Israel is building a tourist attraction on water stolen from a Palestinian farmer

On Sunday, Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that 'development and preservation' of Herod's Pool, an ancient reservoir in the occupied West Bank, had begun. Posting a photograph of workers and wheelbarrows at the site, the far-right minister declared: 'The Settlement Revolution continues!' What he did not say is where the pool's water came from. In June, settlers severed a pipeline carrying spring water to the Palestinian village of Fasayil and the fields of Saad Nemer, a 69-year-old farmer who owns the land the pool sits on with his siblings. The water was redirected into the reservoir, which the settlers named after Herod, the Roman-appointed king of Judea. 'One morning nothing came out of the pipe,' Nemer told reporters. Within days, the pool had become a summertime magnet: hundreds of Israeli visitors a week splashing in the water and picnicking on his land. His family holds documents proving their ownership. Where he once grew watermelons, eggplants and cucumbers in the arid Jordan Valley, he now watches his livelihood wither under the desert sun. The Israeli military has acknowledged the diversion. No one has claimed responsibility for cutting the pipe. But settlers celebrated the refilling in videos shared on social media, and the project has powerful patrons: Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu praised the volunteers and pledged 3 million shekels — nearly a million dollars — to develop the site, tying it to a 250-million-shekel government programme to restore heritage sites. Knesset member Zvi Sukkot hailed the 'heroic settlers' who had returned the pool to 'Jewish hands'. Research by Dror Etkes, who runs the settlement watchdog Kerem Navot, determined the land was privately owned Palestinian land. The site sits in Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli military control — the legal architecture that lets a farmer's documented ownership dissolve into a minister's tourism project. The theft fits a wider pattern. According to United Nations data, settlers have vandalised water and sanitation systems at least 80 times this year. Illegal outposts have been built close to springs, and Palestinians who come to bathe or water their livestock are intimidated away. The springs and ancient pools of the West Bank — vital for drinking water, tourism and agriculture — are increasingly inaccessible to the 2.8 million Palestinians living there. Instead of restoring the stolen water to Fasayil, the Israeli state is now spending public money to formalise the theft, turning a crime scene into a tourist attraction. Smotrich himself connected the project to 'strengthening [Israel's] hold' on historical sites. That is the honest sentence in this story. Herod's Pool is not archaeology. It is annexation with a swimming ladder.