Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Looting arrest near Nablus

APPREHENDED: Police uncover antiquities trove in West Bank bust. Palestinian suspect arrested; artifacts confiscated include Hellenistic and Roman-era coins, jewelry and ceramics (Ilan Ben Zion, Times of Israel).
A Palestinian man suspected of smuggling hundreds of antiquities was arrested early Tuesday morning by Israeli police in a village outside Nablus in the West Bank.

A police spokesman said officers working in cooperation with the Civil Administration’s archaeological unit searched the suspect’s house in Hawara and found a trove of antiquities mostly dating to the Hellenistic, Second Temple and Roman periods “estimated to be worth thousands of dollars.”

Among the antiquities were “hundreds of coins from various historical periods, jewelry and pottery,” police said.

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This happens a lot. Reports of looting arrests so far in Israel and the West Bank in 2017 have been noted here, here, here, and here. As I've said before, these are just the arrests. Presumably most looters get away with it most of the time, which means that the full scale of the looting is probably considerably larger.