Al-Qaryeten

Masafer Yatta is made up of many villages—Al-Qaryatain is one of them. The site holds two earth banks and around 200 man-made caves, many of them covered with beautiful stone façades. Today, the area is enclosed within Israel and designated as a “nature preserve.”

Palestinian workers from the West Bank often hide inside these caves, while gazelles leap around them and the sound of the mosque from Yatta carries across the hills.

The people of this village were uprooted in 1967. My aunt, who was displaced with my family to nearby Tel Arad, told me that while grazing her sheep, she would encounter Palestinians who once owned these caves—visiting them and weeping over their lost heritage.

Al-Qaryatain once held a remarkably sophisticated infrastructure, sustaining agriculture and community life. Today, only fragments of that legacy remain, layered into the land itself—navigating the relationship between what lies beneath, the underneath, and the above.