John Lampen shares a reflection on visiting the ancient settlement of Sebastia in Palestine (with help from Dave and Lynn Morris).
When I visited Palestine with Dave and Lynn Morris in 2017, we visited Sebastia, once the capital of biblical Samaria. It is a very ancient settlement. It is said to be the burial place of the prophets Elisha and Obadiah (who wrote the shortest book in the Hebrew Bible, a fierce attack on the Palestinians of his day); and later of the body of John the Baptist, who is revered by Christians and Muslims. In 1160 the Crusaders enlarged an existing Byzantine church over the supposed grave. This is now a ruin within which Saladin erected a small mosque in 1187. So Sebastia is important to each of the three major Abrahamic faiths, as well as having impressive Roman remains including a forum and theatre, and traces of an earlier Iron Age settlement.
Tourism was a main source of income for the 3.5 thousand Palestinian residents. But this has been eroded over the last decade. We saw shown tourist maps produced by Israel in which Sebastia had disappeared, in spite of it being a major centre of cultural importance which had attracted tourists in their thousands previously.
For at least one day in every week the village has become a ‘no-go’ area as the IDF move in and block off access roads to people’s homes with armoured vehicles, furnished with dozens of tear gas canisters. These are there to ‘protect’ the hundreds of settlers who are brought in to the town in large luxury coaches. Many of these settlers openly sport large, powerful guns. They take over seating areas in the cafes but do not purchase from the Palestinian owners; they bring their own pop-up refreshment stands. The locals have no freedom of movement for the whole of the day until all of the settlers and soldiers have left. There are frequent flare-ups of anger and frustration, often met with gunfire and tear gas. The café owner in the main square showed us how Israeli soldiers and settlers had wrecked his premises several times but each time he had managed to revive it; undaunted he was serving customers from a caravan.
When Dave and Lynn paid another visit four years ago, there had been something of a transformation in the top square of the town. There were freshly laid pavement areas, planting, a children’s play area, new coffee shops, restaurants and snack shacks. All of this had been funded through the EU and was an initiative to encourage the people of Sebastia to take ownership of this part of their town and bring families to it from neighbouring villages. This was possibly one of the first steps towards gaining World Heritage status.
Then in November 2025 the Israeli authorities announced the seizure of the whole of the sprawling hilltop archaeological site next to the town. Their plans involve a visitors’ centre, a car park, and a fence that will separate the ruins from the rest of the town, cutting the residents off from the ruins, the tourist income, and any olive orchards that survive.
In August UNESCO added Sebastia to its list of more than twelve hundred World Heritage Sites which includes such diverse locations as the Great Barrier Reef, Timbuktu, the Bridge at Mostar and the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in North Wales. And they immediately classed it as “endangered”. Their recognition does not automatically bring more protection or money, but it does draw world attention to the village and so puts pressure on the Israeli government – even though it has withdrawn from UNESCO, and predictably described the designation as “a weaponization of cultural heritage”. That seems particularly cynical, given their own scheme to take Sebastia over.
When we visited the village it reminded me that the grim overall situation in Palestine is made up of thousands of individual places, incidents, and above all people who are suffering undeservedly. Even if the international negotiations make progress, there has been so much harm done (as in all wars) which can never be repaired.
