In the pre-dawn hours of June 20, a huge Israeli flatbed truck arrived under the protection of the Israeli army at the home of Taysir Abu Mufreh, the director of the Tuqu municipality, a town in the Bethlehem district of the West Bank. Using the truck’s forklift, the Israelis removed an eight-ton 6th century stone relic that had been used by early Christians to conduct adult baptisms.

Palestinian photojournalist Oday Daibes posted a video on social media of the Israeli action, causing a great deal of criticism against the Israeli archaeological theft. The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported June 20 on the archaeological relic, documenting the various stages it went through since 2000.

International law prohibits an occupying power from taking archaeological relics. The international community made such action a war crime due to the archaeological theft by the Nazi regime during their occupation of most of Europe back in the 1940s. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, The Hague Convention of 1954 and its protocols of 1991-1999, and UNESCO 1970 and 1972 all make theft of archeaological items a war crime.

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO’s Executive Committee and responsible for culture and education, tweeted her condemnation of the act calling it a “typical” Israeli act, writing, “Israel steals our land & resources, plunders our archeological/historical sites, appropriates our cultural heritage & seeks to eradicate all evidence of our identity & continuity in our ancestral homeland — a settler-colonial attempt at erasing evidence of the indigenous.”