Looting arrests at Horvat Mishkena

APPREHENDED: Antiquities thieves caught red-handed. Arabs use backhoe loader in attempt to loot archaeological site (Orly Harari, Arutz Sheva).

On Tuesday afternoon an off-duty Border Police volunteer noticed a backhoe loader working on fields near the Golani Interchange.

The volunteer knew the area well, and knew the field in question was part of the Horvat Mishkena archaeological site, and had been a Jewish village during the Roman period.

He immediately called in supervisors from the Israel Antiquities Authority's Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery, as well as police and Border Police. The units arrived with the equipment necessary for the capture and arrest of the suspects.

When the preparations had been completed, the forces entered the area while recording their findings and the suspects' movements. They then arrested five suspects from the northern Arab town of Tur'an.

The suspects, three adults and two minors, were transferred to the Antiquities Authority for questioning. The backhoe loader was confiscated.

[...]

Sadly, this sort of story is all too common. And those are just the cases in which arrests are made. The full scale of the looting is presumably larger.