earlier circular one, surrounded by thousands of animal bones from sacrifices. Zertal concluded that it was the altar described in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. Archaeologists still debate the identification.

Under the Oslo Accords, the site lies in Area B, where the Palestinian Authority holds civilian control and Israel holds security control. Jews generally need IDF authorization to visit.

The PA has already done serious damage. In late January 2021, a PA contractor paving a road between the village of Asira ash-Shamaliya and Shechem destroyed some 60 meters of the ancient outer wall surrounding the altar. The stones were ground in a gravel crusher and used as a bed for the road, and the PA posted video of the work online. Then-President Reuven Rivlin wrote to Defense Minister Benny Gantz demanding an investigation. PA officials responded by calling the identification of a Jewish altar a falsification of Palestinian history.

In 2023, the PA began paving roads for a planned 32-unit housing project on the ruins. Thousands of Israelis marched to the site in October of that year. National Missions Minister Orit Strock accused the PA there of committing “one of the most serious crimes, which is the destruction of heritage.”

Archaeological terrorism

The assault on Mount Ebal is one front in a campaign of archaeological terrorism aimed at erasing the physical evidence of the Jewish people’s 3,000-year bond with Judea and Samaria. Where the Bible says Jews lived, worshipped and ruled, the PA sends bulldozers, and the stones that testify to that history are crushed into gravel.

The numbers are staggering. A 2021 National Heritage Survey by the Shiloh Forum and Shomrim Al HaNetzach (Preserving the Eternal) examined 365 of the most important Jewish heritage sites in Judea and Samaria and found that 289 of them, about 80%, had been damaged or destroyed. The report attributed some 90% of the attacks to the Palestinian Authority. A later Shomrim Al HaNetzach report found that all 24 of the most important sites in Area A had been damaged, with roughly 40% in immediate danger of destruction. Most of the damage came from land development and road cutting, the same method used on Mount Ebal.

“This is reminiscent of what ISIS does,” Shomrim Al HaNetzach activities coordinator Adi Shargay told Israel Today.

According to data cited by the Regavim movement, the scientific community recognizes some 6,000 sites of historical and archaeological importance in Judea and Samaria. Only about 2,300 have been formally declared protected, leaving roughly 3,700 without legal protection. A 2024 survey by Palestinian archaeologists themselves found evidence of looting at 309 of 440 sites examined.

At Sebastia, the ancient city of Shomron and capital of the biblical Kingdom of Israel, PA workers brought in heavy machinery and paved a road through the archaeological site, destroying a Herodian-period wall. At Tel Aroma, the Hasmonean fortress overlooking the ancient road from Shechem to the Jordan Valley, the PA raised a giant flag mast and turned the site into a Palestinian tourist attraction.

The pattern reaches Judaism’s holiest site. In 1999, the Islamic Waqf, which administers the Temple Mount, used bulldozers and heavy earth-moving equipment to dig a massive pit for a new entrance to the underground el-Marwani Mosque, built in the vaulted hall known as Solomon’s Stables. No archaeologist supervised the work. Some 9,000 tons of earth, saturated with artifacts from the First and Second Temple periods, were hauled away in about 400 truckloads and dumped as garbage in the Kidron Valley.

Archaeology student Zachi Dvira began collecting the discarded soil, and in 2004 he and archaeologist Gabriel Barkay launched the Temple Mount Sifting Project to rescue what the Waqf had thrown away. Volunteers have since recovered coins, jewelry, pottery and seal impressions dating back to the First Temple period, including a seal impression from the sixth century BCE. All of it came from soil the Waqf treated as trash, at the same time that Palestinian leaders deny a Jewish Temple ever stood on the mount. The wet-sifting method developed there is the same technique that later recovered the curse tablet from Zertal’s discarded dirt on Mount Ebal.

At the foot of Mount Ebal stands Joseph’s Tomb, the burial place the Bible assigns to Joseph’s bones. When Israel handed the site to PA security forces in October 2000, after a Border Police officer was killed there, Palestinian rioters looted and razed it shortly afterward. Rioters set it on fire again in 2015. In April 2022, a mob of Palestinians broke in, smashed the gravestone, burned prayer books and set the tomb ablaze. Then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz called it “a grave event and a serious violation of freedom of worship.”

The physical destruction runs alongside a diplomatic campaign to rebrand the sites. In early 2026, the PA submitted 14 sites in Judea and Samaria to UNESCO’s World Heritage list, presenting places central to Jewish history as Palestinian heritage. PA officials have dismissed the identification of Joshua’s Altar itself as a falsification.

A law to protect the land’s history

Israel has begun to fight back. Under the Oslo arrangements, antiquities in Judea and Samaria have been managed by a military body, the Civil Administration’s Staff Officer for Archaeology, while the PA controls its own antiquities department in Areas A and B. In February 2026, the Israeli Cabinet approved measures authorizing Israeli enforcement against damage to archaeological heritage sites in Areas A and B for the first time.

The Knesset went further. A bill sponsored by Likud MK Amit Halevi would establish a Judea and Samaria Heritage Authority under the Ministry of Heritage, modeled on the Israel Antiquities Authority, with powers to excavate, preserve and manage sites, enforce the law against looters and expropriate land needed to protect antiquities.

