Old Town of Hebron (Al-Khalil)

Hebron is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, mentioned in Genesis as the burial place of Abraham. The Old Town climbs a hillside in a dense tangle of stone streets that predate the Crusades, with some structures built directly over earlier Canaanite and Herodian foundations. The city feels vertical rather than horizontal: you climb through it on stepped lanes, passing workshops where glass-blowers and bread ovens operate in the same courtyards they may have occupied for centuries.

The heart of the old city is sealed within a medieval wall and entered through one of several ancient gates. Inside, the covered market — a long vaulted street of small shops — runs along the foot of the hill, its low ceiling trapping the smell of spices, roasted nuts and fresh pitta bread baked in clay ovens. The passage narrows to single-file in places, forcing shoppers and visitors into close proximity with each other and with the goods: leatherwork, ceramics, embroidery, and the Hebron glass for which the city has been known since the Byzantine period.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs — known in Arabic as the Ibrahimi Mosque — rises above the market as a massive rectangular enclosure built by Herod the Great around 1000 BCE. Its current form is largely the Herodian original, expanded by the Crusaders and later converted into a mosque and then a synagogue at different points in its history. The building was the site of the 1929 massacre, in which Arab residents were killed by Zionist militants, and the event shaped all subsequent relations in the city. The memory of that violence remains embedded in the physical landscape of the old town.

The old town's urban fabric has been damaged and altered by Israeli settlement expansion within and adjacent to the historic core. Several buildings in the Avraham Avinu and Tel Rumeida neighbourhoods have been appropriated, their Palestinian owners displaced. The main thoroughfare to the Tomb of the Patriarchs now passes a series of Israeli-controlled checkpoints that fragment what was once a seamless street pattern. Palestinian residents navigate these barriers daily, and the old city carries a double weight: it is both a UNESCO World Heritage site and an active conflict zone where heritage and human rights concerns overlap.

At street level the city pulses with a resilient normality that visitors often find unexpected: shops open early, children walk to school, families share bread. The old houses — many with arched windows, interior courtyards and mashrabiya screens — are a sophisticated vernacular architecture adapted to the hot climate and the need for privacy in a dense urban fabric. Some have been damaged beyond repair by clashes; others have been quietly maintained by their owners despite the difficulties of living in a sealed street with irregular access. The spirit of the place is inseparable from this everyday endurance.

Hebron's old city is one of the world's oldest urban landscapes, with continuous habitation tracing roots to the Bronze Age and deep biblical significance as the burial site of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs is one of the most contested sacred sites in the Middle East, and understanding Hebron is essential to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The city's artisan traditions — glass-blowing, pottery, leatherwork and bread-making — survive in situ and can be observed in their original urban context.