As night falls, grave robbers fan out across the southern West Bank hills on a macabre mission.
Armed with metal detectors, shovels and pick axes, the thieves unearth graves last touched thousands of years ago and scoop up whatever loot they can find before slipping into the night, leaving broken pottery and scattered skeletons behind.
“The damage is irreparable,” said Amir Ganor, the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority robbery division. “It is not like a forest that burns down and can be replanted. If an antiquities site is robbed, then it is destroyed for good.”
Every year the thieves raid around 300 antiquity sites in Israel and hundreds more in the West Bank, where there is no law enforcement against such thefts. They take the valuables and smash the rest in their hunt for buried treasures.
“It’s easy work and easy money,” said Monzer, a grave robber from the Hebron area.
Getting rich by robbing graves
By day, the 27-year-old Palestinian is a jeweler. By night he is the leader of a gang of 10 thieves who comb hills near the southern West Bank city or sneak into nearby Israel to loot treasures from ancient graves.
Like most of the grave robbers, Monzer learned the profession from his father. He is so successful at his job that he drives around in a brand-new BMW.
His most impressive find to date was a rare ancient Jewish half-shekel coin, which netted $20,000. The thieves fence to middlemen, who sell to dealers and then customers on the international antiquities market in London and New York.
“We look mostly for gold, coins and ceramic pieces,” Monzer said. “Sometimes we find skeletons with gold jewelry on their wrists, so we break the arms to get the bracelets.”
Thousands of pieces are stolen annually, worth millions.
History wiped out
Most horrifying for the archaeologists — whose science requires the study of relics in situ — is that the thieves wipe out every trace of the ancient people who lived there and destroy potentially significant historical clues.
“The robbers are only interested in stealing antiquities for profit. They work very quickly and destroy the site,” Ganor said. “They take whatever is valuable and smash the rest.”
Ancient Jewish antiquities and finds from the Byzantine period etched with crosses command the highest prices, as much as a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a sought-after coin.
Thieves in the Promised Land
The Promised Land for the thieves is a narrow strip of land near the West Bank between the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh and Beit Guvrin, where 1,000 antiquity sites are thought to lie.
The dangers are many. Not only must the thieves evade Ganor’s antiquities police, but they come face to face with deadly snakes and scorpions as well as insects that can infect them with a potentially deadly cave fever.
Most frightening of all is the “djinn,” the ghosts the thieves believe inhabit the underground burial chambers.
“I am not afraid of the soldiers or the snakes, I am afraid of the djinn. Sometimes people become sick or go mad from the ghosts,” Monzer said with a shudder.
Sometimes the grave robbers bring Muslim holy men to recite incantations to drive away the spirits.
Working at night
Monzer and his crew work at night when they can more easily slip into Israel and evade the antiquities police. Dressed in dark clothes and armed with metal detectors, sifters and knives, they work as if on a military operation.
Several of the band take observation posts to keep an eye out for police while the rest go to the site, usually in underground burial chambers or tunnels used by Jewish fighters rebelling against the Romans in around A.D. 132.
The grave robbers don’t search randomly. They spend weeks staking out suspected antiquities sites, looking for clues such as fig trees that flourish near underground caverns, broken ceramics or signs of hewn stones.
“In many ways they are better than archaeologists in terms of reading the terrain. They know where to look and how much the antiquities are worth,” said Ganor.
Sometimes a grave can be ransacked in a single night. At other times the thieves return night after night or over a period of months to make sure they have collected every last valuable.
Astonishing expertise
Some of the thieves are barely literate, but their expertise in antiquities is astonishing.
“This one is Nabatean. This is late Canaanite. Israelite, early Roman, late Roman and Byzantine,” veteran grave robber Abu Khaled said as he shuffled through a pile of coins.
They brush up on the history of ancient peoples who lived in the land, like the Canaanites and Israelites, and keep antiquity catalogs so they can verify the prices of their discoveries.
“I spend most of my time studying about antiquities,” said Monzer. “I easily recognize what is authentic and what is not.”
Much of the demand comes from dealers in Israel, the only country in the region to legalize the antiquities trade.
But since 2002, dealers can only sell artifacts discovered before raiding ancient tombs became illegal about 20 years ago. They can be imprisoned for trading in stolen antiquities.
One notorious collector was Israel’s legendary military and political leader Moshe Dayan, who used the army to help conduct unauthorized digs. Dayan was eventually forced to hand over most of his collection to the Israel Museum.
The antiquities police are poorly staffed and equipped but they managed to make 150 arrests last year by ambushing robbers in burial caves or catching them red-handed as they left.
The prospect of up to five years in jail does little to deter the thieves, some of whom joined gangs to earn an income after Israel curtailed work opportunities for Palestinians in its territory when an uprising began four years ago.
Most of the grave robbers see their work as just a job — one that is dangerous but potentially very lucrative.
“People will pay thousands of dollars for a piece of history,” Abu Khaled said.
This report includes additional reporting by Haitham al-Tamimi.