Palestine urges UNESCO to protect archaeological sites from Israeli theft

Palestine called on the UN culture and education agency UNESCO on Thursday to assume responsibility for protecting Palestinian archaeological sites from Israeli theft.

In a statement, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry called an Israeli decision to classify 63 archaeological sites in the occupied West Bank as Israeli heritage a “blatant violation of international law, the Geneva Conventions, and signed agreements.”

“This comes within the colonial ideology of the occupying government aimed at deepening the gradual annexation of the West Bank, changing its landmarks and identity, and imposing new features on its geography and demographic reality,” it said.

The ministry described the seizure of these sites as “one of the largest acts of piracy and theft of Palestinian land for purely settlement purposes under false pretexts with no historical or documented evidence to support them.

“It is an open crime of falsifying history and the present,” it added.

The ministry called on the international community, particularly UNESCO, to “urgently expose a crime and counter the Israeli narrative that seeks to consolidate illegal settler presence and control over these sites,” many of which are located in the heart of Palestinian towns and cities.

The Israeli measures, it warned, “undermine the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state on the ground, while erasing and altering the identity of heritage sites.”

On Wednesday, the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), a Palestinian nongovernmental organization, said that the Israeli army had declared 63 Palestinian archaeological sites in the West Bank as “Israeli heritage sites.”

According to the institute, Israel has already classified more than 2,400 Palestinian sites in the occupied West Bank as Israeli heritage sites.

The move comes as the Israeli army escalated its assaults in the West Bank, killing at least 1,015 Palestinians and injuring over 7,000 since October 2023.

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal in an advisory opinion, urging the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.