The legislation spent nearly two years in the Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee, chaired by Religious Zionist MK Zvi Sukkot. Its first version, titled an amendment to the Israel Antiquities Authority Law, would simply have extended the Israel Antiquities Authority’s jurisdiction to Judea and Samaria. After objections from legal advisers and from the Antiquities Authority itself, the sponsors redrafted it to create a separate heritage authority answering directly to the Minister of Heritage. On February 3, 2026, the committee voted 7 to 5 to send the bill to the plenum for its first reading, and days later the Ministerial Committee on Legislation gave it the government’s backing. The bill was then submitted to the full Knesset on May 11, at the opening of the 25th Knesset’s final session, and passed its first reading by a vote of 23 to 14 in a session that ran past midnight into May 12.

Halevi described the legislation as historic, the first time Israel would apply its own law directly to sites in Judea and Samaria. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu called it “good as an interim stage, until full sovereignty is applied.”

Critics on the left agreed about what the bill means and objected for that reason. Peace Now called it the first annexation bill in the Knesset, and the Foundation for Middle East Peace described it as an act of de facto annexation. The Knesset Education Committee’s own legal adviser warned that it would mark the first time Knesset legislation granted powers of expropriation in Judea and Samaria, including over Palestinian residents of Areas A and B, and could reinforce claims of creeping annexation.

Supporters pushed to complete the final readings before the Knesset dissolved ahead of the October 27 election. Mount Ebal shows what is at stake while the law waits: in Area B, the PA still decides what happens to Joshua’s Altar, and only the Jews living on the mountain stand in the way of its bulldozers.

A curse in God’s name

The mountain gave up one of its most remarkable secrets in December 2019. A team led by Scott Stripling of the Associates for Biblical Research was wet-sifting the dirt that Zertal’s excavators had discarded decades earlier when they found a folded lead tablet barely two centimeters square.

The tablet could not be opened without destroying it. Scientists from the Czech Academy of Sciences used X-ray tomography in Prague to read the text hidden inside. Epigraphers Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa and Pieter Gert van der Veen of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz identified some 40 letters in an early proto-alphabetic script forming a repeated curse invoking the God of Israel by the name YHW. The team’s peer-reviewed paper, published in the journal Heritage Science in 2023, carries the title “You are Cursed by the God YHW.” The researchers concluded that the inscription predates every previously known Hebrew inscription from Israel by at least 200 years. The find remains contested among scholars.

“We have a Hebrew inscription of a curse found on the mountain of curses,” van der Veen said, according to JNS.

An altar of whole stones

Moses commanded the people to build their first altar in the land on Mount Ebal, the mountain of the curse.

“And it shall be when ye are passed over the Jordan, that ye shall set up these stones, which I command you this day, in mount Ebal, and thou shalt plaster them with plaster. And there shalt thou build an altar unto the LORD thy God, an altar of stones; thou shalt lift up no iron tool upon them.” (Deuteronomy 27:4-5)

Joshua carried out the command as soon as the people entered the land.

“Then Joshua built an altar unto the LORD, the God of Israel, in mount Ebal.” (Joshua 8:30)

The Mishnah in Tractate Sotah (7:5) describes the ceremony that followed. Six tribes stood on Mount Gerizim and six on Mount Ebal, with the priests, the Levites and the Ark of the Covenant in the valley between them. The Levites turned toward Gerizim and proclaimed each blessing, then turned toward Ebal and proclaimed the corresponding curse, and the entire nation answered amen. The Sages teach that the Torah was inscribed on the plastered stones in seventy languages, so that every nation on earth could read it.

No iron on the altar

The command to build the altar without iron tools carries a specific reason. The Mishnah in Tractate Middot (3:4) explains that iron was created to shorten human life, and the altar was created to lengthen it. It is improper for the instrument that shortens life to be raised against the one that lengthens it.

In 2021, the stones surrounding the altar on Mount Ebal were fed into an iron gravel crusher and ground into fill for a Palestinian road. On Thursday, iron bulldozers returned to the same mountain to finish the job. Three months earlier, the iron of a terrorist’s stolen rifle cut short the life of the man who had led the fight to protect the altar.

Where the promise began

The road the bulldozers were paving begins in Shechem, and Shechem is where the Jewish claim to this land begins. It was the first place Abraham stopped after arriving in Canaan, and the first place God promised the land to his descendants.

“And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said: ‘Unto thy seed will I give this land’; and he builded there an altar unto the LORD, who appeared unto him.” (Genesis 12:7)

Abraham’s first altar in the land stood at Shechem. Joshua’s altar, built when Abraham’s descendants returned from Egypt to claim the promise, stands on the mountain above it. Jacob bought a field at Shechem, and the bones of Joseph, carried out of Egypt, were buried there.

The Palestinian Authority has spent years trying to bury that history under gravel and housing units, insisting that the altar is a fabrication and the mountain belongs to someone else. On Thursday, the machines met a lookout named for Joshua, built by Jews who settled the mountain after one of their own was murdered defending it. The bulldozers turned around and fled down the road toward Shechem, and the altar of the covenant still stands on the mountain where Joshua built it.