Protecting Palestinian Archaeological Sites, Vital to Safeguard land and Identity
The President of the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, Mu’ayyad Shaaban, said that safeguarding archaeological sites will remain an essential part of protecting land and national identity, and that any attempt to turn heritage into a control or annexation tool will be met with all available legal and national measures.
In a statement reported by the Palestinian news agency (WAFA), Shaaban said that the Zionist occupation issued an order to seize 2,000 dunams of land in the towns of Sebastia and Burqa, northwest of Nablus, under an expropriation decree targeting the archaeological site in the area.
The Palestinian official said that the occupation authorities’ issuance of an expropriation order for the archaeological site in Sebastia reveals a selective manipulation of legal mechanisms to serve settlement objectives, adding that under national law, the concept of expropriation means to designate land for public benefit and serve the citizens equally and without discrimination.
He said that the Zionist occupation authorities exploit such measures to establish actual control over the land and allocate it exclusively for the benefit of settlers, which turns an instrument designed to serve the public good into a mechanism to redistribute the benefit on a settlement basis.
“This serves the settlers while threatening the very landowners it dispossesses, stripping the measure of any legal legitimacy and exposing it for what it truly is: a form of annexation carried out under administrative cover,” he added.
